Tracing The Influences of a Strategic Foresight

You wonder what was on the mind of North Carolina’s greatest entrepreneur in the last three decades of his life.

I suspect it was dirt.

By the 1930s, the Piedmont region of North Carolina had lost an average seven inches of soil to erosion, up to 18 inches in some places.

The reddish, sometimes yellowish, clay so prevalent now is actually a subsoil laid bare by this erosion according to historians such as Dr. Paul Sutter.

The effects of that erosion are clearly evident today.  It is why nearly all of our creeks, streams, rivers and lakes are muddy and will be, according to ecologists, for a thousand years.

A hundred years before we had “climate change deniers,” we had “erosion deniers.”  They, too, had policy makers who tried to outlaw science.

Deniers of both are still in office in some states today.

James Buchanan “Buck” Duke, who died in 1925 at age 69, would not have been among the latter nor were he alive today, the former I suspect.

Duke was eight and living with family in Greensboro during the chaotic end of the Civil War, as it was being negotiated near his home in Durham even as his recently released Confederate father, a Unionist, made his way back home.

He was 17 when his father moved their tobacco factory into town and just 21 when “Sons” was added to the name of the enterprise.  His father delegated manufacturing and marketing to Buck.

He is widely regarded today as the first genius in modern marketing.

But before relocating those four miles into Durham, Buck had earlier left the family farm during his teens first to attend what is now Guilford College in Greensboro.

But he soon left there to attend a business college called the Eastman National Business College, a school of business in Poughkeepsie, New York (the image at this link dates to his tenure there.)

He may have been the quintessential Tar Heel at the time, accent, chaw of tobacco and all, but uniquely for his time he also had formal business training including a curriculum that included practical experience to inform his innate entrepreneurial and strategic gifts.

At 24 he was made chief executive of his family’s business and opened a branch in New York.  Before he was 30 he took the company public.  By the time he turned 34, Buck Duke headed a trust that controlled 80% of tobacco production in the world.

In what we call today a SWOTs analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats,) he was well aware that one of the biggest threats to his company came not from federal regulators but the soil depletion associated with growing cotton and tobacco.

At first tobacco had required fertile land.  But the weed-like varieties that yielded a much milder and more popular tobacco not only formed the basis of the Duke corporate empire but they grew on lands depleted by cotton.

But after a few years, even this tobacco wouldn’t grow without huge amounts of fertilizer, which became prevalent after the Civil War, as well as large quantities of water and eventually pesticides.

Still growing tobacco was leaving swaths of abandoned farm land unproductive because its topsoil had washed away.

Buck Duke did not know of tobacco’s harmfulness to health but he could readily see during his time that it was not good for the environment or future business.

With half of his life still ahead of him including new entrepreneurial pursuits in hydroelectric power and higher education in his home state, Duke bought a farm 45 miles west of New York City and assembled nearly 40 others, for a total of over 2,700 acres in all.

Northern New Jersey had been deforested for agriculture and charcoal by 1850, resulting in heavy erosion into the Raritan River adjacent to his land.

Any forest remnants that remained, here and there, were in poor condition.

Buck Duke foresaw by several years a call in 1896 by the state geologist for reforestation and protection of watersheds.  Primeval forests were extinct and nearly half of the state had been cleared of trees.

Forest fires were ravaging what remained to the south. half of them caused by sparks from locomotives.

Through much of his 40s, Buck Duke worked feverishly to recreate more of a nature area than an estate including excavating and/or rehabilitating, enhancing and connecting a chain of nine lakes and associated waterfalls.

All of this was protected by extensive reforestation of more than 2 million trees.

His vision, in the wake of deforestation, was to create a natural “wonderland,” but he also experimented with sustainable hydroelectric power there and methods to make both land and water more sustainable as well.

Within a few years, his work would be the inspiration for forest parks in New Jersey.

Coincidentally, this was the same period in which his father, Washington Duke, aided by other Durham leaders was busy relocating the 1830’s Trinity College to Durham as the foundation for what would later be renamed Duke University.

But rather than a retirement for Buck Duke, this period of creating what is called Duke Farms in north-central New Jersey was more of an entrepreneurial interlude to be inspired by his intrigue with hydrology and forestation.

It was also about this time that soil research became a national priority, including its indispensable role in life and its birth from forest.

The system Buck created with his natural restoration at the turn of the 19th century was designed to pump a million gallons of water per day from a canal above the Raritan River up to a reservoir.

From there the water was then controllably-released through gravity to flow successively down through nine excavated lakes and related waterfalls as well as restored meadows, lagoons and other wetlands before being reintroduced to the river much cleaner than when it was removed.

Lets just say that before he turned his attention a few years later, when not yet 50, to a startup back in his home state that would become Duke Energy today, Buck Duke knew what he was doing.

That experience through his 40s gave him an understanding of how to later rehabilitate thousands of acres of depleted farm land in his hometown of Durham by laying the groundwork near the end of his life for what would become Duke Forest as part of his transformation of Duke University.

Soil scientists estimate that in North Carolina where under virgin forest exists, it would take approximately 468,000 years to remove a topsoil layer, something that takes only a matter of minutes with today’s method of site preparation in advance of buildings.

Soil science is a discipline fathered as we know it today by another North Carolinian, Hugh Hammond Bennett.

But some who had previously also cut their teeth in North Carolina had been “erosion deniers,” as some policy makers are today.

Back then, evidence was mounting in some studies that would show that an average of 5.3 feet of topsoil sediment had discharged between 1820 and 1830 atop pre-settlement floodplains.

Ironically, many areas we consider treasured wetlands now were really created by these sediment avalanches.

As a ten year old, Bennett has been observing erosion on his family farm near Wadesboro at about the same time Duke was experimenting with how to prevent it as well as restore and protect polluted waterways.

Bennett was graduating from UNC and starting out his career by performing soil surveys in North Carolina counties in the two years before Duke returned to his native Tar Heel state.

One subsequent 1920 survey of Durham soils is filled with descriptions and information about Durham at the time Duke spent much of the last years of his life back here.

Based on a plan hatched in 1919, Buck Duke at the time of the survey was already buying up what would be 5,000 acres (today more than 7,000) of mostly depleted farmland in Durham dotted here and there by remnants of old growth forests.

But this was much more than what was needed for what are now Duke University’s West and Central campuses.

While much of the land he acquired would be reclaimed by forest, telltale gullies are visible today in the undergrowth, tombstones for an era of topsoil erosion.

Only today, the culprits behind that continued destruction are more likely to be mechanized site preparation for buildings which not only scrape off or crush fragile top soils but compact it so as to be impervious.

Most credit those acquisitions from 1919 through the early 1920s stretching across west and southwest Durham as well as west into Orange and eventually Alamance counties to Duke’s strategic sensibilities, a means that guaranteed access roads and water availability.

But his past experience suggests something even more strategic.

The School of Forestry created five years after Duke’s death is credited to William Preston Few, a longtime friend who was the university’s then president, along with a Forest Service veteran turned professor and researcher named Clarence Korstian, with the creation of Duke Forest.

Korstian had served in the United States Forest Service out West including a stint in the Pacific Northwest during the period of The Big Burn in 1910 before an assignment in the North Carolina Mountains.

He followed that with a stint at Yale before returning for a consulting assignment at Duke.

Few had spent a lot of time with Buck Duke, and while intrigued by Harvard Forest, in the mid-1920s he had recruited an ecologist named A.S. Pearse who was even more intrigued with the potential of the lands Duke had purchased.

Pearse connected Few with Korstian in 1927.  Buck Duke had died suddenly in late 1925 leaving behind one last stroke of entrepreneurial genius, a vast endowment so visionary it is as relevant today as it was then.

At his death, he was one of only 23 multimillionaires who had been born in the South, out of 331 nationwide.  But unique to others, he directed his philanthropy back to his roots.

It isn’t a leap to conclude that his influence was very present as Few, Pearse and Korstian envisioned Duke Forest.  Not at all.

If only shorter sighted policy makers in Durham today had the strategic sense of this earlier native son when it comes to the overall urban forest canopy.

“Foresensing”–The Key to Evergreen

In the days before texting I had friends, who even after email had become common via mobile devices, would always call or leave a voice mail message when they needed something or had a question.

It typically involved a document or some research finding.  So I would fulfill the requests quickly via email to leave a paper trail, but these individuals would invariably call again for clarification.

