In my twenties I started and ran a natural foods restaurant and a natural-fiber dry goods store, ran the letterpress department for a printer, served as the delivery guy and sales manager for a whole-grain bakery, started and ran an appropriate-technology magazine and took over the in-house agency at a tofu company.

In 1982 I hung out my shingle as an advertising and design consultant. My first clients were natural foods companies.

Since then I’ve facilitated organizational, corporate and product branding programs for clients that include Avid Technology, FX Networks, Church World Service, Reebok, Northeast Sustainable Energy Association, Franklin Pierce University, Ropes & Gray LLP, Burton Snowboards, Massachusetts Chiropractic Society, ESPN, MTV, Rollerblade, Lake Compounce, Lightlife Foods, Bloomberg Television and VH1.

My sweet spot is positioning, brand strategy, communications strategy and ideation/concept development. I’m a skilled facilitator and presenter with a track record of finding synergy, traction and opportunity where fear, overthinking and bureaucracy slow others to a crawl.

My cohorts and I have won our share of international design and advertising awards, and our work has been recognized by Communication Arts, Graphis, Print, How, IDN (Hong Kong) and BusinessWeek.

Cool. But how does an organization come by this kind of responsiveness? And how does it find direction amid constant change?

Well, it turns out that the processes of design and branding meet these challenges rather elegantly. They are built around facilitation rather than authorship, around building agreement rather than top-down decision making. And when team members are clear, via branding, about who they are and what they stand for, they have a “true north” to navigate towards in an ever-changing, interconnected world.

Taking this understanding a step deeper, it’s also true that mission and messaging are inextricable—two strands of the same thread. They are distinct, yet there is a dot of each in the other, and they can’t be separated. I think of them as yin and yang.

One manifestation of this is that a message that is clearly understood by everyone in the company has the catalytic effect of aligning everyone’s intentions and energies toward the same goal. The organization changes. It’s really simple cultural physics.

Branding is a conversation. So too is organizational responsiveness. For true synergy, make them a part of the same, integrated system.

Arnold Communications
Avid Technology
Basketball Hall of Fame
Burton Snowboards
Bloomberg Television
Center for Human Development
Church World Service
Coldham & Hartman Architects
Design Continuum
ESPN
Ferrari Clothing
Franklin Pierce University
FX Networks
Hanna Andersson
HBO
The History Channel
Lightlife Foods
Lotus Development
MTV
Nautica Kids
Northeast Sustainable Energy Association
Nortel
Oxfam America
Polaroid
Reebok
Rollerblade
Ropes & Gray LLP
Softimage (Microsoft)
Stoneleigh-Burnham School
Sugarman and Sugarman, PC
United Methodist Church
VH1

2.  The best way to discover a company’s best opportunities is to listen—to each other, to stakeholders, to the marketplace and to customers. Not coincidentally, listening is the beginning of good design.

3.  Every element of the design and delivery of a service or product is part of an integrated whole. It’s a system whose parts want to work together.

4.  Mission and messaging are inextricable—two strands of the same thread. When you work on a company’s message, you are working on its mission.

5.  A message that is clearly understood by everyone in the company has the catalytic effect of aligning everyone’s intentions and energies toward the same goal. It’s simple cultural physics.

6.  Most companies separate strategy and storytelling functions. This is a huge waste. The branding and design process is a uniquely powerful strategic development tool.

7.  People are social first. What motivates us best is an understanding of our collective goals, our role in achieving those goals and how we’re doing.

8.  Conventional change management is obsolete. What works is open, honest and transparent communication between team players, collaborators and customers.

9.  You can’t plan for success, nor can you forecast it. Change is emergent and can be discovered only by experimenting—in small, discrete ways—with ways to better serve your customer.

10.  Change is quantum. Put enough energy in the same direction, and things change very suddenly, often without rhyme or reason. There is no measurable path from “before” to “after”; things are just different.

Positioning + Messaging
Most of my engagements start with the development of a core brand study. It is a highly collaborative program of discovery that builds on workshops, structured visioning sessions and group and one-on-one interviews.

I use the process to survey an organization’s history, its audience(s) and potential audience(s), its service(s), the features and benefits that these services provide and the competitive environment(s) in which the organization operates.

Most important, the work provides many stakeholders with the opportunity to share and align vision, goals and “what-if” scenarios.

Typically this direct survey work is supplemented by secondary research on the trends affecting the organization and on its industry or sector.

The desired outcome of the brand study is a shared and consensual understanding of the organization among the individuals who have an interest in its success.

The brand study articulates recommended positioning and messaging strategy in the context of the audiences served and the trends that might influence perception.

Creative Direction
Typically the brand study reveals specific communications and/or organizational growth opportunities. Clients very often then hire me to either direct my own creative team to develop specific communications media or to act as creative director to their in-house or other subcontracted creative team. Sometimes we create a hybrid of their and my own creative resources.

Strategy Development
One of the biggest benefits that accrues to the organization that invests in clear visioning and mission alignment (read: clear communications) is a refined sense of purpose, focus and intention. This is a relatively new area for me, but increasingly clients ask me to provide ongoing consulting on the development and execution of integrated strategic programs. I help them use the tools of branding—visioning, building internal consensus, testing ideas, coalescing around a common story—to make their organization more effective.

I provide these services on a contract or per diem basis.