Archive for category leadership
Breadwinners
Posted by Peter in Uncategorized, creative process, leadership, storytelling on May 5, 2012
In-Flight Theater presents
Breadwinners Written and Directed by Peter Davis
Where:
In-Flight Theater, Load of Fun Building, 120 West North Avenue, 2nd floor. Parking is everywhere!
When:
2 shows each day Saturday (May 26 and June 2) 3PM and 7PM
2 shows each day Sunday (May 27 and June 3) 3PM and 7PM
$10 tickets
Reservations:
https://davisbrand.tixato.com/buy/
Synopsis:
Alice, a financially strapped housewife and recent widow, moves in with her daughter Molly, who is a dominatrix. Through the course of the play, Alice finds her backbone.
Breadwinners uses Alice’s journey to explore the relationship between power, control and love. The two women work it out.
Cast:
Alice – Barbara Geary
Molly – Jessica Ruth Baker
Man – Chris Krysztofiak
Change or be changed.
Posted by Peter in Uncategorized, branding, creative process, leadership, storytelling on March 7, 2012
Since my last post I’ve separated from my wife, moved to a new part of town, am having a ten-minute play produced by Fells Point Corner Theater, and I’m writing and directing a new original one-act play called BREADWinners.
I’ve completed three full branding engagements: a leading edge program within the school of Social Work at the University of Maryland, a nationally recognized (60Minutes) public school debate league, and a beloved Baltimore cultural center. I also completed a focus group with the board of a regarded classical orchestra.
I’ve been writing a theater column for What Weekly, an online magazine documenting Baltimore’s culture and art renaissance.
What Weekly interview with Kwame Kei-Armah
The concept for the column is conversations with talented, smart, passionate people who tell stories mostly in a theater or in a theater style. Actually, the conversations are more like interviews. And the interviews are more about branding, leadership and vision, than they are about theater. Which leads to some interesting theater insights.
The branding engagements overlapped. My mind was continuously occupied with the branding process, which leans heavily on synthesis as its driver. I invited a talented theater performer and director Barbara Geary to work with me as an associate. She attended the orchestra focus group and helped me document, highlight and synthesize what was said. This was new and it worked.
In one of the engagements I re-learned the wisdom of silence and the value of patience. A client asked a difficult question I had no answer to. I asked for a moment to think about it. We were silent for almost 2 full minutes. 30-seconds into the silence I was beginning to panic. I was desperate for something smart to say. I kept breathing and hoping something would bubble up. I tried to remember the exact question. I couldn’t. Then I concentrated on the client as a person, and as a leader. Finally, I changed the subject. I gave her a compliment about the way she navigated politics and bureaucracy. She was grateful, and restated what I had said in a much different context. Bang! In a shot the conversation was now alive with new insight and energy, and we got around to a place where she could finally see that her power comes from her gift for strategy, not her heartfelt earnestness.
Meanwhile, the separation has been difficult. You divvy up memories, stuff, money and friends. And to make the most of it, I enlist the Universe for help. I make reasonable requests every now and then, and sometimes when strange and contrasting things work well together or something logistically or sequentially too-convenient happens. I think the Universe really is listening.
Manifesto
Posted by Peter in branding, leadership, positioning on June 2, 2011
Everyone should have one. Explain your concept and how it works. Share your worldview, and what you believe in.
Manifesto
Care and Dare
* * *
Art
Paradox
Metaphor
*
Concept
Rehearsal
Performance
*
Listening
Learning
Stretching
*
Authenticity
Passion
Humor
* * *
Look for beauty…create it if you can
The big hard questions are found in art and the answers to most questions are found in nature.
