Observed

Creating humankind may be one of the Divine Spirit's greatest acts of faith. It's comparable (in a small, small way) to the hope you and I demonstrate when we risk rejection, uncertainty and everything else that comes with sales and business development.

Cathe Dykstra recently began an excellent essay about the organization she directs with an analogy.  She wrote in Louisville’s Courier-Journal that the things that make the rooftop garden at Family Scholar House grow and prosper can be likened to the things that the single, working, college-going participants at Family Scholar House need to grow and prosper.

I’ll extend Cathe’s wonderful analogy.  In addition to support and guidance and patience and so on, many things we do also take hope.

Or, perhaps, faith.  As in, leap of faith.  As in, be prepared, minimize your risk and then…jump.

I realized that what Cathe wrote about is also true of sales, fund raising and business development — and of many, many other things many of us do every day.  Such as having a child, matriculating to law school or making a cold sales call.

So, while I hope my readers get this far in this post (148 words), I know (from plenty of user-habit studies) that a lot of you won’t.

Nevertheless…

1. I write and post anyway, confident that if I don’t (or rarely) post anything, I predictably reduce my chances of Getting Found.
2. I make what I write as engaging as possible.  Such as leading with an interesting bit about Cathe’s rooftop garden and how it’s like the worker-scholars she plants and tends to.
3. I leverage the visual and ensure that I bake my main message into the caption under my post’s main image.

Get it?  I hope so.

The French seem to know that there's often more to something than meets the eye. When considering why empires go to war, for example, they might suggest cherchez la femme...or, look for the woman.

It’s important for me to remember that things are not always as they seem.  That it might be healthy to give people (including clients and prospects) the benefit of the doubt.  And that, in some cases, better management — not just better writing — might be an option.

Example:  I had a small cow the other day.  I went off after reading a story in my hometown paper, the once-mighty, Pulitzer Prize-winning Courier-Journal of Louisville, Ky.

I don’t need to go into the details.  Trust me.  It was really bad.  Over the 24 hours or so since it first ran, the editors have cleaned it up a lot.  Here’s the on-line version, for what it’s worth. (more…)

I don’t normally flame reporters…or ex-reporters.  For Mark Hebert, I’ll make an exception.

Mark’s the flak for the University of Louisville and a former local TV news reporter.  Here’s what  today’s Courier-Journal reported about Dana R. Kelly, 48, of Louisville, who showed up where Mark works yesterday.  Kelly had come to the office of a faculty member, pulled a pistol and said, “This is good-bye.”

The paper got the following comment from Mark in response:

U of L spokesman Mark Hebert said no one was hurt in the incident, and Kelly did not appear to have been a threat to students, faculty or staff. (more…)

“It took 70 years for the U.S. flag to accumulate 28 stars. John Calipari has done it in seven weeks at the University of Kentucky.”

–The (Louisville, Ky.) Courier-Journal, May 19, 2009