Love & Work
A notebook about how we work, learn, love and live.
This past Monday marked the spring equinox. On that day Anna Brones posted a thoughtful mediation on seasonal change:
"Creativity, art, and ideas, they all need time to marinate and come to fruition. Just like the plants around us, we need time to unfurl. The ferns don’t shoot up overnight, nor do the trilliums. They slowly come into being. They take their time, all at their own pace.
"Like the plants, we too need the space and time to fully grow into the new versions of our creative selves, refreshed and energized and ready for what’s next. Creativity refuses to be rushed. It wants to be nurtured."
She reminded me that learning to work, love and live smarter and more peacefully is not a sprint. We start where are and go one day at a time.
Happy spring. Happy Friday.
How We Live
Epicureans seek both tranquility and joy.
Emily Austin is professor of philosophy at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. She's been studying Epicurus (341-270 BCE), an ancient Greek philosopher who himself lived in remarkably troubled times. She's summarized some of what she's learned in a new book, Living for Pleasure: An Epicurean Guide to Life. She's summarized some of the book in this good beginner's guide to the philosopher's approach to opening doorways to "unalloyed, anxiety-free joys".
"Epicurus readily concedes that we often struggle to pursue pleasure without making a mess of it," she says. "Our failure might even lead us to believe it’s pleasure’s fault. Epicurus, though, thinks we’re doing pleasure wrong. We navigate the landscape of pleasure and pain artlessly and inattentively, sometimes without any sort of plan at all. Epicureanism aims to point us in the right direction, to help us find security and joy, to do pleasure right."
Article: How To Live Like an Epicurean
Futures Thinking, Brand Strategy
At the heart of every culturally impactful brand is a wager on what the next 5, 10 or 15 years will look like.
Brand strategist, Jasmine Bina, is so right. Brands that have an impact start with a clear vision of how the world will be different when they are successful. And those brands "make it their job to inch toward that vision in every single action they take". She holds up Parsley Health as an example:
"Parsley Health is about functional medicine but if you experience the brand in any meaningful way, whether its logging into their patient portal, walking into a clinic, or following CEO Robin Berzin on social, you will see that they are betting on a very different kind of medical mentality emerging in the coming years among consumers.
"Parsley believes patients will become the new experts: proficient in their own health and wellness, talking from an empowered point of view with their medical providers, and open to exploring complementary therapies that combine mind, body and soul.
"Nearly all expressions of the Parsley brand are geared toward making this future a reality. Even though Parsley has great tech that makes the medical experience remarkably different from the usual visit to the doctor’s office, they rest their brand strategy on the changing user instead of their platform."
Article: There Is No Brand Strategy Without A Prediction
How We Work
"The human brain was built to solve problems that we no longer solve."
 Developmental molecular biologist John Medina via American Program Bureau
"The brain appears to have been designed to solve problems related to surviving in an outdoor setting in unstable meteorological conditions and to do so in near-constant motion. That’s what the brain came up with in response to what I like to sometimes call our [species’] uterus — which is essentially the east African plates, the Serengeti, and the sides of the Ngorongoro Crater.
"Given that performance envelope, you can say something almost immediately about a practical application in the business world. That being, if you wanted to design a workspace that was directly opposed to what the brain was naturally good at doing, you’d come up with a cubicle. You’d come up with a desk, you’d come up with a corner office, you’d come up with an office building." - John Medina
Article: Modern Workplaces Don’t Mix Well With Our Ancient Survival Instincts. Here’s Why.
Ownership
How two business founders are sharing the wealth with their partners and staff, and assuring that their values endure long after they depart.
My friend and colleague, John Abrams, has been writing about Perpetual Purpose Trusts of late. This week he posted an article about a PPT recently formed by the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses (ZCOB) in Ann Arbor.
"Here’s my simplified version, with all the parts:
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Any one of the 750+ Zingerman’s employees who has completed a 90-day orientation can purchase a share of ownership for $1,000. Each year a share of the profits are distributed to each and the investment is recovered after a few years.
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There are 18 managing partners who own the 12 ZCOB businesses. Two of them are Ari and Paul. They all share another portion of the profits.
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Each Zingerman’s business pays 3.1% of annual sales to an entity called Zing Intellectual Property (ZIP) as a royalty for the brand that has developed over time. ZIP pays the founders and provides a second layer of profit sharing to owners, currently 5% of the operating income. Over time, as Paul and Ari divest their interest, this will grow, to as much as 50 or 60% being distributed to shareholders.