Create contrast or the clash of opposites–go to extremes and see what happens
* * *
Don’t be too literal or logical…the facts and truth of it aren’t necessarily the same
Keep the facts change the context
Invite objective and creative outsiders look to at it and give you fresh insight
* * *
A Leader uses Story as Strategy and uses Design to tell the Story
Don’t be too attached to “strategy”
Strategy and logic are over-rated
There is no one right way…keep finding what works
Look for patterns
Find the fringe
Find a place where failure is encouraged. In theater we call it rehearsal
Exploit the forces of change
* * *
Give big and take small
Buy low and sell high
Baltimore Branding Workshop
Posted by Peter in branding, leadership, positioning, storytelling on May 16, 2011
Back by Popular Demand — The Creative Alliance presents
The Power of Stories: A Crash Course in Branding
Baltimore, MD—June 4, 2011—Peter Davis, brand strategy consultant with Better Brand Story, returns to Creative Alliance to deliver a third crash course in branding workshop.
WHEN:
Saturday, June 4
1pm – 4pm
WHERE:
Creative Alliance At The Patterson (3134 Eastern Avenue)
FEE:
Advanced registration $100, $85 members. Walk-in $115, $100 members.
TO REGISTER:
Call 410-276-1651 or visit
http://www.creativealliance.org/events/eventItem2571.html
The class is hands-on and limited to ten people who each get personalized attention elevating their personal or organizational story.
Testimonials from the last branding workshop include: “transformative,” “I’ve been thinking about it ever since,” and “in the 6 years I’ve been attending workshops at CA this was by far the BEST experience out of all.”
This workshop is designed to help you understand what branding is and what a high-performing brand can do for you. In this workshop you will:
- Identify what is interesting about your story to the people you do business with
- Learn how to tell a more compelling story about what you do and why it matters
Leave with a killer workbook and a head buzzing with actionable ideas.
# # #
The Power of Stories
Posted by Peter in branding, leadership, storytelling on March 3, 2011
Your company story changes many times before it reaches your employees, customers, investors, and stakeholders. Your message gets weaker as it moves farther and farther from the source.
As a leader, you are your company’s principal storyteller. Employees, customers and investors all look to you to set the theme and develop the plot. Tell a great story and they all want to be characters in it. Every business transaction becomes charged with meaning and drama. In a good story, threats and setbacks are sources of narrative suspense, motivating the protagonists to fresh feats of ingenuity and daring. If you want your employees to act like heroes, you’ve got to provide them with an epic.
Your story brings people together. Crafting a compelling story and nurturing it over time is your most important job.
So what story are you currently telling? Is it keeping your audiences on the edges of their seats? Is it inspiring your employees, enticing your customers, holding your shareholders in thrall?
Anchoring a brand in story isn’t buying into the latest management fad. The client isn’t buying a proprietary process and at the mercy of agency “experts” to translate the process. By emphasizing story (mythology and archetypes) you’re harnessing a living force, primal impulses as old as humankind. It is both old school and cutting edge. Bold yet familiar. It is profitable because the modern world is based on logic and practically fetishizes efficiency and homogeny. Now more than ever people crave the experience of being truly alive and relentlessly search for meaning, even if they have to ritualize it in the form of commerce.
I can help you to craft a better brand story, elevate your brand promise, and signify the meaning of your story across a variety of integrated new world media.
New York Times: In Film And Life, Story Is King
Posted by Peter in branding, creative process, leadership, storytelling on February 27, 2011
What could be better than a successful business person making the Power of Stories case? From an article in the New York Times Business Section. Writer Michael Cieply talks with Peter Gruber (former Chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment).
Excerpt:
But Mr. Guber, 68, who throws off ideas the way a storm hurls bolts at the prairie, has finally found a pattern in what can seem to be the brilliant disorder of his own thinking. Along the way, he’s also spotted a few things that the movie industry can teach the rest of us.
“I decoded it, I didn’t invent it,” Mr. Guber said — well, shouted, actually — as the energy of telling lifted him several inches above his seat in the second hour of a conversation about his voyage of discovery.
“It’s like a Seurat painting. Lots of dots,” said Mr. Guber, who talked of his wildly eclectic life in the sports and movie industries, as well as a decades-long commitment to teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the dawning realization that something more than nervous energy held it all together.