That is unless they disagreed with the information I had sent or something our organization was doing predicated on the findings, in which case they would write a lengthy email neglecting to include the background and copy a trillion other people, now understood as a cardinal sin.

Boy, I sure miss that drama.  But don’t jump to the conclusion that they had a learning or reading disability.

People who did that may have been much more strategic and savvy than it seems.  They probably accepted something I, too, understood at the time but chose not to further enable:

1. Many people no longer read;  2. Even more prefer to shape decisions and opinions on anecdotes and personalities rather than data and information; and 3. Very few are paying attention to the future or evolving.

In community work, like business and government, the world is awash with dead or dying organizational models which are kept on life support by people either addicted to those behaviors or overly conscious of those still all-too-prevalent conditions.

This is why “best practices” are so easy to spot, not merely for purposes of copying, but because the organizations that exhibit them are purposely wired for what entrepreneurial researcher Dr. Joseph Pistrui calls “nextsensing.”

During my now-concluded career in community destination marketing to generate visitor-centric economic and cultural development in four different parts of the country, I was what some would now characterize as an “evergreen entrepreneur.”

Only, I was on the quasi-public-private side of things. Still, according to some, I exhibited all 7 characteristics of evergreen entrepreneurs to some extent in the five different startups with which I was involved and/or led.

I enjoyed startups because you not only get to build an organization from scratch but you get to evolve each one by quantum leaps each time.  During the last half of my career, I learned to do this every few months with the same organization.

Nextsensing doesn’t come from “group-think” exercises such as brainstorming which, as studies have shown, is a pure waste of time unless accompanied with a very healthy dose of critical thinking.

Unfortunately, most people who facilitate or are drawn to the “kumbaya” school of brainstorming seem averse to thinking at all, let alone critically, because to them, asking questions is criticism.

But this is only one of the reasons that the traditional approach to making strategic plans is often futile, or when successful, are destined to be quickly relegated to a dusty shelf (buried on a rarely seen portion of a computer drive.)

An even more compelling reason these plans are now ineffective is that true strategic insight, strategic foresight or “nextsensing,” must be woven into the DNA of an organization in such a way that it occurs organically in real time.

Writing about this aspect in a classic book entitled, The Living Company: Growth, Learning and Longevity in Business, author and researcher Arie de Geus famously wrote “The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be your only sustainable advantage.”

Earlier, in 1988, de Geus termed this as “institutional learning” in an article in Harvard Business Review.  He explained that this type of learning is much more difficult than individual learning.

Organizations that are “evergreen” outperform those that are focused only on near-term returns.  According to studies, de Geus explains that they “institutionalize change” rather than reacting to crisis.

In the past, even evolving organizations could afford to gestate learning anywhere from 12 to 18 months before acting on it.

Today, that evolution must be in real time.

Researchers involved with the Nextsensing Project have identified four skills needed to see the future in real time:

1. Stretch Sensibilities – A mindset and commitment to exploration.
2. Stand for Change – Set new directions and adjust priorities.
3. Create a new Order – Retool the enterprise to set new goals and trigger actions no one else has set or achieved.
4. Lead with “Foresense” – Transform hunch to vision and new skills.

In late 1970s, Bert Lance, a banker and native-Georgian who headed the Office of Budget and Management for then President Jimmy Carter popularized the expression, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” an old Swedish proverb.

No even remotely sustainable organization has that luxury today.

The Future of Analytics

With history and law in my educational background, few people, including me, would have predicted back in 1981 that I would become one of the first in my career of community destination marketing to embrace analytics.

Although I took statistics, in essence history is a form of analytical thinking.  But back in 1972 when I earned a degree in that major it was less likely to involve data.

Law school certainly teaches critical thinking but not open-mindedness.

As NYU Stern researcher Dr. Jonathan Haidt, the author of The Righteous Mind, put it this week on the Diane Rehm Show:

“But as soon as we want to reach a conclusion, or as soon as we get emotional, we get angry and open-minded thinking shuts down and we become lawyers.”

Researchers know today that the natural talent for analytics that I began to tap into in the early 1980s is a competitive advantage that was central to the DMOs I led being able to quickly leapfrog more established competitors.

Unfortunately, other than various aspects, I was never really able to teach it to others on staff before I retired at the end of 2009, with the exception of my eventual successor.

Even so, she had an innate talent for analytics. You can teach skills but not talents, especially not nuance.

Rare even among those now formally trained in analytics is the ability or talent to see nuanced patterns and then apply them strategically to an objective.

Research conducted by MIT’s Sloan Management Review and SAS calculates that only 12% of organizations overall have this ability.

More than a third are “analytically challenged” and more than half are “analytic practitioners” that employ it primarily for operations, sometimes predictively, although that is not their focus.

So one-in-eight of these organizations are “analytic innovators” which are found to be seven times as likely to employ analytics predictively and six times more likely to deploy it prescriptively.

The Sloan/SAS report entitled The Talent Dividend well worth downloading, reading and applying.

Recently, while writing an essay about what organizations such I led will look like in the future, I noted that analytical ability will soon be required for every job in an organization, kind of like how keyboard skills became in the 1990s.

When I retired, still only 37% of organizations overall saw analytics as a competitive advantage.  This peaked at 67% in 2012 and is now a view held by six-in-ten organizations.

But I believe the true value of analytics going forward will always be strategic including innovation.

The Well Worn Path from Penny-Wise to Pound-Foolish

Recent headlines in my local newspaper reminded me of how ironic one of the challenges was during the four-decade career I concluded more than five years ago.

The way the headline writers convey it, our City Council is divided about whether to endorse health insurance from a locally based corporation or send tax dollars off to a company in Connecticut.

Reading more closely, it is nothing more than jawboning to get a better deal, but whatever the reason, it is sending an unfortunate message to local businesses as well as universities here sure to undermine economic development.

Part of my job in visitor-centric economic and cultural development was one where mission accomplished was ever elusive.

it was challenging enough to remind both public and private sector players that a primary outcome for community destination marketing, a demand-side form of economic development, is to fuel the local business climate and the local tax base.

A corollary often lost even on economic developers on the “supply-side” is that it can be optimized only when local businesses and organizations strategically give preference to using or making purchases from other local businesses.

This has always been economic development 101.

But the reason so many in every sector don’t get it is because of a notion called siloed thinking which structurally permeates even the smallest of organizations.

I’ll use local government as an example but it is applicable to organizations as large as Duke University here, one of the state’s largest employers and even businesses that owe tax credits to their success.

Siloing especially infects the way organizations are structured.

This condition results in revenue streams being severed from how an organization conducts purchasing.

During my career, we trained in how to do economic impact analysis, in part, to help local festivals make a case to local government officials for funding but also to help deflect some in the private sector who always seem bent on “big game hunting” to bring in outside mainstream events instead, diluting sense of place.

But rarely if ever do local government officials or organizations anywhere tie their own procurement to local economic impact.

For example, any decision to ditch a locally based insurer for an out of state competitor should factor in the local property taxes paid by the local corporation, along with induced impact from its locally based payroll.

Also included should be the work-side spending of its commuter payroll, spending with local vendors and of course, the company’s local philanthropy.  Any decision to penny pinch should be informed by an economic impact analysis.

During the near decade I was in Anchorage during the 1980s, both the municipality (merged city and county) and State government would give a percentage preference to local vendors during bids, even if it meant a broker until local capacity could evolve.

During the 1990s, the ImPlan input-output model was made accessible with metrics calibrated for each county in the country.  It is the one we deployed in Durham during my former life, both through consultants and for local stakeholders through trained staff.

Rather than a percentage preference such as Anchorage had long used, it makes it possible to run an economic impact analysis to inform decisions including direct, indirect and induced effects as well as “leakage.”

Still, many organization continue to make “penny-wise and pound-foolish” decisions because siloing prevents them from being strategic when it comes to the local economy.

Unfortunately, it is endemic today across all sector.

It is why I still find myself explaining the importance of “buy local” to economic developers, sense of place to boomer developers and recently the importance of using Tar Heel artists to a state arts official.

Especially ironic is when I have to defend selective and sustainably tree cutting over clear cutting to consulting foresters, because the most accurate economic impact models in use today were first developed for the United States Forest Service.

So how did I get so smart? (smile)

I learned my former craft in the early 1970s from a generation of community destination marketing mentors who reached back before WWII.

