Mr. Lincoln's Hat
As I have reviewed essays and speeches I've written and given in the past, this one has emerged as one of my favorites. It is simply about how we create meaning and how we ascribe value as a result.
I hope you enjoy it.
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THOUGH IT MAY BE UNKNOWN TO MANY OF YOU, I spent nearly 20 years as a performing artist. It is easy for me to recall the fluttering heart, the sense of awe and wonder I experienced when I walked out onto the stage of an historic theater. It is ironic, I think, that the most beautiful place from which to see the grandeur and sweetness of a theater is from the stage; it’s a pity, really, that audiences rarely experience that. But you, in your work, not only preserve buildings but the awe and exhilaration they inspire. As an artist, I KNOW that your audiences get better performances than those seated in more spartanly, functional spaces. They’re better because the ghosts of artists like Heifetz, Casals, Bernhardt, and Caruso whisper their genius as artists conjure on those very selfsame boards they tread. So on behalf of artists everywhere who benefit from your worry, wisdom, sweat, and no little private swearing—I thank you.
When I was asked to think about the intersections between technology and the historic theater preservation movement, I could not fail but wonder if there is a tension between the two and what that tension means?
If there is a value that overwhelms the culture of the tech sector, it is speed. Competing effectively requires an obsession with developing products and getting them to market before the competition. Very little that is developed today will not be obsolete in several years. By comparison, those of us assembled here today do not contemplate obsolescence in developing our strategies and futures. We may worry about becoming obsolete but our focus is probably upon more vigorously responding to overcoming obsolescence than on fostering it through innovation, as does the technology sector. We share a core value that some things—specifically historic theaters—are worth preserving. Though we acknowledge and understand that the new and state-of-the-art is worthy and exciting, we do not believe that the introduction of the new should displace or destroy that which has served our communities well in the past. Our historic theaters mean something to us and we’re as likely committed to the meaning as we are to our buildings. I reflected long and hard on the questions, "What does this fundamental value sheer between obsolescence and preservation portend?" Will an economy and a culture engorged by the new and the improved value preserving artifacts of the past? How can we successfully integrate these oppositional values in a way that both are strengthened?"
Over the next several days at this conference, as in conferences all over the world, technology and its dizzying, giddifying promises, effects and potential will be discussed and explored. Here, I hope that we will try to plumb the depths of these questions. In learning community language, there is a wonderful term: sensemaking. It is a process of making sense of things—figuring out what things mean. I think we all have experienced that technology is pretty heady stuff; intoxicating. I occasionally feel like I imagine Ice Age man might have felt if he were to encounter my dad grilling steaks on his backyard barbecue grill—will appetite or curiosity prevail? I suppose it depends on garlic.
Talking about meaning always takes me back to my junior high days when I would skip school and ride around with my Uncle T. in his oil field mud truck, regaling me with war stories and tales of his riding the rails as a hobo during the depression. He’d fix those pale green eyes on me, grin crooked-like, and say in his Texas drawl, "Now I can ‘xplain it to ya, but I cain’t understand it fer ya." Uncle T. was trying to tell me that I’d have to find the meaning in my own heart, but for me his stories were the fire next to which I warmed my hands and heart. He’d take me to meaning. Stories always take us to meaning.
Technology has always had its mavens and its salesmen; it has always had a hungry public ripe for consumption, but I daresay that I doubt it has ever had such a powerful engine thrusting it upon center stages everywhere. When I try to imagine what the inventor of the shovel—an early but useful technological implement—might have said to skeptical neighbors, it is easy for me to imagine him hawking its usefulness as a paddle or club in addition to its digging utility. It would seem that there is nothing that technology cannot or will not do for us if we are to believe all that we are promised. What are we to believe? Is technology a means to an end or an end in itself? What does our current cultural obsession with technology mean? Can technology as easily deliver meaning as it delivers efficiency, information, or records? No, I don’t think so.
This is why I have chosen to talk about meaning and how pivotal meaning is in the development of strategy. I urge you to remember—because the ends should never be eclipsed by means—that technology and its trappings—while glorious and helpful—are a means, not an end. How human beings feel; what events mean; how revelation and insight confer their magical benefits upon human beings—these are the ends to which we ought to devote ourselves and the ends to which I think we have devoted ourselves traditionally.
