On Stage With My Favorite Punk Rock Artist

Artist Ed Trask is probably tired of hearing me talk about the possibility that he is a reincarnation of my grandfather, who studied fine art at what isnow Virginia Commonwealth University and spent most of his artistic career painting signs, billboards and water towers (photo, above).

I remember when I met Ed. It was a Sunday afternoon, and we were both students at VCU. One of his first bands was playing at a club on Laurel Street. (I wrote about that in 2011 in the Floricane newsletter.)

He’s been a friend and inspiration ever since.

In October, I somehow managed to (finally) share a stage with Ed. We were making art, not music.

A brilliant idea hatched by Ed and Hands On Richmond’s Vanessa Diamond needed some facilitated set-up during the Collaborative Leadership Conference hatched by the Partnership for Nonprofit Excellence, Greater Richmond Chamber and Leadership Metro Richmond.

The idea: Take 1,200 metal birds, have community leaders at the conference and visitors to the Richmond Folk Festival write inspiring messages, and create an art installation – a physical, community murmuration.

And so Ed talked about his artistic vision, and I worked to connect the dots between the idea and the individual passions and commitments of the 300+ conference participants. Following our joint appearance, the group migrated into an adjoining room to pen their messages and hang their birds on a temporary installation.

It only takes a couple of birds to inspire a flock, as Vanessa and Ed discovered.

Great Art is Built (and Curated) by Great Organizations

There are days in our work when we sit down with an organization that has fundamentally changed the way our community looks and feels -- organizations like 1708 Gallery.

For 34 years, 1708 Gallery has paved the way for modern art in Richmond, and changed the way many Richmonders have considered art. Through big public exhibitions -- the Go Fish! Project in 2001, the edgy Wearable Art show, the annual InLight installation -- and through small, but dynamic, installations in its West Broad Street gallery, 1708 has moved the needle on art in Richmond.

As #RVA settles into a new arts-centric groove -- the expanded VMFA, the pending arrival of VCU's Institute for Contemporary Art, an arts district on Broad Street, a new chapter for the popular First Fridays art walk -- the team at 1708 is preparing for 34 more years of challenging the status quo.

We began our strategic engagement with 1708's staff and board at the end of September with a full-day exploration at the Linden Row Inn. We'll regroup with a small project team in October to build a strategic framework for the gallery, and position the board to finalize the work over the next several months.

Letter from John: Having Good Partners

Having a baby? Starting a business? It helps to have a good partner in the mix.

Four years into this business of Floricane -- and almost five since Thea was born -- I can make an easy argument that Nikole has played seriously large role in my successes as a businessperson and a parent.As a partner and as a wife, she's been solidly invested from the start.

Like the life of a newborn, the first year of business at Floricane was a heady mixture of having no clue, soaking it all in and constantly waiting for the next meal. Nikole thought and celebrated and worried through all of 2009 with me.

There were no terrible twos -- at Floricane, anyway. The second year of business was a lot of fun. The toddler stage of the business was busy, and growing, and good. Nikole celebrated every success we hit in 2010.

Year three was bumpy -- more growth, along with a handful of mistakes and more than a bit of unwarranted cockiness. All of which conspired to make this fourth year of consulting challenging beyond belief. Having a partner at home to help hold things together, and push me at the right moments, hasn't made the work easier, but there's something reassuring about having someone alongside me in the boat.

If Nikole has been at my side through the thick and thin of Floricane's emerging adolescence, I've also been fortunate to be surrounded by a great community of coworkers and supporters.

Bill Martin (of Valentine Richmond History Center fame) and I had drinks earlier this summer to discuss the challenges of these entrepreneurial preschool years. He suggested that I didn't know enough to do anything different in the first year, was too busy to do anything different the second year, and too stubborn to change course during the third year. He also advised me not to wait until year five to adjust course.

And so 2012 was the year I finally stopped screaming, "I can do it by myself!" (see Playground Perspective, below), and started allowing the excellence of others to really shine. (Admittedly, not until I hit a wall.)

Leap forward sixty days, and Floricane faces its 4th birthday (and enters its fifth year) with a new home, a solid team of star players and a steady pipeline of fun, meaningful work. We're busier than ever, and optimistic about the future. Did I mention fun?

As Floricane moves into its fifth year, I find myself saying "Thank you" to a lot of people. Friends, family, clients, business partners, community supporters -- there's been no end to the steady stream of caring, supportive people who have helped us thrive. My commitment for year five is simple: Give Nikole more successes to celebrate, and help the team turn Floricane into the business we all want it to be.

Happy anniversary, Nikole and Thea. Happy anniversary, Sarah and Tina and Debra and Caroline. And thank you, friend, for being a part of this fun, fantastic, stress-inducing journey!

Playground Perspectives: The Dance of Days

Parenting gets more interesting every day, especially when I'm able to spend less time supervising Thea and more time just being with her, and with her and Nikole.