I then watched as peers came unmoored from how economic development works, to the point that some even humorously tried to justifying imperial over-reach by arguing that it didn’t matter if the visitor spending they drew occurred in the business climate and tax base they were paid to promote.

Really?

I also saw peers over on the “supply-side” of economic development (recruiting relocating businesses) such as chamber of commerce types forgo the importance of using local vendors and local employees as metrics, to rationalize being able to poach members from other communities.

Siloing makes all of us appear stupid.

In the late 1970s, as the organizations I led as startups grew into adolescence and beyond, I began to study a new discipline of organizational structure designed to overcome the tendency of organizations and teams of individuals to silo.

If they haven’t been thrown out, there will be books I devoured on the topic of organizing like a matrix rather than a hierarchy still on the library shelves of the three DMOs I led over the decades since then until retiring at the end of 2009.

It was a theory put into practice by GE when it developed a new type of plant in Durham to assemble jet engines, just as I arrived here, structured around “teams” rather than the customary assembly line which opened in 1993.

But it was a much more difficult concept to execute in a community destination marketing organization, let alone a city, county or other large employer.  Inertia continued to rule

However, a new book I just read may be a breakthrough.

In Team of Teams, retired four-star general Stanley McChrystal and Chris Fussell, a former Navy Seal who also teamed up to form CrossLead, made the idea of a matrix much more practical and achievable for any type or size of organization.

They also provide a history of how organizations, on purpose, came to be siloed and examples of organizations who have overcome it only to have a new generation of leaders take them back to be siloed.

Team of Teams reminds us that on May 25, 1961, when President John F. Kennedy, less than four months after inauguration, announced to Congress that Americans would land on the moon before the end of the decade, our space program was a disaster.

That all turned around and this was successfully achieved less than eight years later on July 20, 1969  because George Mueller reorganized NASA into a matrix.  But during the 1970s and 1980s, NASA re-siloed, resulting in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986.

Despite being well managed and contributing to community accolades, local governments in Durham are and have been heavily siloed for a long time.

An example other than procurement decisions being detached from from revenue streams is the sad state of urban forests.

The strategic approach to urban canopy in planning is undermined by cuts to code enforcement and isolation from urban foresters in general services where they are purposely made non-strategic.

Each of these functions is estranged from public works where trees are as more of a nuisance.

Thus Durham places little priority on green infrastructure and still has no strategic urban forest assessment or management plan of any kind, let alone one that is community-wide like the ones other leading cities began to create and implement nearly three decades ago.

In the meantime, Durham has been losing a net 18,000 trees a year not counting tens of thousands more lost to wasteful clear cutting.  All of this is estranged from local government sustainability and storm water treatment objective elsewhere.

Frustrated?  Eye-rolling?  Overly sensitive?  You aren’t alone as are many who work in local government including some of the brightest and most dedicated people I know.

Problems similar to this are endemic across the county in every sector of the economy.

But local governments can and should set an example because they are in the best place to do so strategically.  There is no better place to begin than by reading Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement For A Complex World.

Four Behaviors That Stifle Strategic Thinking

One thing I don’t miss from my former life is being invited several times a year by other organizations to participate in so-called “strategic planning” sessions.

Never mind that regardless of intent, nearly all of them ended up having nothing to do with strategic thinking, dumbed down instead to developing a tactical to-do list.

Real strategy-making deals with uncertainty and ambiguity and very few people are comfortable with that.  More on that later in this essay but there is another reason these sessions usually end up being a waste of time.

It is because they nearly always employ the outdated 1950s notion of brainstorming, which until discredited in the 1960s was promoted as a means to increase creativity by 50%.

So run as fast as possible from any group today still using this practice.  It has long been shown to suck the life out of creativity instead.

I’m not talking about soliciting ideas, observations and input in group settings which can later be analyzed and filtered for patterns and connections that could be useful strategically.

I’m talking about sessions where groups are asked to distill or narrow down the input as a group.

Whether it be participants, governing boards, teams, executives or even some consultants, there are four types of behaviors that undermine this endeavor according to experts such as Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic.

“Social loafing” is one which is the predisposition of many people to become bystanders when in a group setting, looking much as if they are watching a tennis match.

Then there is “social anxiety” which refers to those poor souls who, rather than engage in critical thinking, soon begin to defend other people’s ideas from serious scrutiny and evaluation.
They are usually also the folks who cut off debate, “bless their hearts.”

Even if a few people in the group are given to discussion, evaluation and strategic thinking, others engage in what is called “regression to the mean,” meaning they dumb down the results of the meeting to the level of those who don’t or won’t or can’t think critically.

Some of this is due to what is called “production blocking,” terminology researchers use to describe a phenomena related to the size of the group.

It refers to the fact that the number of good ideas generated by a group plateaus when there are more than six or seven participants and plummets as the size of the group increases.

And this is even before what I call the “good ole boy” effect occurs, which is when two or three participants align on an agenda in advance of the brainstorming and spend the session trying to persuade or more often bully the group into getting their way.

I can’t tell you how many times I was invited to these sessions because of my expertise in strategic visitor-centric economic and cultural development only to be forced to listen to someone without a clue pontificate on how something would be great for tourism.

Now the new CEO of Hogan Assessment Systems, Chamorro-Premuzic explains the behavior of those who were so eager to lecture me on what was good for tourism in his recent book entitled, Confidence: How Much You Really Need and How to Get It.

My problem was never confidence.  But shaping community consensus taught me how often it is that far too many otherwise reasonable people get hoodwinked, as noted in the book, when lobbied by those high on the narcissism scale, into mistaking confidence for competence.

Dr. Chamorro-Premuzic has also found that virtual or online collaboration is far more productive than in-person group think not only because it tempers these behaviors but because participants become more thoughtful overall.

Most so-called strategic efforts, however, actually digress into tactical plans.  The late Stephen G. Haines, an expert in strategy-making distinguished strategic as the “what” versus the tactical of “how.”

Think “roadmap” versus the “vehicles for the trip.”

To paraphrase Gallup experts in the psychology of workplace strengths, being strategic comes from being able to see patterns in data and events “where others simply see complexity.”

Okay, “piece a cake,” right?

The key word is “patterns.”  People who can quickly see patterns and make connections strategically use that ability to sort through various scenarios and see alternatives which allows them to be more creative and innovative.

The reason so few people are strategically inclined is that it requires being comfortable with uncertainty.  Fear of impatience with uncertainty can make us disregard important cues.
In her classic book Beyond Fear, Dr. Dorothy Rowe, a clinical psychologist, argues that more than death itself, we fear uncertainty.

But the comfort with uncertainty that comes with being strategic is much more than falling back on intuition, at least the kinds that are merely gut instincts or snap judgments, which also give profiling a bad name.

It comes down to what Dr. William Duggan at Columbia describes as Strategic Intuition in his book by that title, “a clear thought,” but “not fast” and even somewhat “slow.”

Think “percolate” when you think of strategic intuition or what Steven Johnson calls a “slow hunch” in his book Where Good Ideas Come From, which by contrast is another reason brainstorming sessions end up being so superficial.

In a now classic white paper for McKinsey & Company, Dr. Hugh Courtney who is now the Dean of International Business and Strategy at Northeastern, broke “uncertainty” down into four levels.

Level 1 is “A clear enough future” based on market research and near term capacity, which in my experience is where most organizations stop when attempting to think strategically, if at all.

Level 2 deals with “alternative futures” often in my experience related to trying to keep up with, emulate or “fast follow” competitors, again pretty straight forward but near term in nature.

Level 3 is when a push is made to deal on a spectrum with “a range of futures” but still pretty predictable.

Level 4 is looking out into “true ambiguity,” still data-derivative but more qualitative and speculative in nature.

Plans should strive to deal with all four levels but most clearly stop at the first.  Insights into level 4 often comes from looking back at history for clues to patterns that will influence the future.

Truly strategic organizations employ all four levels but organically evolve strategies by immediately informing them as new information become available.

It is amazing how rapid, in a relative sense, that even the most long term uncertainties are able to be dialed into focus, only to be replaced by more longer term uncertainties.

Why bother then?  Because research confirms that more strategic organizations are not only more nimble and innovative but they perform at higher levels.


But strategy-making is hard work, even for people who are naturally inclined.

A Price to Obsolescence Denial – Part II

This is part II of an essay posted yesterday tracing the modern history of tourism along with that sector’s seeming inability to exercise what the late Peter Drucker called “systematic abandonment” as it relates to giving obsolete layers of organizations a proper burial.