I vividly recall entering the office of the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Lawrence Smalls, noticing a glass case standing in the corner. In that case, I saw a faded graying-to-black top hat. An old top hat is not necessarily a precious object; the materials of its makings are commonplace things: felt, silk, wool, leather, and wire, all ordinary staples of the milliner’s craft. These materials were gathered and conformed into a sartorial feature we now undoubtedly would find archaic or even pretentious on today’s boulevards and avenues. Top hats, like cravats with stick pins, frock coats, or spats—all former hallmarks of a gentleman’s dress—have suffered fashion’s mercurial judgments; those that survive have been banished to the costumer’s wardrobe or to the occasional attic trunk. But not this top hat. There is another element—invisible yet precious, worldly yet sacred—that elevates this object to an ennobling status, the salty residue of the sweat of the man whose head this hat crowned: Abraham Lincoln.
Mr Lincoln’s hat. Personally, it is difficult for me to imagine an object more emblematic of the Smithsonian Institution’s mission than this one. I imagine, though I do not know, that this hat serves as a powerful reminding—even a prompting—force to Secretary Smalls, whose position makes him the custodian of those objects, which assembled, represent our heritage, our culture, our civilization. Simply put, Mr. Lincoln’s hat embodies those principles and virtues upon which we as a people, at our best, aspire to uphold and to preserve. We understand why Mr. Lincoln’s hat is important.
Yet, what makes this object precious is purely intangible—its preciousness resides in the meaning we ascribe to it, and that meaning is based on what we know and what we revere. Its preciousness springs from our human nature. One will not find courage in the warp and woof of the silk. One cannot finger nubs of compassion in the felt. You will not discover liberty, equality, or opportunity alloyed with the iron wire that gives this hat its shape. If charity or dignity ever made its leather hatband more pliable, it can only be conjured by someone who feels these things called forth from their own heart, prodded by the memory of a great and humble man who feared praise more than contempt.
As you reflect on what I’m saying, I want to reassert and emphasize my point that meaning is a pure intangible. How we might feel looking at Mr. Lincoln’s hat is no less real than the hat itself but the reality of our feelings is virtual. However, I strongly believe—and I think that events of history would support my premise—that the virtual character of this reality does not diminish its potency. If the top hat in the case were the former property of a merchant from St. Joseph, Missouri who supplied wagon trains embarking west on the Oregon Trail, chances are that it would already be consigned to oblivion, and not rest in a climate-controlled case in the office of the nation’s chief steward of our heritage. No. In this case, the virtual is what’s precious and the real is just a reliquary.
For some reason there is a failure to appreciate that human beings have trafficked in the virtual since the dawn of time? God, ghosts, memory, myth, history, hallucination, imagination and vision are the promontories of the virtual landscape. These are the domains of the artist, the priest, the shaman, and the conjurer. They are also the domain of the entrepreneur, the inventor, the explorer, AND the arts administrator.
When a priest invokes God's blessings upon a child being baptized, the transformation of the water in the font is a product of faith not substance. When Edison sought investors for his new electric company to wire an entire city, he could not prove it could be done; it happened because belief and conviction trumped hard evidence. When Itzhak Perlman coaxes a Bach chaconne from his violin, it emerges with the sweep of his bow and disappears into ephemera with the drop of his arm; we know the music was there but we cannot touch it. We have always lived with the virtual; we just haven't talked about it as such. It is ironic that so much that we treasure cannot not be touched: love, inspiration, desire, hope, joy, and faith.
If technology has raised our consciousness about anything, it has certainly effectively delivered the message that the "virtual" encroaches upon the "real." And the virtual is usually ensconced within information. The information explosion is a byproduct of the emergence of a tech infrastructure which is eclipsing all other economic sectors. Who among us has not encountered the notion of virtual reality? A quality of "fuzziness" comes with the virtual—intangibles elude us. Have you noticed that many distinctions that used to be clear are getting fuzzier and fuzzier? Boundaries are blurring everywhere. Where does government end and the non profit sector begin? What’s news and what’s entertainment? What’s a peccadillo and what’s a crime? Where do good intentions end and manipulation begin? Collaboration and co-dependence are oberservationally identical yet I know that one’s good and the other’s bad and I’m struggling to tell the difference.