“But the logic of it is clear to me now,” he said. That logic has to do with story, and how we are wired to organize our lives around it.
His coming to grips with narrative as a force in his own and others’ lives is the stuff of “Tell to Win: Connect, Persuade and Triumph With the Hidden Power of Story,” to be published on Tuesday by Crown Business.
Theater as a Business Metaphor
Posted by Peter in Uncategorized, creative process, leadership on April 13, 2010
“The Humble Hound” is a great editorial in the New York Times (April 8, 2010) by David Brooks on leadership styles. It ends using theater as a metaphor.
The metaphor relates to the people who work behind the scenes, whose satisfaction comes, not from the applause, but from working with others towards a shared higher purpose.
Ideas on when and how to fail
Posted by Peter in Uncategorized, branding, creative process, leadership, risk, storytelling on April 8, 2010
The two most artistically interesting people I know are Liz Lerman and Adrian Danzig. Liz is the founding Artistic Director of Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, and Adrian the Artistic Director of 500 Clown. What do a dancer and a clown have in common? They ask the most daring artistic questions and risk their take on the answer in performance. For each, differently, failure is part of the bargain between them, their ensembles and their audiences.
Whatever question I ask Liz, she will answer with a different proposal and set of questions. This is how she creates art as well. Built into her creation process is the willingness to destroy her own premise, see what holds up, rebuild from there. Knowing what to jettison and what to keep is what distinguishes great artists. She has a book, Hiking the Horizontal: Field Notes From a Choreographer to be published by Wesleyan University press coming in spring 2011. I look forward to reading it.
Liz and I had a conversation about the difference between practice and rehearsal. Practice is skill-based. You practice the individual components of your art: plies at the barre, scales on a guitar, anatomy sketches in charcoal. The goal is perfection. Rehearsal is where you learn what doesn’t work. Rehearsal is where you try things. Where you go for the big “what if.” The goal of rehearsal is failure. If not in rehearsal where? In performance in front of an audience?
Liz and I wondered, if business is theater, then when do business performers (workers) get to rehearse.? If business is theater and process serves as the script, when and where do business performers learn what doesn’t work? When do workers get to build destruction into the business premise and come up with a better one? Unfortunately for customers, workers fail in performance when the stakes are highest. It’s hard to overcome a bad script and a lack of direction. Instead, managers often double down on the ideas and processes that got them in trouble in the first place. Management rarely questions their premise. Artists always do.
Branding Lesson–Build destruction into your own argument, see what holds up, and build around that. Repeat.
500 Clown (there are three of them), also asks big artistic questions. What makes them so unique is that their approach is to stage failure. Yes they use rehearsal to try things and fail, and they aim to demonstrate in performance that failure is part of the human experience, and survivable. A clown by nature subverts authority. To 500 Clown traditional theater itself represents authority. The script is authority. The fourth wall is authority. All must be subverted by clown-play. They’re clowns and clowns screw things up, of course, because they’re human. A clown by nature is also resilient!
The 500 Clown belief system goes like this…
500 Clown believes that life is worth the risk.
500 Clown wants to respect the actor as the primary artist, and not just serve as a mouthpiece for the writer and director.
In live performance it’s the actor, not the writer or director, who charges the moment. The objective is to feel something and do something authentic. 500 Clown wants to show that having a profound experience in public is survivable.
If we succeed, we show the respect for the audience and allow them to have their own profound experience.
* * * That is what good branding is and does! Oh, that business would regard their workers as the “primary artist” versus the owner (author) or manager (director) * * *
500 Clown recently performed 500 Clown Macbeth in Baltimore at the Creative Alliance. Their interpretation is based on a very simple premise: clown want crown. It takes them up to two years to develop a piece. It takes so long because they keep asking big questions and starting over. Their director doesn’t provide answers. She helps them decide what to jettison and what to keep. There is no single right answer. There is what works and what works more provocatively.