I left off yesterday just before WWII created a lull in the widespread embrace of destination marketing organizations.  States had begun to advertise in the 1930s (the only element of marketing widely understood at the time.)

But first they had to purge their roadsides of billboard blight.  They also discovered another reason that they had the “cart before the horse” when it came to marketing.

States such as North Carolina had very little idea of what they could offer tourists.  The federal government came to the rescue again, as it had when it incentivized the building of roads.

A Depression-era program designed to put people to work rallied teams of authors and artists in each state to compile and illustrate comprehensive guide books that were then left to each respective state to publish.

In January 1937, my native Idaho’s was the first of the guides to be printed.  The remote mountain state had gone from having 5 of its 2,255 miles of roadway paved in 1922 to having 2,176 miles paved or oiled by 1936.

By the end of 1937, 400 autos a day were using the segment of the North & South Highway between Boise and Coeur d’Alene alone and officials were promoting improvements as a “means of attracting more tourists to Idaho.”

When first completed in 1927, the North & South’s terminus was at Weiser, about 74 miles short of Boise.

That segment had been completed by the time the state’s guide was published, making it possible for travelers to drive to and from Bonner’s Ferry, 30 miles shy of the Canadian border.

These state guides each catalogued detailed histories, inventories of flora, fauna, geology and archeology as well as point to point descriptions of things to see and do in each community.

Published in 1939, the guide book for North Carolina showed communities what was possible and planted the seeds for the post-World War II emergence of visitor promotion as we know it today.

That first visitors guide took nearly four years to research and produce with writers working out of eight different cities across the state.

But returning GIs across the country after World War II were impatient.

Tourism entrepreneurs, fearful states would not resume tourism marketing, began to instead organize another layer of associations, hoping to apply pressure.

Had they investigated more closely, they may have understood that the paradigm was shifting to community-based destination marketing organizations.

Key to strategic thinking is to look back in order to see forward.  A few did and jumped ahead of the shift to community-based tourism promotion.

Within five to ten years, the statewide tourism associations began to struggle for membership, as the idea of community destination marketing organizations rapidly spread and then exploded in the late 1960s and 1970s.

The shift was hastened in North Carolina when one of those returning GIs, an aviator who had survived two plane crashes in the war, pioneered the local option occupancy tax as a means to self-fund community destination marketing.

By the early 1980s, even rural communities and counties were organizing DMOs.  The vast majority of travelers by the end of that decade were destined for a specific city, town or county.

That’s when meetings began to be held to determine what do with those middle-ring associations created in that span after the war.  People who were unaware of the paradigm shift that made them obsolete only a little more than a decade later were perplexed.

At a meeting in the early 1990s to decide what to do with that layer of associations created in the 1950s, a friend of mine who worked for Biltmore at the time gently explained why that layer should be laid to rest, what Nancy Lublin calls “death by success.”

He explained that tourism organizations were by then far more connected to their respective community destination marketing organization rather than statewide or even national tourism-related associations.

It was one of a half dozen such meetings I was asked to attend over the years.  But there were always a few on both sides of the paradigm shift who didn’t accept that “pulling the plug,” could be both celebratory and merciful, preferring life support instead.

It isn’t a phenomenon unique to tourism.  There are many such organizations on life support in every community, kept there by a few people who can never seem to say goodbye and forcing many times their number to pay the price of their reticence.

In my experience, those who are reticent to pull the plug are otherwise reasonable people who also often struggle with anything strategic in nature, giving them a general lack of understanding of patterns or distinctions.

I suspect that the productivity of society in general is loaded down much more than it needs to be, merely by the reluctance to shutter the obsolete.

For those who are near-sighted when it comes to recognizing paradigm shifts from either shore, they must seem so gradual as to barely even exist.

But in fact, those who do see patterns and distinctions long before they are apparent know that the tipping point can be blindingly fast when it comes.

It is why those who perpetuate roadside billboards fail to grasp that while that form of media began its march into obsolescence in the 1930s, it recently reached its rapid conclusion over just 48 months.

It explains why progressive tourism leaders pushed for them to be banned 76 years ago, while a handful today can’t bear to see them go.

But just as we kept an old typewriter stashed in the back rooms of offices as well as fax machines more than 20 years after either had been useful, we are forced to keep layers of organizations on life support for the few who can’t bear their demise.

It is the price we pay for those who are not strategic.

The Inverse Drop In Questions

It is of great concern to educators that the percentage of students who ask questions during plummets from near 100% when they are 2 years of age to only 25% by the time they are 18 and finishing high school.

It is the inverse of the percentage who gain the ability to read and write during those years and parallels the decline in the number of students who are engaged in learning.

It isn’t coincidence that it also parallels engagement in the American workforce, including those in management and policy-making.

Somewhere in that decline, the majority of Americans lose their ability to be creative and innovative because they focus almost solely on answers rather than asking questions.

Sometimes it is cultural.  In the South, where I have lived for 26 years now, it seems that questions are often interpreted as criticism.  From there it is only a short hop to avoiding crucial confrontations and/or conversations.

Polluting the process even more in the workplace is the tendency of some people to make statements that should be in the form of questions.

Or another gimmick is to appear to be asking a question at a public gathering, but in essence, doing so only to toot your own horn or score brownie points.

The Right Question Institute is working to help educators focus on teaching how to inquire rather than just memorizing answers.

This includes publishing a primer entitled, Make Just One Change.

For the workplace, an excellent article just appeared in Harvard Business Review entitled, Relearning the Art of Asking Questions.

This could also be used to help teach how to ask questions in the workplace or among stakeholders in community endeavors, even on List Serves.

The authors, who work for Mu Sigma, provide a model for asking better questions as well as taking them in stride.  In my experience, I agree that far too many meetings fail because people “talk past each other.”

The model divides questions into those seeking a wider view of the issue under discussion vs. those that seek to narrow or deepen the discussion.  In both instances, there are questions meant to affirm what we know and those meant to discover something new.

Questions are divided into those that are adjoining or elevating to the topic at hand (think strategic) and those that are clarifying or seek to drill down deeper into the topic.

With some of the groups with which I am involved in retirement, it would probably be useful if we each prefaced our questions using with one of these four purposes (smile) or places a notation on the agenda signifying which kind of questions are in order.

Questions are not criticism or challenges.  They are gateways to learning, enlightenment, alignment, creativity and innovation.

They are as important to adults as they were when we asked an average of 40,000 questions between the age of 3 and 5.

Looking Out 35 Years From Now

Frankly, I was always a bit puzzled, back in the day, to hear myself introduced as innovative or strategic.  I still am whenever I guest lecture college students, including many who are pursuing my former career.

On reflection, I have probably always been more of a “repurposer.”  Studies show that less than 14% of Americans are strategically inclined. 

However, according to experts who study strengths, inclinations such as this, otherwise known as talents, are “naturally occurring patterns of thought, feeling and behavior.”  They are building blocks that can be refined and amplified through education and skill development.

For the rest of us, talents such as being strategic don’t come as naturally but we can still develop a certain level through practice and study.

Studies show that learning to see things strategically is also the secret to why some people can juggle multiple priorities making it is just as relevant to working through a daily list of assignments.

My first brush with thinking strategically probably began in 1970 when a history professor recommended that I read a newly published book entitled, Future Shock.

A quote that has stuck with me through the years is, “The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read.  It will be the person who doesn’t know how to learn.”

But it is the co-author’s second book entitled, The Third Wave which I refer to students today who are serious about learning to think strategically, more than 35 years after I read it for the first time.

It isn’t just because so many of the possibilities the authors concluded have come or are coming to pass today.  It is because it is written to show how they arrived at those conclusions by understanding the patterns of the past.

For instance, the book foretold the “collapse of consensus” we are experiencing today but it also sheds light on where we might go from here.

The revolutionaries who founded this country revolted against the feudal systems of governance then in place.

Societal headlines today reflect those who want to move forward to a more sustainable path and those who are trying to pull us back into another era or at the very least keep one foot in the past.

By looking at past patterns, the authors of The Third Wave, Alvin and Heidi Toffler, were also able to predict the change in how we will view being employed or unemployed in a world with more and more people but fewer and fewer jobs.

A blog I enjoy reading is Carolina Demography.  A recent post noted that of the nearly 4.5 million North Carolinians (age 16 and older,) 3.3 million or nearly three-quarters are of prime working age (25-64.)