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Finally, there is the Perpetual Purpose Trust, the key ingredient. The PPT will ensure that the Zingerman’s mission and values will outlive the founders. The only beneficiary of this trust is purpose – no person, just purpose.
"The Trust has, in perpetuity, veto power over any sale of the intellectual property and significant use of the Zingerman’s brand. The job of the Trust board and its Protector Committee and Enforcement Committee are to maintain, defend, and protect the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses. Zingerman’s will remain Zingerman’s." - John Abrams
Article: Perpetual Purpose Trusts (Part II)
Related Article: Can Companies Force Themselves to be Good?
How We Work
"It might be better to jump to the hyperdemocracy in which the people that do the work plan it, execute it, and then rate their performance."
Stowe Boyd
On his LinkedIn page, Stowe Boyd, describes himself as focusing on "the ecology of work and the anthropology of the future." He is concerned that today’s oligarchic business lacks speed, agility, and resilience.
"The short version:
- The oldest form of organizational psychology is Competitive. That’s the most feudal internally. Power is used coercively by the ‘king’ executive and his elite, and others do what they are told or else. The structure is top-down command-and-control: a strict hierarchy.
- Today’s corporate model is the Collaborative: the executive elite drive strategy and operations, but engage in an on-going and extensive process of consensus building as a central part of the narrative of enactment. The structure is a flattened, matrixed hierarchy with a great deal of lateral interaction of the members, and increased level of involvement and power-sharing between formal and informal leaders.
- The emerging corporate model is Cooperative: the company is a non-hierarchical network, where a constitution defines the rights and responsibilities in a relational model, and influence is social. All members are ‘owners’, in some degree, of the work being done, and this confers authority differentially, and not directly because of legal ownership. Most critically, each individual and team operates on the premise that they ‘own’ their own work, and that others have only indirect influence on the processes and practices applied. The power structure is decentralized, and a laissez-faire model prevails, since people work in voluntary associations, largely autonomously.
"A useful characterization of the cooperative business is fast-and-loose: a cooperative business is more agile because the strongest ties of earlier organizational models — those between the supervised and the supervisor — are broken, and supervision is replaced by circumvision: the peer influence and review of work." - Stowe Boyd
Article: Today’s Business Organization is an Oligarchy, and That Needs to Change
Visual Identity
Milton Glaser married "the blaring-glaring palette of advertising with the simplifications and geometric ordering of the European avant-garde: a sophisticated look and a selling look became one."
"No art director’s work was more influential or instantly identifiable than that of Milton Glaser. The extent of that style, which adorned books and records and movies—and is revealed in a new anthology from Monacelli, courtesy of Steven Heller, Mirko Ilić, and Beth Kleber, titled simply “Milton Glaser: Pop”—is astounding. Glaser was famous as the co-founder and original design director of New York and as a creator of two images that helped define two decades. One was the 1966 poster of Bob Dylan that showed him with snakelike hair blossoming into a skein of rainbows. The other was the 1976 “I❤️NY” logo—which was commissioned by the State of New York but promptly adopted as a local symbol of the city, and, being keyed to the city’s unexpected revival, is the closest thing there has ever been to a logo that changed social history.
"But Glaser’s real achievement lies in what the book lays out: a breathtaking empire of imagery that encompassed both decades and more. Anyone who came of age in the sixties and seventies will be astonished to discover that so much of the look of the time was specifically the work of Milton Glaser and Push Pin Studios, which he founded with Seymour Chwast and Edward Sorel and then oversaw. (I recall standing in front of a paperback bookstore in Montreal with a few bucks in my pocket, agonizing over the choice between “Hard Times” and “Tom Jones”—both of whose enticing covers, it turns out, were made by Glaser.) The Signet Shakespeare series, posters for rock bands, album covers for newly fashionable recordings of Baroque music (Bach and Vivaldi), classic nineteenth-century novels, the outsides and insides of New York when it was an audacious newcomer—all of it was done in a manner that is at once immediately recognizable and resistant to easy analysis." - Adam Gopnik
Article: How the Graphic Designer Milton Glaser Made America Cool Again
It's more than a little ironic that this monograph of a genius is released in the same month as a misplaced effort to give one of his most iconic works, the “I❤️NY” logo, "a more modern twist". Writing in the New York Times, Dodai Stewart reported that "Just a few hours after the new 'We ❤️ NYC' logo was revealed on Monday, reaction on Twitter — and beyond — was not merely negative, but brutal." As writer and blogger Rafi Schwartz tweeted: “This sucks on every conceivable level and also on some levels that exist beyond human perception.”