Even our language reflects this sea change. Community used to be all about town and neighborhood, place of worship and place of work. Virtual communities have transformed the tangible features of the landscape from bell towers and belfries to fiber optic cable and microwave dishes. We’re still occasionally enclosed in the envelope of the town hall but our enclosures are more than batten and board, clapboard and plaster. They’re threaded conversations, chat rooms, video-conferencing suites, and that reliable high-tech engine of high touch—the telephone.
Well, the world may feel more virtual every day but our challenges still feel real. I suppose that for those of us who long for the real, we can take some comfort from this. The long and the short of it is that managing the real is no longer enough. We must be able to handle the virtual, the intangible, the ephemeral. What’s more, we must be skilled in conjuring these things. It’s not just some New Age figure of speech to recognize that organizations are increasingly searching for shamans. In this "Matrixesque" world where the real and unreal exist in dynamic tension, where the tangible and intangible compete for top-of-mind, leaders MUST be conjurers, especially in the non-profit sector.
Throughout history people have searched for meaning. Along the way we have created monuments to it—lighthouses that warn us away from expediency’s shoals. We have martyred those who terrified us with the penetrating clarity of their visions, later canonized them, and gathered their bones and called them holy. All these things we have done out of meaning, not out of profit. While commerce moves minds, meaning moves hearts, and as history has so often shown us, the mind often makes a practice of justifying what the heart has earlier decided. Our job as leaders, as conjurers, is to move people and we will move them through meaning; story is a powerful way to meaning.
I’d like to take a few minutes now to talk about meaning and strategy can intersect to create powerful results for you and for your organization. I want to share some ideas about what you can DO to take meaning, myth and story and bolster your organization and community’s vitality.
For the last two days I have been delivering a seminar on the art and practice of branding. Branding is one of those marketing practices that is very "hot" right now. It is difficult to pick up a business magazine or attend a conference where someone is not talking about the subject—generally in terms of describing it as the latest/newest "answer" to whatever ails an organization.
I will join in this chorus, at least in part, because I believe that the context within which we find ourselves makes the application of this strategy especially effective. Essentially, most people don’t understand what branding is and because they don’t understand it, they fail to bring its full force and power to bear upon their challenges. Branding is creating an intentional identity. It is about creating and ascribing personality traits, values, expectations, myth, metaphor, and meaning to a product or service. This is because products and services are no longer perceived as utilitarian solutions to needs. Consumption has become a means of self-actualization for many people; products have become our companions in life. Thus, what a product, service, or affiliation says about the consumer—how it reflects upon, augments, or colors their own identity—has become a crucial strategic consideration in winning within the consumer dynamic. In other words, many people believe that what they buy means something. This meaning is not a feature or benefit of the product; it is something intangible which the consumer perceives and infers, and which—by consuming—augments or enriches their own identity. Similarly, what people do NOT buy has meaning as well. For example one might choose to spend one’s money on collecting art and driving a ten-year old Honda rather than sport a sleek new BMW. Both actions are value sets being played out and the specific choice reveals volumes.
Within the context I will describe—an environment marked by information overload, a time famine, and a proliferation of new media, products and services—the quick, effective, and focused communication of identity—of brand—becomes key. If an intuitive "fit" isn’t sensed by the consumer for the product, if one can’t establish top-of-mind position among competitors, one languishes in obscurity. To create a distillation this powerful—this holographic—requires focus, discipline, mastery of tonal communication, but most of all a profound understanding and ability to communicate what we stand for. What we aim for—what we try to do is to create an identity as rich with meaning, as emblematic, as Mr. Lincoln’s hat. Our organizations stand for something; Mr. Lincoln’s hat stands for something; both must be made equally vivid. Those values that form the core of your work—what we stand for—are invisible and mute to those who do not see and understand them. In strategic terms, if a tree falls in a forest and nobody is there to hear, it does not make a sound.