That definition is slightly more broad than the norm.

Experts who have suggested that unemployment analysis would be much more relevant if it focused on the prime working age population, generally use ages 25 to 54 for this cohort.

A poll published three months ago by the Kaiser Family Foundation with the New York Times and CBS found that a little more than half of the U.S. population age 18 and older falls in the prime working age.

About 18% are prime working age but unemployed.  This group includes 26% homemakers but able to work outside the home, 34% disabled and unable to work and 24% unemployed and able to work.

Of the 24% who are unemployed but able to work, 5% don’t want a job now or in the future, 8% will want a job in the future, leaving 19% who want a part-time job and 67% who want a full-time job.

When this group is asked which factors are a major or minor reason they aren’t working, 52% cite family responsibilities, 32% cite health problems (although they are not disabled,) 38% note lack of education or skills, and 34% say their job was replaced by technology.

Other factors listed are 32% jobs because jobs are going overseas, 28% because of discrimination and 35% apparently don’t need the income.

Of the 78% who are unemployed, able to work, and have looked in the last year, 86% are open to entry-level in another field, 81% are willing to return to school or job training, 77% are open to non-traditional hours, 64 would take minimum wage, 45% would move to another city, 46% would commute more than hour each way, 69% would take 10% less than the last job and 37% would take 25% less.

There are some smart people across the full length of the ideological spectrum who are noodling about what we do as it becomes more and more a privilege to have a job.

One is called a universal basic income that would replace the myriad of safety net programs and a better option for the 25% of all workers including 40% of those in restaurants or food service who need public assistance on top of what they earn.

Ben Schiller makes a good argument that this is also a better way to eliminate poverty.

People who dismiss the ability to look ahead any more than three years if that, including many serving on governing and elected boards, as well as far too many executives are well advised to read or reread The Third Wave, but for process rather than content.

The exercise may be not only be inspiration to look back for clues to the possibilities lying beyond the horizon – perhaps another 35 years.

Looking Back To Detect the Future

One of the signature artifacts of Durham, North Carolina’s past that has been lost during the eight decades of neglect since a local history museum was first proposed is a calliope.

Beginning less than a decade after the Civil War ended here 150 years ago next month, this musical instrument sat atop the now repurposed Old Bull Building and simulated the sound of a bull at each factory shift change and other special occasions.

I grew up on a cattle ranch in the Rockies so when I first read about this famous calliope, I had no trouble imagining the sound it played (click here to hear a bull.)  It celebrated Bull Durham tobacco and the “Bull City” it was soon to make world famous.

It is important to remember that in 1870 as plans were being laid to erect the Old Bull Building, now a National Historic Landmark, Durham was already very different than the rest of North Carolina.

At the time, Governor W.W. Holden was standing up against gangs of Ku Klux Klan riders who were marauding through nearby counties committing public murders and whippings while intimidating officials from doing anything about it.

Several counties were declared to be in a state of insurrection and state militia were deployed.

These gangs of terrorists were targeting “blacks who did not know their place” and whites who advocated for the rights of blacks.  In fact, maybe the sound of a Bull blaring from Durham was meant to ward them off.

Seriously, this is when Durham residents began talking privately about formation of a separate county which got its unique shape when several pieces of land were lopped off during passage of the controversial 1881 bill in the legislature, enabling voter approval.

But Durham’s industrialists and merchants were divided on another issue, bonds to build graded schools.  Republicans were opposed, arguing that education by families and in private and parochial schools was enough.

Opponents sued to overturn voter approval so voters approved the bonds again while proponents started a “moonlight school” for factory workers.

Artifacts such as the now lost “bull calliope” will be crucial to a fully-functional Museum of Durham History, should officials ever make it the priority public opinion polls have shown for decades.

The compelling essay entitled “Looking at Artifacts, Thinking About History,” notes that artifacts reflect and symbolize changes.  Had the old calliope survived, it would today serve as a clarion reminder that Durham is different, and proud of it.

There are people who dismiss the past by claiming they only want to think about the future.  This is the kind of thinking or lack of thinking that leads quickly to a surrender of sense of place in so many communities.

It is by understanding the patterns of the past that we see into the future.  It is why a class in historical analysis should be required as a prerequisite in business schools for one on strategic thinking and/or strategy making.

With each passing day, Durham loses more and more of its history in exchange for mainstream culture that can be found anywhere.

For those still puzzled about why we should care and in need of lists to check, below are just a few reasons a Museum of Durham History, stocked with both artifacts and the latest technology, is crucial:

• Story Telling. It will give children, students, newcomers and relocating executives a place to get in touch with Durham’s story. People who grasp that stories are more inclined to be engaged as activists, volunteers and philanthropy.
• Synergy. It will augment Durham’s historic sites by providing exhibition space to stir interest in those locations, making them more sustainable. It will complement rather than undermine other cultural facilities and programming.
• Preservation. It will be a vigilant testimony to what makes the community distinct and unique and insulate its character and personality from the pressures of development and “generica.”
• Future Generations. As a repository of innovations and artifacts, it will inspire future generations to build on the temporal qualities that make Durham, well, Durham…creative, entrepreneurial, caring, innovative, accepting, etc.

Maybe it is because I am something of an artifact myself, that this has now become so clear (smile.)

Two Hallmarks of a Worthy Consultant

A well-researched and documented concept such as “authenticity” is often misunderstood when executives such as many in my former field of community marketing begin to salt and pepper it into use as a buzz word, rather than understanding its real meaning.

They are easy to spot because they haven’t really read the research behind the term, hoping their community can bluff visitor prospects by liberally adding it throughout its communication resume.

The thing about authenticity, though, is that to consumers it is not a buzz word making it easy for them to detect a fraud.

Linked is an article forwarded by a friend of mine about how Asheville, North Carolina is losing its authenticity.  A three and a half hour drive east, Downtown Durham too may also already be on the backside of that tipping point.

Having destination marketing organizations with a good sense of what makes these communities authentic is not enough if even the best intended developer and public officials carelessly enable destructive mainstream forces instead.

Soon the existence of authenticity in North Carolina may be extinct except for history museums, greatly diminishing its appeal in the eyes of travelers including more than 80% of those who visit fantasy attractions and events.

Few DMOs and even fewer consultants to DMOs have actually read this research about authenticity which was conducted in 2009.

Bill Geist is one of only three consultants to DMOs that I recommend, but it isn’t because he was necessarily a visionary during the nearly nine years he was a DMO exec or because we are friends or because we have always seen eye to eye.

I recommend Bill because in the twenty years since he ran a DMO, he has never stopped learning or repopulating what he had learned to others.  He understands that it isn’t what a community DMO knows or has accomplished but how eager it is to learn that makes all the difference.

Innovation is another attribute that is overused but those who merely salt and pepper it into resumes or initiatives are easy to detect.

Even fewer truly grasp “disruptive innovation.”

According to the Harvard business professor, entrepreneur and consultant who coined the term more than 15 years ago, a “disruptive innovation is not a breakthrough that makes good products a lot better.”  Those are sustaining innovations.

A disruptive innovation transforms a product or service to be more affordable and accessible, giving a much larger population access to them.

When Clay Christensen and I briefly overlapped as classmates at BYU the only computer programming we learned to do was creating punch cards for the university’s huge mainframe computer.

By the time Christensen coined disruptive innovation, the organizations I led had been using desktop computers since the early 1980s.

By the time my career was coming in for a landing, Steve Jobs, who wrote about powerful influence of Clay’s book, had put that computing power in a smartphone.

What distinguishes Bill Geist and Clay Christensen is their humility, a prerequisite to lifelong learning.  Consultants who believe they know it all are a dime a dozen and worth even less.

Christensen famously tells the story of getting a call from a notoriously gruff and impatient Andy Grove at Intel, asking the professor to fly out and explain the theory of disruptive innovation to his execs because he was too busy to read.

When he arrived, crises had arisen and Christensen was told that the execs didn’t have time to even listen to the theory so he would need to just tell them what they needed to do in the ten minutes available.

Pivotal is that Christensen held his ground and insisted they listen to an explanation of the theory because he didn’t know much about Intel but that the theory of Disruptive Innovation would have an opinion.

Grove listened and made the connections.

Christensen eloquently describes the challenge of a consultant.  You can’t be suckered into just telling an organization what to do because there is no way a consultant can ever know enough about an organization or community to do that.