Related Article: These New Yorkers Don’t ❤️ the ‘We ❤️NYC’ Logo
Media
How to tell the difference between a hamper, an earpiece and a dog's dick
Minnesota Newspaper Museum in the 4-H Building at the State Fair in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, United States Tony Webster, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
My first job in media was as an apprentice letterpress printer in a commercial job shop. Amongst my colleagues today I'm alone in knowing that the leading of a line (the space between lines) is called that because lead type was separated by strips of lead. Neil Benson is a sixty-something too. He remembers that an "older, stranger language – one that was unique to the analogue newspaper and with its roots in the hot metal era - has been rendered virtually obsolete by changes in technology, and is now all but lost. I find that sad."
"Why shed a tear over old terminology? Change happens, the world moves on. Well, because this peculiar language encapsulated 100 years or more of our industry. For generations of journalists, commercial staff, typesetters, compositors and press crews, this was our lingua franca."
To supplement his memory he posted on the Horny Handed Subs of Toil Facebook page, a kind of "online care home for sub-editors" of our vintage, to ask for help.
Article: The Lost Language of Newspapers
Advertising
The power of a first impression
Article: Surreal Cereal – Endorsements From Famous Names
One-liners
Article: Gen Zers are bookworms but say they're shunning e-books because of eye strain, digital detoxing, and their love for libraries.
Article: Hemp production is expanding in the construction market.
Article: What’s happening in your brain and body when you are having an aesthetic experience?
Article: 88% of Britons who took in Ukrainian refugees would do it again.
Playlist
 Video: Eva Cassidy - Autumn Leaves
I've been a fan of Eva Cassidy ever since I first heard her in 2008. When I did discover her, I shared a reaction with many other music fans: how had I not known of her before then? The answer is tragic. While very active starting in 1992, at the time of her death from melanoma at the age of 33 in 1996 she was virtually unknown outside her native Washington, D.C..
This song recorded live in DC is from her second album, Live at Blues Alley, which was released after her death. The whole concert performance is hauntingly beautiful.
Writing about her in 2009 Jazz critic Ted Gioia said, "you might be tempted to write off the 'Cassidy sensation' ... as a response to the sad story of the singer's abbreviated life rather than as a measure of her artistry. But don't be mistaken, Cassidy was a huge talent, whose obscurity during her lifetime was almost as much a tragedy as her early death."
By now her discography includes 14 albums, most of them released posthumously. This month composer and arranger, Christopher Willis, released a new album titled I Can Only Be Me. It features new orchestrations by the London Symphony Orchestra and debuted at number 9 on the UK Official Albums Chart. Willis used audio restoration technology developed by filmmaker Peter Jackson to strip Cassidy's voice from her original recordings, which he combined with new orchestrations.
Album: Live at Blues Alley, 1997
Album: I Can Only Be Me (Orchestral), 2023
Article: Strings Attached: A New Eva Cassidy Album Features an Orchestra
Wikipedia Article: Eva Cassidy
Mitch, the editor, in his a new role as Mitch the DJ
Autumn Leaves, a mix-tape of music inspired by Eva Cassidy
Eva Cassidy "could sing anything — folk, blues, pop, jazz, R&B, gospel — and make it sound like it was the only music that mattered" (The Washington Post). I love covers, so building on her beautiful spirit was really fun and satisfying. This is my latest post in a new weekly series of mix-tapes, Big Sounds from a Small Planet.
Mix-Tape: Autumn Leaves, Easy Now #4
Image of the Week
"These vintage photographs capture a timeless energy and diversity that is characteristic of the sleepless streets of New York City. The recently discovered antique portraits showcase the city in the midst of the 1950's, as seen through the Rolleiflex lens of the undiscovered photographer Frank Larson. While digging through his aunt's attic, where Larson stowed away his images in 1964, the photographer's grandson found this remarkable collection of street scenes that give a candid glimpse into the history of the big city." - Kristine Mitchell
Article: Vintage Photos of Everyday Life in 1950s New York Discovered in Attic 50 Years Later
What's Love & Work?
Love & Work is the weekly newsletter by me, Mitch Anthony. I help people use their brand - their purpose, values, and stories - as a pedagogy and toolbox for transformation.
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