Wild and wonderful storytelling

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The United States of Fast Food

Image credit: Thrillist

In America our relationship with fast-food is a funny thing. It carries so many negative connotations- unhealthy, unsustainable, low-status, the worst of corporate America. Everything that Eric Schlosser, Michael Pollen, Morgan Spurlock and others have very persuasively deconstructed about it. For all the profitability of the McDonald's brand, you can seemingly devalue a thing by adding 'Mc-' to the front- McMansion, McJob, McChurch, etc.

But for many of my generation, fast-food was our first paying job and where we learned to work. I remember at age 15 being taught to work the grill at a McDonald's in Bellingham, Washington, and marveling as my trainer explained that their hamburgers tasted the same wherever you went because their entire system of operation was designed to achieve that consistency. I came to discretely harbor immense pride at being an employee of the most unstoppable restaurant brand in the world and looked down at my friends who'd settled to work at inferior chains, jobs that had the same stigma without any of the (admittedly, perhaps, imaginary) status.

For all the unfavorable associations with fast-food, it is part of the fabric of our culture, because it is everywhere we go. On a remote state highway or in a bleak airport terminal with few appealing options for sustenance, it might be the one thing you feel like you can trust. And in this excellent read by Adam Chandler, his fascinating personal and historical journey showed me how fast-food, for all its faults and flaws, serves as kind of a connective tissue, facilitating shared experience in this country in a way I'd never fully appreciated. And in this day and age where we live in either a red state or a blue state and there is no shortage of issues to fracture us- whether it is politics, religion, education, health care, parenting, or the economy- it's worth noting when anything has the power to connect people in ways that transcend social, racial, economic, political, geographic and even generational lines.  Even if it's a way we might be reluctant as a fast-food nation to admit.




Drive-Thru Dreams: A Journey Through the Heard of America's Fast-Food Kingdom
By Adam Chandler
288 pp. Flatiron Books. $27.99.

Thoughts on "This Is Marketing" by Seth Godin

I've republished an updated version of this article on Medium.  Thanks for visiting!

Freedom and accountability: can't have one without the other

This freedom and accountability matrix shows how I think these two concepts come together in the most successful working relationships.

People want to be trusted to do their job and be given the freedom to figure out the solution to whatever the challenge at hand is.  Employers and supervisors want to see results that hit the target and make real progress on the big goals.  I see the upper right quadrant- high freedom and high accountability- as the ideal to work toward, and believe you can't really achieve success in one dimension without addressing the other.

For example, if you're a supervisor who perhaps has a talented and capable employee who is nevertheless disengaged or seemingly avoiding accountability, it may be that from their perspective that limits on their freedom (real or imagined) are inhibiting them from performing to your expectations.  If you can confirm they value autonomy or freedom to operate in carrying out their mission, whatever it is, that may be a great opportunity to negotiate for the specific outcomes or change that you seek as their supervisor and move the relationship closer to win-win.

On the other hand you may have a team member who you have given a long leash, so to speak, but you have still not seen the results you want.  In those cases, there is a good chance they may not understand what is expected of them, or understand the stakes of their work, or some combination of those two factors.  This too would be an opportunity to recalibrate by negotiating clear expectations around what both sides value and need from the relationship.  Aspiring toward the ideal of high freedom and high accountability can help ensure everyone gets what they need from the partnership.

New University of Iowa TV spot

This is our new halftime spot, the television commercial that airs for the university during our football and basketball broadcasts.  It seeks to build on the style and tone of our spots from 2016 and 2017 before that while adding in what some are calling the best new tradition in sports, the Hawkeye wave.

Songwriters on Songwriting

Songwriters on Songwriting by Paul Zollo/Da Capo Press, 1997

Since I was weaned on the Beatles I always looked at songwriting as the most accessible and yet challenging form of artistic expression I could potentially undertake.  I got this book in Ann Arbor around 1997 or '98 when I wanted desperately to be a songwriter but was apparently too scared to actually try it, so I instead obsessed about craft.  Still, it's become might be the most valuable book I own, the closest thing I have to a personal artistic bible.  Every interview, whether it's Bob Dylan, Jimmy Webb, Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon, Randy Newman, is such a window into the creative process, revealing everything and nothing.  It affirms for me there is no one right way and just like any other form of writing, you do whatever it takes to 'deliver the payload' as Cohen put it.  I was fortunate enough to be able to do my own version of 'Songwriters on Songwriting' years later in the form of a creative writing interview series called On the Fly.

Branding in the new normal

This talk by Sasha Strauss is the best description of branding I've come across; clarifying what you believe and what you bring to the discussion of whatever it is that you are in the business of.