It’s always a welcome adventure to participate in Gennari-Aronson’s Authors and Innovators event. Just the venue alone was a great discovery – the Mosesian Center for the Arts in Watertown was a pleasant surprise. I love being greeted by great art on the walls!
As per Larry Gennari, the voracious reader who thinks up the festival each year, the theme was “The Persuasive Entrepreneur: leveraging the power of storytelling to explore your own journey, grow a brand, raise money, motivate a team, sell a business, and inspire change. Stories matter and the most successful leaders are the ones who know how to develop and share an effective narrative to inspire willing change in others.” This helped cast a wide net to encompass many interesting and timely reads that kicked off on Thursday evening. My blog, however, will cover Friday as I was in the audience live on that day.
Time, Talent, and Treasure: The opening conversation between authors Archie Jones and Jennifer Tosti-Khara focused shared many common findings from both personal experience and research. If only 1/3 of people are happy at work, what’s happening with the other 2/3? Many are disengaged or trying to follow a path of what they think they “should” be doing. The goal of this conversation is to understand and help close the gap of engagement at work – whether it means changing your line of work or finding a way to leverage superpowers in your current role. A lot here for leaders to absorb and take under advisement.
Changing the Story: The sole panelist here was Christopher Marquis, author of the Profiteers speaking directly to leaders about moving beyond shareholder primacy to finding a purpose in what they are leading. In a world where climate change is REAL, what is our level of accountability toward this and other externalities? He used many examples from companies that have built their brand based on their social responsibility – but then found out they weren’t entirely true to solving the problem. Patagonia was used as an example – identifying its externality as impact on agriculture and then creating its “provisions” division to give back in this arena. A second example is a Dutch chocolate company, that fought the child labor abuses by creating a healthy supply chain
Spin in Business, Politics, and Beyond: This one was a bit unsettling. One can only describe Phil Elwood as quite a character, a self-names PR Operative. Doug Banks of the Boston Business Journal appropriately conducted the interview to add the journalistic “spin” to the interrogation. Elwood kicked off by reminding us that Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, but his legacy will be the Nobel Prize for Peace. This is what he defines as spin. If you even wondered how the US lost out on hosting the World Cup to Qatar where many workers ultimately died of heatstroke – this book reveals the story. If you ever wondered about the impact of “sportswashing” and “greenwashing” – this is the playbook. Candidly, Elwood uses these stories of his colorful PR work to force each of us to answer the question – “should I do this?”
All the Feels: Throw way traditional brand marketing and research, Leslie Zane a leading behavioral research and advertising executive has explored the power of instinct and how to tap into it. She shared her guidelines for the five promises a brand needs to keep – Empower people to do things; know your people/audience in a non-creepy way; reach the audience, show me something that I can see (literally), delight me and make me better. She eschews all the “scores” out there for brands and suggests a brand must BE LARGE; more positive than negative; and distinctive in order to reach the instinctual level of the brain via brand connectomes. A lot has changed since the early days of consumer behavior and Leslie gives us serious food for thought.
Alongside Leslie, David Edelman introduced Personalized. David provided a detailed example of how he was persuaded through personalization. He and Leslie riffed on the subtleties of reaching the consumer in a world of constant messaging and believes that AI will create unlimited opportunity. An internet pioneer, he believes we need to look at AI’s disruption in the same way
Presidential Stories: Just in time for election season, this curious wealth manager, Megan Gormon, explores an uncanny topic – how former Presidents made and managed their personal finances. Professionally, she has studied the “psychology” of wealth accumulation, so it’s a fascinating way to complement her professional portfolio. As part of her talk, she discusses how slavery played into wealth accumulation – citing 12 presidents who were slave owners. Fascinating details emerge and pique one’s interest. One in particular was how Gerry Ford used the Franklin Mint to create presidential medals – something we now take for granted. Her hope is that by humanizing presidents we will come to know them and relate better to who they are as people. This book and talk are both timely and relevant and a perfect match to the storytelling theme. We can all stand to learn more of our country’s history and what a fun way to do it. Megan was delightful.
On the whole, this event provided a congenial and comfortable way to meet authors, learn from them, and enjoy the exhibit of innovators who are an integral part of its format. What’s truly outstanding is how the curator, Larry Gennari is able to distill the vast array of current business topics into those that are truly top of mind regardless of industry or size of company. Many thanks to Larry and his team for their hard work.
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