Scott Bedbury—a man who many believe (myself included) is the nation’s leading branding strategist—first created the Nike Brand and then went on to Starbucks. Bedbury reveals in his thinking that myth and story are two of the most powerful tools we have in building identity. " A brand is a metaphorical story that's evolving all the time," says Bedbury. "This connects with something very deep - a fundamental human appreciation of mythology. People have always needed to make sense of things at a higher level. We all want to think that we're a piece of something bigger than ourselves. Companies that manifest that sensibility in their employees and consumers invoke something very powerful. Stories create connections for people. Stories create the emotional context people need to locate themselves in a larger experience."
Why is this branding approach necessary? What has changed that requires a rethinking or a re-engineering of communications about image and identity? Thirty years ago in his book, Future Shock Alvin Toffler described a world where people were to be overwhelmed by information. He spoke of a "frontal collision" between information, knowledge, and meaning. In simple terms, he described a world of too many choices, of too much information, of "decisional over-stimulation." He described a world that most of us in the room today recognize as the world we live in. It may have been his Future Shock, but it’s our present shock.
We are so bombarded by messages that many of us experience information as "background noise." A notable research institute estimates that the average individual now encounters between 4,000 and 6,000 messages, signs, and signals per day. We can expect that the signal clutter will only increase. Bandwidth growth across all communications technologies will triple communications capacity every year for the next 25 years. The most conservative estimates show business information doubling every three years. At the current rate we will be handling twice as much information every 1,100 days.
The cruel irony of what Toffler called "cognitive overload" is that we still have to make intelligent choices. This new economy—what many call "the information economy"—has changed the nature of work from making things to making choices. As Bill Jensen writes in his extraordinary book "Simplicity," the new economy has also changed the impact of each choice. According to Jensen, it’s easier to make big mistakes than it used to be.
The impact of choices we make, and of solutions we choose is ironic. Speaking of technology, many of us look to technology to solve our current problems, forgetting, of course, that previous technological solutions created the problems we’re now trying to solve. We looked to science for cleaner energy; science gave us nuclear power, but science can’t tell us what to do with old nuclear fuel. Come to think of it, science can’t tell us what to do with old tires! We imagine that technology has no limits while we sometimes forget that the limits about which we ought to most concern ourselves are our own.
This is the environment in which we tell our stories, spin our tales, make our cases for funding and support. If we expect to fulfill the various missions to which we have committed ourselves, we must cut through the clutter; our signal to noise ratio must be very high. Our messages have to be clear, focused, believable and memorable.
These communications imperatives make the case for branding strategies. Practicing branding is like practicing communications judo; it uses the muscles, balance, force and fleetness of the market to its own ends. Branding is powerful primarily because it focuses a very wide spectrum of messages and images to laser-like bandwidth. As Al and Laura Ries wrote in "The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding," "If marketing is to fulfill its promise as the driving force in an organization, the marketing process itself has to be simplified. In other words: focused ." With branding, the practice of communications mimics the physics of laser science; cutting through clutter is all about focus.
I find it curious, even mystifying, that accompanying this exponentially explosive growth of information there is a presumption that humans will find more meaning hidden within these gigabytes upon gigabytes of information that swamp our ability to distill and make sense of things like never-ending digital tsunamis—tidal waves of gargantuan proportions.
I find the term data-mining an especially apt metaphor for the dilemma of understanding this changing ratio of information to meaning. I grew up in the West in Wyoming, a state with more than a few ghost mines. The quality of a mine has always been judged by the ratio of whatever you were mining—gold, silver, copper—to the amount of raw ore you had to process. I suspect that all information is not created equal and that one of our biggest challenges in dealing with what has been called "the emerging economy" is differentiating the gold from the slag. I have come to suspect that this facility may become the most valued attribute of leadership. Those who know the difference between what’s interesting and what’s useful, what’s meaningful and what’s meaningless can help us navigate the future.