The value of a consultant is to show you how to think differently.  Data can only tell you about the past and help illuminate patterns and connections.  But strategic direction is about connecting data, connections and patterns with a good theory.

A consultant can only teach managers how to think differently and see “through the lens of a theory into the future, you can actually see it very clearly.”

All of this is to say that if you think you don’t have time to read and think about the data behind something like community authenticity or delude yourself into applying buzz words as a short cut, you have no business masquerading as a community marketing exec.

Nor will consultants, even those few who are the best, be able to connect the dots.

The Rarest of Competencies

Experts at performance appraisal recommend no less than three and no more than five performance objectives.

During my four-decade career as a community marketing executive the number varied but mostly my performance was evaluated on five objectives, each weighted differently and recalibrated every few years.

It was only coincidence that there are now considered to be five roles for such organizations.

Like baseball statisticians are forever trying to do, periodically we would see if we could come up with a single performance metric, a sabremetric

It isn’t an unreasonable exercise because each of my five performance objectives was woven from at least five sub-objectives.  But more than three decades ago, researchers began identifying the dangers associated with too narrow a goal.

Remember the Vietnam War and “body counts?”  It is an example experts often cite because that obsession drew the military away from other more valuable metrics, a mix of which may have changed the outcome.

Overlapping with that period was the explosive (literally) Ford Pinto which was built using only two metrics, “under 2,000 pounds/under $2,000,” which turned out to lead to structural design issues.

Many management studies have warned that too narrowly focusing an organization’s leadership can lead to unintended consequences such as strategic breakdowns and dysfunctional systems, even unethical behavior.

Beginning in the mid-1970s, this had even been given a name, Campbell’s law:

"The more any quantitative social indicator (or even some qualitative indicator) is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."

Many years ago one of my board members, who was very concerned for my welfare, tried to persuade my governing board as a whole to refocus one of my/our objectives around a couple of people who were bending ears about us, especially me.

He, as many do in business circles, just wanted to stop the “boat from rocking.

But prevailing voices raised an even more valid point.

Unless those concerns were far more broadly held, spending too much time on so few would take away from energizing far greater numbers of stakeholders who supported what was apparently irritating to so few.

In political circumstances like this, experts encourage organizations to look at the positive-to-negative ratio using scientific, generalizable methods.  This is the ratio of people who feel passionately one way or the other about an issue or person.

As long as the ratio is positive, focus as much energy as possible into energizing those stakeholders.

This holds true in nearly every facet of life…not just community destination marketing and including hallway politics that carry over from high school into business and politics.

For example, as I’ve mentioned before, 1% of performers generate more than half of all concert revenues.

But Perry Marshall reminds us in his new book 80/20 that the same is true of sports teams where half of the fan revenue comes from 1% of the customers.

He argues that this is a law of nature, not just business, because the same is true of a faith congregation of 400 members, 1% do half of the work and nearly all of the volunteering is done by less than 100 members.

It is also true of our internal stakeholders for any cause, especially grass-roots support.  Those most passionate about a cause represent 1% of the total but more than half of the passion and energy.

Two expert data scientists argued recently in Harvard Business Review that “analyzing the data is the easy part.  The hard part is deciding what data matters.”

Of course, 30% of any performance rating should relate to specific “core competencies,” which for CEOs today should include both innovation and strategic thinking.

This is especially true for those in my former field, community destination marketing organizations where a CEO’s job description should include visioning along with strategic thinking and strategy making.

The problem is that these abilities are hard to teach and resumes now indiscriminately throw these characteristics in without a clue as to what these terms mean.

Studies show that fewer than 14% of Americans are strategically inclined.  Research shows that executives average only 1% to 3% of their time building perspective for the future.

Those who study strengths argue that competencies such as strategic thinking begin as talents that get refined by knowledge and skill-training and then refined with practice.

This is why some people become disenchanted with higher education.  They expected to graduate with talents and came away with only knowledge for a skill.

As a professional discipline, strategy making began in earnest in the 1980s according to observations this month by experts at McKinsey & Company.

But in many organizations it is delegated as only a process, negating the most important aspect of strategy making, agility.

McKinsey applies ten tests to measure the effectiveness of strategies and four years ago a survey of executives around the world found that only a third believed theirs would pass more than three.

Organizations that do best at strategy making are twice as likely to view it as an ongoing function in real-time, which makes it even more crucial as a core competency for CEOs.

Planning has a place, but it is a platform from which to innovate and adapt strategically every single day.  The report details the 13 facets of a chief strategist, broken down into five archetypes: architect, mobilizer, visionary, surveyor and resource manager.

A few months ago, the founder of McKinsey’s Strategy Practice, Fred Gluck, who served as the firm’s managing director during my career, wrote that “strategic planning…provides the raw material and factual basis for strategic thinking and opportunistic decision making.”

But in his experience, it is the latter two that are most important.

Planning defines the dimensions of strategy making but Gluck explains there are also within each “strategic degrees of freedom” and strategy making must react daily to new developments and trends.

To be meaningful and effective, according to Gluck, executives must synthesize and resynthesize analyses into strategic initiatives for continuing and never ending improvement and agile evolution.

From my four decades as a CEO, the challenge for even the most strategically inclined CEOs is that many board members, community policy makers and especially investors, don’t have a strategic bone in their bodies.

This is also why they talk innovation but don’t walk the walk.  If you want a quick way to differentiate those who use strategic and innovation only as “buzz words,” they are the first to undermine data analysis and marketing intelligence while pushing worst practices such as traditional advertising.

An alumnus who overlapped my time at BYU, Dr. Clayton Christensen, who coined the term “disruptive innovation” used to take notes in class by writing down the questions asked and later looking for the patterns that distinguished the most brilliant from the ordinary.

He was putting into practice what management guru Peter Drucker had recommended in the 1950s when we were both in elementary school.  I’m afraid to see his notations about my questions in class.

Clayton’s been searching for a metric for innovation.  In an article for Inc. Magazine, Ilan Mochari reminds us of terms that Christensen uses as a metaphors to distinguish organizations that are strategic and innovative.

He recommends that organizations that are interested in long-term success should ignore stakeholders who act like tourists and focus on those who act like residents.

Another way to view this in sense of place parlance is ignore those who are boomers and focus on the stayers.

Community destination marketing, at its highest and most strategic level, is about guarding sense of place.  These organizations pursue tourists by appealing to their instincts for being rooted, almost as if they were residents.

They grasp that marketing is about asking questions, as much about disqualifying potential visitors for whom a destination would not be a good fit as it is storytelling to engage those in conversation for whom it would be.

By nature, marketing community appeal is about strategic differentiation, marketing innovation and credibility. 

It can also be a very lonely job, thus my I forecast this week that executive levels will be increasingly inhabited by introverts and omniverts capable of strategic sustainability in rooms filled with stakeholders who simply aren’t.

The Underlying Fallacy of More and More, Bigger and Bigger

It should have been no surprise to, at least, tourism marketers when airlines serving Brazil attributed a drop in revenues due to the World Cup.

The paradox of mega-sports events is that they displace more economic impact than they create.  A classic illustration of that is when an economist measured tax revenue collected in a community that hosted the Super Bowl.

It varied little from collections over that same period the year before and the year after.  How can this be when input-output measures taken computed value-added?

The answer is displacement and it’s why sustainable community marketing is not about more and more or bigger and bigger but how to feather sports groups or conventions or festivals in a way that doesn’t create displacement or increased public services or inconvenience.

It is also the little known secret to why communities that carefully do this, outperform or perform equal in the proportion of visitors they draw for those segments compared to those that go “big game hunting.”

Economic impact models struggle to measure the economic activity that huge events override or dislocate such as the economic activities people would have been doing anyway or those they didn’t or couldn’t or chose not to do because of the event.

It is possible, but they would be costly to run.

If fact, if these analyses went beyond just the local or even metro or state levels, the events may turn out to have a negative impact when taking into account their impact on a national, continental or even hemispheric level.

Sure, there is value added from people who bought snacks and beverages to throw home parties for friends to watch on television or from people who went to sports bars or drank more or stayed longer who wouldn’t have otherwise or who traveled to see the event in person.

But that amount would need to also net out the activity these consumers would have generated anyway had then been out shopping or buying vehicles or attending performances or taking trips they postponed to avoid perceived crowds or to watch the event on television instead.

Ironically, the net effect of mega-events can be negative overall.

