Spirit Doll Speaks
Late August in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the monsoon rains held off until early evening so we could take in the wonders of Indian Market. In its 95th year and billed as the preeminent Native arts market in the world, it is nearly overwhelming. As the Southwest Association for Indian Arts says, "There is simply no other time and place in the Native arts world where the impact and influence of Native culture and identity is reinforced, reestablished and reinvented." I cannot judge meaning of the market in the wider world, but I know that every time we visit, the experience brings me circling back on my personal history with Native American culture, and with my pre-occupation with culture as force in our lives.
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Why We Write
In 1996 Bill Gates wrote an essay titled "Content is king." Fast forward 20+ years and content's expanding kingdom means more and more of us are called on to write. But why are we writing? What story are we trying to tell? Asked to address these questions by the marketing team a large engineering firm, I gathered my thoughts.
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Parsing Harvard
For a dozen years, my remarkable partners, Marjanne Pearson and Paul Nakazawa, and I taught a course on professional practice classes in the Executive Education Program at Harvard's Graduate School of Design. Exhilarating, educational (for the educators) and exhausting. Our first gig ran for nine years — 1996 to 2004; the second from 2011to 2013. Much changed for the professions over all those years. What has not changed is my own curious relationship with Harvard. Not so much the real place, rather the over-determined Harvard of my mind.
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Return on Investment: SMPS Member 477
Watching the crowd parade into the ballroom for the SMPS Build Business Gala last Thursday evening, reminded me of the line from Van Morrison's Wild Nights, "all the girls walk by dressed up for each other." Quite the catwalk. That hasn't changed much since the earliest grand galas (staged by the remarkable Jeanne Murphy, our first executive director.) Nor has the intention of using the event to honor the best of SMPS — our people and their work.
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