I am reminded of a time fifteen years ago when I was still a performing artist when I visited Boonville, Missouri to play a concert. I had a vague knowledge of the Boonville Opera House; I had read that it was the oldest performing arts facility west of the Mississippi. When I arrived I was confronted with a rather dilapidated structure with a columned portico, a stage with a noticeable grade, peeling paint, and disintegrating plaster. Nonetheless, the facility’s manager, Patrick Overton, was proud of the building and had great plans to raise money and renovate. After I’d warmed up, I spoke with one of the community’s old timers about the place; it was during the conversation that I learned that Jenny Lind—the Swedish Nightingale—had graced the stage. Caruso had sung there. Segovia—and I was a classical guitarist—had played there many years earlier. Compared to the lions who made this place resound in earlier days, I felt obscure beyond measure. I was moved. I was humbled. The ghosts who inhabited that stage; the importance of the hall as a stop between St. Louis and Kansas City on early riverboat tours endow it with meaning beyond the condition of its plaster. It was a story deserving of telling and no cost benefit analysis would ever raise a dime to restore the old hall. But its myths and stories would and did.
Not every historic object is a national treasure and to expect a theater to rise to that status to deserve veneration ignores, even denigrates, the importance of living in a local place among others in community. Ultimately, none of us can inhabit an entire nation. We are, by temperament and physiology, creatures of more limited geography. Where I grew up in Cody, Wyoming, our identity—for better or worse—rotated around the myth of Buffalo Bill Cody for whom the town is named. During my growing up years, I witnessed the birth and development of the nation’s leading Western art, firearms, old west, and Plains Indian museums. I guarantee you that the impulse for the Buffalo Bill Historical Center had everything to do with history and place and almost nothing to do with economic development even though the place is a powerful engine of tourism. The Center sprouted and grew because, in fundamental ways, the ground was right. It was an outgrowth of our history and identity and no small part due to the myth of that cunning old scalawag circusmaster, Army scout, and buffalo slaughterer, William F. Cody. As Bedbury tells us, myth has extraordinary power; it is the fiery core of a great brand.
Let me sum up by saying that this historic theater preservation movement and this work will go on—it must go on—because it taps into a need deep within our human psyches. We are anchored in experience. In the end those experiences that we share define us as we have defined them. The question is not whether we should survive, but how we should prosper and thrive. To thrive, it is irrelevant whether or not we are tantalized by technology’s potential; as natural wonderers and as natural players we cannot help but be fascinated by these extraordinary tools. However, we must not let ourselves be marginalized by what boils down to a set of tools. When the farmer becomes less important than the plow, something is wrong. What is pivotally important—what really matters—is that we remember who we are. That we learn to tell a compelling story and become mythmakers who know how to connect with that larger experience within which people seek to locate themselves. This is the power and the strength of building and nurturing intentional identity, of branding; we use this skill and this strategy to more powerfully connect people to themselves and to us.
Today, I live in Washington, DC, in historic Georgetown not far from the National Mall. Occasionally—more often than I would wish—the place overwhelms me with its grandeur, its marble facades, its people of power and prestige, and its overly sufficient complement of important people. Sometimes these things make me feel small. When I feel this way, I am in the habit of going to the Lincoln Memorial and reading the words inscribed there within the chamber that houses Abe’s seated marble figure. Being with him never fails to call me to my highest self by reminding me of the relative insignificance of my sacrifices and tribulations compared to this funny, humble, canny, and poetic man whose compassion for others moves me to this day beyond words. I am so heartened to know that another man, Secretary Smalls, sees Mr. Lincoln’s hat every day that he walks into his office because I do and must believe that he, too, is a higher and better man for the reminder in that glass case in the corner. I would remind you; I would urge you to consider as you go about your work preserving humanity’s anchors in your own communities that you perform a similar service.
You do not so much care for buildings as you do for faith and continuity. Your historic theaters—those anchors of memory where first kisses were traded, where newsreels of the War inspired hope for warring sons, where science fiction transformed somehow over decades into science history—are like the totem houses of the great Northwest First Nation’s People: magical spaces where reality and unreality blur, where mystery and conviction intersect comfortably; there are not so many places like that for we quirky human creatures where what we summon from memory requires something of our creative, imaginative facility. We require magic as much as we are comforted by certainty; it fuels the imagination and summons courage when courage is sometimes unreasonable. Nothing is so comforting nor convincing of the future’s possibilities as is the past’s enduring presence within our lives. Go forward with good will, with stout hearts, with strong backs, and fluent tongues. Find and tell your stories; invest them with context. Be mythmakers. I wish you well.
Posted on October 31, 2005 12:00 PM | Permalink
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