Does that mean mega-events are bad?  Nope.  Just that communities and nations shouldn’t be deluded by those who use economic impact as a rationale for hosting the events.

It is also why visitor-centric economic development organizations such as those I ran over a four decade career can, if data and results-driven, be frustrating to stakeholders who don’t understand their purpose or who make up their minds and then take interest only in information to support their opinions.

Such organizations, called community, state or national destination marketing organizations are often given only one of two choices by powerbrokers.

Just go along to get along while withholding critical information from the public or get steamrolled and disparaged including as one official threatened me once misusing a metaphor, being forced to “fall on your own petard.”

People aren’t rational by nature, especially fanatics, but the role of a community destination marketing organization, while it involves bringing popularity to a particular place, isn’t to be popular but instead, rational.

Many years ago, I had a chair of my governing board who worried about my personal welfare, dismissed the high regard for our organization and me personally in scientific residents polls or anonymous opinion polls of community stakeholders.

His was overly concerned with the opinions of a trio of people who wanted my head and seemingly hated the community marketing organization  I led and therefore lobbied whoever would listen to undermine us.

So I spent an inordinate amount of time and energy meeting with these individuals in an attempt to better understand where they were coming from, even hiring a consultant who was an insider in their circle to coach me.

They were nice enough in person but what got under their skin was simple.  We made decisions based on data, not who’s asking.  When the data didn’t make our case we were as likely to distribute to inform community decisions as we were when it did.

My job though, was to continue to try in every way possible to show even detractors how they could also achieve their objective using data and sustainable tourism.

I was lucky to have governing boards who stood behind me as long as we were following the data, resisting special interests and doing what was best for the community overall.

It is also why I have empathy for former peers who weren’t so fortunate and who, instead, were forced to surrender their community’s welfare to powerful forces, a slippery slope from where there can be no return.  “But for the grace of God, go I.”

In one community, a cabal of five people collectively came after me, ostensibly over my “style” which has definitely always been a work in progress.  I survived there on a 10-7 vote, a veritable landslide in political terms.

In my two other communities, similar votes under even heavier-handed circumstances, though less publicized, were far more favorable, a testament more to my heart than style.

But that’s all part of the job.  Politics is personal, not logical, but in community marketing you can never make it the former.

The job of community destination marketing is to reap a community’s full share of visitor-centric economic and cultural development.  That requires four things not generally understood as part of marketing:

• Strategically deciding what not to do;
• Disqualifying events, groups and segments of potential visitors that don’t fit or cost more than they can deliver;
• Pursuing visitation in scale that will complement and appreciate things distinct to a particular place; and
• Seeking to do no harm to the things that make a community worthy of love.

In summary, without surrendering to more and more, bigger and bigger, the organizations I led were able to statistically outperform or keep pace with those that did, even if it didn’t make the news or appease special interests.

Modifying “Gnats” As A Strategy

In the early 1990’s, I don’t think Durham’s local governments realized they were being strategic when they provided nearly all of the funding for a new non-profit organization to do advocacy for downtown revitalization.

Typically governments across the country do this initially either as a “dole-out” to “make some constituents happy” or because it seems like an inexpensive way to shed a responsibility.

Either way, it turned out to be genius.  Essentially, the organization turned out, at its best, to be a sort of ombudsman to work deep within those bureaucracies both as a collaborator with public servants but also to connect dots between agency silos.

Any large organization, public or private, could benefit from a few “gnats” such as that.

I know it wasn’t a strategic move in Durham because the formula hasn’t been replicated in other areas even once.

In fact, when I pointed out how it had worked to one administrator, she tried to replicated it with Keep Durham Beautiful but clearly as a way to shed responsibility for community upkeep on the theory that businesses and residents could be panhandled to do it instead.

To apply a popular rhetorical device, “How’s that workin’ for ya?” .

KDB was instead embedded within the bureaucracies but given a hybrid non-profit with which to work along with a tiny fraction of what had been given just for downtown advocacy, greatly inhibiting its effectiveness.

But essentially this has still served its more valuable role as a “gnat” to “connect or reconnect the dots” between agencies regarding the huge dividend local governments can reap by fulfilling overarching responsibilities for curb appeal.

There are advantages to each approach.

But having seen both close up now, I am persuaded that the former makes it less likely that such “gnat” will be weighted down with internal agency culture.

Even so, it still doesn’t appear that local governments here have caught on that funding “gnats” could be scaled up as a broader strategy but then again being strategic or innovative often goes unrewarded in public service these days.

Ironically, before there is any “eye-rolling,” most stupid public sector decisions originate when instead of creating economic value on their own, some private sector “bottom feeders seek to leverage value through manipulation of public policy as a substitute.

Or when small groups of vocal constituents sense handouts could result.

Remember, the “Baby Bell” that reconstituted AT&T after its breakup did so by overwhelming the Texas legislature and a soon-to-be US President by literally deploying a lobbyist for each member of that body.

Thus we now see even our jointly-owned airport shamelessly out panhandling local governments to subsidize fights that don’t make sense otherwise to businesses.

Where do you think they got that bright idea?  Proponents of convention centers and stadiums such as subsidy-ravenous event planners and promoters?

Of course, even if Durham had been strategic with downtown advocacy and community appearance, the “gnat” model only works as long as public, rather than special interests are foremost and those spearheading change are insulated from closed-door strong-arming and retribution.

That given, an area ripe for extension of the “gnat” model as strategy is in the area of land use and specifically, the character of the “built” environment that can make or break the distinct sense of a particular place, that is, if like Durham, it still has one.

This certainly isn’t a role for which commercial boosters would fit, or anyone afraid to walk away from a project.

But Durham local governments do have a non-profit with the mission, sensibilities and now expertise to fulfill this role and one with which they already have a relationship, however modest.

They would be well advised to greatly expand the role of Preservation Durham in the mold of how it has done with Downtown Durham Inc.  The organization both by sensibility and by expertise is in a unique position.

It already serves to survey and identify landmarks but it could do so much more, much as DDI did for revitalization, but in this case to work with planners, general services, open space and many other agencies.

The dividend would be to shape public and private structures early in the process where modifications aren’t costly in ways that ensure the structures belong in both scale and design and links and benefits to their surroundings and to the “built” aspect of Durham’s sense of place.

This wouldn’t be a much fun for those who enjoy public policy “car wrecks” and controversy, but it is something Durham’s local governments need, not a shedding of responsibility but another useful and collaborative “gnat.”

Converting tactics into strategies, let alone overarching strategies is not always the best way to shape strategy, but often innovation occurs unexpectedly when something works for a reason other than intended.

Think “post-it notes”, “stainless steel,” “x-rays,” “Velcro,” even “potato chips” and “matches.”

Durham local governments stumbled on its own “post-it” innovation and now, in my opinion, it is well advised to strategically replicate it.

Fostering – Framing - Fabricating Authenticity

Two weeks ago while I was relaxing lakeside in the Northern Rockies, a message from a friend popped up making sure I had seen a post earlier entitled “Is authenticity authentic?”

Perhaps he wanted to be sure I read it because he noticed that I tried in an essay a month earlier about authenticity as a continuum,  to briefly touch on some recent research revealing where along that continuum public opinion places various tourist activities.

The data showed that “attraction” visitors overwhelmingly prefer authenticity in the communities they visit, including those who participate in activities visitors rate as least authentic, e.g. sports, musical theater, concerts, theme parks, casinos, etc.

The research drew my attention because it was conducted by PGAV Destinations, a company that since 1971 has helped tourist attractions that fall along the least authentic part of the continuum be more appealing including, well, embracing authenticity.

Another way to look at the data is that more than 86% of attraction visitors view natural attractions like Grand Canyon as authentic compared to the beach at 49.9%.

More than 29% of attraction visitors viewed Biltmore Estate here in North Carolina as authentic (the parts that are still historical such as the house itself rate higher,) shows on Broadway at 18.4% and Six Flags theme parks at 8%.

The message was clear.  Regardless of what may prompt a visit, visitors find authenticity the most compelling attribute.

Coincidentally, as that message popped up, I was finishing an incredible book entitled Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity in preparation for a stop I planned on my way home from a cross country trip in Nashville, home of the still vibrant 1892 Ryman Auditorium.

The author, a Vanderbilt sociologist who recently passed on, reminds us that “authenticity is not inherent” in something deemed authentic.  It is “designated authentic” by a “socially-agreed upon construct,” another reason PGAV’s research is so insightful.