500 Clown deconstructs classic text, aims high and leaves no wiggle room artistically. They keep their edge by making the audience central to the storytelling. The risk of failure is high.
No one creates instant community better than 500 Clown. No one takes risks, and profits from doing so, more than 500 Clown.
Branding Lesson–Aim high and leave no wiggle room. Put your audience inside the story.
Business as Theater
Posted by Peter in Uncategorized, branding, creative process, leadership, storytelling on December 8, 2009
One of my favorite theater companies, Single Carrot Theatre, has been selected as a “Startup to Watch” by the Baltimore Business Journal. I’m delighted but not surprised. Every play that Single Carrot produces is a start-up venture. For each production they assemble a unique team of leaders, designers, techies, and performers around a core concept–the script. Each production must be branded and marketed. The audience must be delighted with their experience in order for Single Carrot to earn the right to produce again.
In business, as in theater, you are judged by your performance. In both your customer (audience) is central to the story. Theater best-practices can improve leadership and brand performance. Theater best-practices can help organizations connect with their audiences down deep were they make important decisions…emotionally.
* * *
- The business leader is the author or playwright
- Business processes serve as the script
- A manager is the director who reinforces only the behaviors that serve the story
- Employees are the actors who perform the story
- Their work is theater
- Their performance is the business offering
- The customer is the audience
* * *
Corporate Culture = Compliance
The major difference between business and theater is that in business the goal is profit (or shareholder value). In theater, profit is a by-product. The purpose and reward of theater is transformation or moments of unity in which the audience and the actors are one.
Theater Culture = Commitment
* * *
In the Baltimore theater scene Single Carrot is unique. Single Carrot is an ensemble theater. An ensemble is a group of complementary parts that contribute to a single effect. Sustaining the ensemble in not just their cause; it is their strength and point of differentiation.
Branding Lesson–Be different
When I asked them what their vision is they said they wanted to create a first class theater company of the future (on a shoe string!) They want to become significant by putting Baltimore on the American theater map.
Branding Lesson–Aim high and leave no wiggle room
The ensemble’s purpose is to stay together. They do so (counter-intuitively) by creating opportunities for each member to flourish on their own terms as artists and businessmen and women. Each ensemble member believes that they will realize his or her personal vision for success faster as an ensemble member loyal the the Single Carrot cause, than they would as freelance actors, designers, and directors who migrate from theater to theater in search of opportunity.
Branding lesson–Embrace paradox or…sometimes the shortest distance between where you are and where you want to be is the path of most resistance
What about leadership or the director’s role? The director must believe passionately in what the story represents. The director helps the creative team and actors to signify the meaning of the story to the audience. The director does this by establishing the world of the play. The world of the play is composed of systems. For example, a system can be the play’s genre, period in history, or language. Making sure the ensemble understands and adheres to the world of the play is the director’s responsibility. The best way to help everyone stay true to the world of the play is to establish a metaphor for the production. The metaphor limits the way everyone thinks about the play. The director never imposes his or her “concept” on others. Theater is a culture of commitment not compliance. A good director doesn’t say much, encourages as much as possible, and says yes to every creative idea. A good director relies on the actor’s intuition and helps the actor channel their intuition through the systems that make up the world of the play.
In theater nothing is arbitrary. Every sight, sound, and movement exists in complete obedience to the world of the play. The director sets up systematic and unified limitations and then gets out of the way.
Branding Lessons–Limitation frees creativity
* * *
Contact me when you are ready to:
- Create like a writer — America needs innovators
- Lead like a director — Your greatest assets are your story and your people
- Perform like an actor — Experience flow and sustain peak performance
The History of Branding
Posted by Peter in Uncategorized, branding, creative process, leadership, risk, storytelling on September 23, 2009
The history of branding goes something like this:
This is mine:
This is better:
I am like this:
When your audience intuitively understands what “like this” means, then you have a winning, sustainable brand.
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