He continues by noting that this agreed upon construct is “continuously negotiated in an ongoing interplay” between various interests and perception.

One of the pleasures of retirement is reflection, something researchers call “metacognition,” a higher level cognition that developmental psychologists labeled as such in 1976, just after I took the helm of my first community destination marketing organization in Spokane.

It is essentially the ability or process of evaluating our own thinking, a form of self-appraisal.  When faulty, it results in the overrating of the influence “our wonderful selves” have on outcomes.

When carefully calibrated researchers have pinpointed reflection as key to learning, innovation, achievement and success.

But I find it interesting in retirement (and on long cross country ventures) as a means to sift through the archeology of my influences. 

Never, I have found, is any success with which I was credited ever due to prescience or “thunderbolt” insights, at least not on my part.  Nearly always it is the result of the good fortune to stumble upon connections and then make use of the patterns.

For instance, what made me connect the strategy of authenticity four decades before it reached buzz word status, as a means to differentiate the three communities I represented and leapfrog competitors?

Conventional wisdom, until recently, was to focus instead on building mega-facilities such as stadiums, civic/convention centers and theaters in a way that we know now tragically makes communities less and less differentiated and appealing.

I was certainly involved in my share of mega-facilities during my career in visitor centered economic and cultural development including three convention centers, three performing arts centers, two stadium/arenas, three museums and numerous other historic and natural interpretive sites.

But what was it that gave me an awareness of the importance of trying to gingerly and coherently feather them into each community’s cultural ecology striving with various levels of success to nestle them into indigenous sense of place while doing everything possible to safeguard authenticity?

Genius? Hah!

Was it growing up on an ancestral cattle ranch and exploring forests, an old family cemetery, and discarded artifacts?  Or the presence of the Tetons looming across the Henry’s Fork?

That may have fostered a proclivity but my first formal brush with the concept of authenticity came in my second semester of college, years before I would back into a lifelong career in community branding and marketing.

An ACT score had pushed me ahead a year in history and one of the readings in a 1967 class syllabus was a book penned earlier that decade by Dr. Daniel Boorstin entitled The Image – A Guide To Pseudo-Events In America.

Authenticity has always been important in historical analysis where its relativity first came to light.  More than fifty years ago, Boorstin was already lamenting the threat of mainstream commercialism to what we known now as sense of place.

Dr. Boorstin researched and wrote this book, his first of more than twenty, after watching the famous television debate between Presidential candidates Richard Nixon and John Kennedy.

His summary of “the dark arts” of advertising and public relations fostered a skepticism that may have been why in my eventual career in marketing, I was one of the first in my field to embrace data-driven marketing decisions and recognize the inherent lack of credibility in advertising.

The third chapter of his book, “From Traveler to Tourist: The Lost Art of Travel,” is still one of the best overviews of the historical foundations of visitor-centered economic and cultural development.

He reminds us all that the inherent value of tourism goes much, much deeper than superficial commercial outcomes such as “heads in beds,” or “butts in seats,” or “feet on the street” or even community revitalization.

At its essence, tourism foremost should be a means preserve and leverage what is truly unique, distinct and authentic to destinations.  And in the words of Dr. Scott Russell Sanders, it should be an educational tool to “preserve and celebrate the commonwealth of the place visited as well as the place to which each visitor returns.”

Boorstin who also forsook a career in the law to instead find history useful for varied career paths may have planted the seed that led me within a decade of reading his book to realize that I was more suited and could make a bigger difference in the field of visitor-centered economic and cultural development.

But Boorstin’s influence on me was not in a vacuum.  I literally came of age during the sixteen years of “See the USA in your Chevrolet.”  “Smokey the Bear” and Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson had by then each made patriotic pleas for Americans to travel.

Remember, barely half of Americans had cars when I was born in 1948, less than two decades after mass leisure travel had moved into the mainstream.  By the time I was attending that 1967 history class at Brigham Young University, nearly three-fourths of Americans had cars.

Another reading required in that history course was written by Dr. Earl S. Pomeroy a professor who coincidentally had taught for several years prior to the publication of In Search of the Golden West: The Tourist in Western America, at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill near where I now live.

Dr. Pomeroy delved into the complex process by which authenticity is negotiated when the “toured upon” assume roles that reflect the perceptions of the West held by visitors from the East.

In the words of Dr. Jerry Frank in a recent doctoral paper entitled, Marketing the Mountains: An Environmental History of Tourism, these perceptions were based on the “testimony of television.”

I may have been hell-bent while taking those history classes in college on being a lawyer but I can see in reflection now how much tourism and the importance of authenticity has seeped into my consciousness.

By 1973, a job in community marketing was my means of working my way through law school at Gonzaga, when I came across a paper by a newly-minted Ph.D. with expertise in anthropology, sociology, geography and landscape architecture entitled, “Staged Authenticity: Arrangements of Social Space in Tourist Settings.”

Within two years, I had exchanged careers and was head of that DMO.  Dr. Dean MacCannell had evolved that paper into a book entitled Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, and I found myself standing on a floating dock one night (shown in image above) with Mike Kobluk watching the sun set over a historic clock tower.

Mike is my one degree of separation from both the singer-songwriter John Denver who was at the peak of his popularity back then and Roger McGuinn, founder of The Byrds, popular for a decade by then (Mr. Tambourine Man, Turn, Turn, Turn.)

Kobluk was co-founder of the popular 1960’s Chad Mitchell Trio (that’s Mike on the Four Winds solo part.)  McGuinn played backup to the trio and Denver performed as a singer for three years, crediting his social and political awareness to that time as well as ideas in songwriting until his tragic death in 1997.

But that night, I was the newly minted exec of Spokane’s community destination marketing organization and after serving as director of performing arts for the Expo ‘74 World’s Fair, Mike was beginning a nearly three decade career as manager for the 2,700 performing arts center and adjoining convention center looming behind us.

The $12 million facilities were a gift from the state after the six month exposition, but stretching before us that dusk was the true legacy of the event, a $117 million restoration of Spokane’s downtown riverfront including two islands splitting its remarkable falls.

I had cut my community marketing teeth with a front row seat to the benefits and drawbacks of mega-events, such as that but we were awestruck by the fabulous park left when all of the exposition facilities were clear away.

As Mike and I looked out over the 100-acre city-center park, he quietly nodded and in that melodic voice uttered something like, “Spokane may have just been the center of the entertainment world for six months, but this park is now the centerpiece of its true visitor appeal.”

Within three years, I had moved on to head my second of three DMOs in Anchorage where his observation that night was still fresh in my mind as I read Dr. Wallace Stegner’s essay on “sense of place,” the first time the term was used.

Mike’s background may have been on the least authentic end of the continuum but he connected the dots again for me that night about the primacy of things authentic.  He definitely had influence on me.

Nearly forty years after his comment, a few years after I retired from that lifelong career in Durham, NC and a decade after Mike had retired from cultural facilities management, two friends of mine in North Carolina happened to conduct research for that DMO I had helped jumpstart in Spokane.

Mike was right.  Visitors not only cited scenic beauty as the destination’s top attribute but overwhelmingly credited the Riverfront Park as the number one attraction not just there but throughout the region.

The Riverfront Park was perceived seven times more powerful than elements found less authentic.

This dovetails with PGAV’s research nationwide.

That research also documents that destinations considered real or authentic tend to enjoy better brand perception, higher satisfaction and greater intent-to-return, but even among attraction/event visitors, fewer than 4-in-10 describe their last trip as authentic (real, natural, original or historic.)

It may be a buzz word now, and my ongoing study and connection more serendipity than destiny, but I still come across a book a year that deepens my understanding including one entitled Authenticity in Culture, Self, and Society that came to my attention as I retired and refreshed my memory to some of my earliest influences.

But it is clear that authenticity is still the most powerful strategy for both appeal and differentiations and history is the leading indicator.

Instead, far too many destinations have destroyed their authenticity, irretrievably cannibalizing it in the words of Dr. MacCannell for the undifferentiating “historylessness” and far less appealing commercial and fantastical tourism features scrambling to monopolize attention.

Authenticity and inauthenticity may be relative but the evidence shows  that the fewer than four-in-ten communities with any “real” remaining that are also willing to make its preservation and promotion a priority will be the only ones with appeal to visitors, even those seeking fantasy.

This in a future where all others will have reached equilibrium of “sameness” and settled for simulation.

If not already too late, which will your community be?