When we're wandering around town these days, we tend to find ourselves straddling that great divide betweenkeeping the parenting ball in motion and giving our daughter space to breath, explore, grow.

It's a hard balance. But it has been getting easier as she's been getting older. Funny how that works.

In recent months, we've tried to be aware that she's getting older, and deserves opportunities to stretch her proverbial wings, to explore the boundaries, to discover safe places in the world absent the shadows Nikole and I cast. It's fun to watch (though occasionally unnerving).

Thea, her Omie (my mom) and I took a bus to the Folk Festival last month. The weather was gorgeous, and Thea was dressed in her finest mismatched ensemble. The minute we stepped off the bus, she was a bolt of lightning -- running nonstop and pell-mell, and dancing up a storm. But she also listened well. The combination of the environment, her energy and her good listening (and the attentive eyes of her Omie and myself) made it easy to let her stretch the boundaries and explore on her own.

A similar routine plays out in smaller venues. Our small family hits the town most Saturday mornings -- breakfast at Perly's, a swing by the Lakeside Farmers Market, a visit to the library. She regularly walks the tip back to our waitress, and selects flowers for her mom with Miss Terry at the market. She checks out her own books. Seeing her confidence grow and her sense of self expand into the world is such fun -- and very reassuring!

It helps that her assertiveness has increased, consternating as it can be. "I can do it myself!" is her latest indignant refrain -- along with a sassy, "You are annoying me so much right now, Dad!"

Not only can she do more for herself, but she's not shy about letting us know it.

What is it allows that combination of love, attention and assertiveness evaporate from our relationships? It's a rare tension, especially in those moments when it feels healthy and affirming. I find myself wondering if I could somehow bottle this unique dynamic we have with our daughter -- I'm pretty sure we're going to need it when she's 13!

I also wonder how different our teams and organizations might be if managers did a better job of letting employees dance up a storm, and if employees had less passive-aggressive ways of telling their supervisors that they are annoying. What would those conversations look like if they could happen with more love and less judgment?

I think it's a perfect question to ask my team at our next meeting. And maybe a good question to explore in other corners of my life. Lord knows, we all could stand a little more dancing.

Sticking with the Basics at ChildFund

I have an interesting new role with the executive team at ChildFund, International. I’m trying to fill the shoes of their former director of strategy. She just left to do a little strategic work at a foundation run by a guy named Bill Gates.

Because she left at a critical planning window for the global child development organization, they began looking for someone who could facilitate and guide their planning process even as they recruited a new director of strategy. That’s how I find myself spending big slices of the next six months helping the senior team at ChildFund map out, prioritize and align big buckets of strategic and operational work.

In many ways, the work takes me back to my organizational development work at Luck Companies, supporting key leaders as they sought to implement big changes. It’s real journeyman work, requiring solid process and facilitation skills – along with the ability to remember that I’m not the boss. (That’s sometimes a challenge for me.) My work at ChildFund isn’t to develop strategy, or invent a process. No, it’s simpler (read: harder) than that – they simply want me to take their existing process for their strategic business planning and facilitate it effectively.

Make it better, not different.

Understand. Organize. Facilitate. Clarify. Those words are at the heart of the role I’ll be playing as I partner with ChildFund in the coming months.

Working with Some Real Movers and Shakers

The headline for this post would be a terrible, possibly inappropriate, pun – save for the fact that some of the individuals who helped kick-start VCU’s Parkinson’s and Movement Disorders Center actually call themselves the Movers & Shakers.

It took me a while to get it.

Bad naming schema aside, it’s been utterly fascinating to dive into the world of medical and clinical research in our strategic planning work with the VCU Center. Our biggest job may well be serving as translators for the talented team of researchers and scientists as they seek to communicate the purpose – and promise – of the Center to the community.

The Center sits at the intersection of global research into neurological disorders, and serves as a gateway to some of the 300,000+ Virginians who have Parkinson’s, Huntington’s or essential tremors. The core focus is research, but there is a clinical care component, as well. At the heart of the Center, however, is the heart of its core team – dedicated researchers who passionately want to solve complex neurological mysteries, and build meaningful relationships with patients and the community.

As we wind down our work with the Center next month, we hope to set the three-year-old Center on a clear course of research and patient care – supported by an organizational structure and an outreach arm that can make its message visible.

Letter from John: The Only Easy Day Was Yesterday

My friends who spend time in the world of Navy SEALS -- either by exercising in a local park, or engaging in more serious work overseas -- are familiar with the motto of the highly disciplined special ops team:

The only easy day was yesterday.

It's a nice phrase. It's simple, clear, sort of catchy. And it's slung around a lot during a mentally and physically grueling qualification training. Slung around for a reason -- 90% of NAVY SEAL candidates drop out during training, unable to take the intense demands.

The work of any successfu l leader is to recognize that every day can be hard. If you're leading well, and your team is growing, the days gets harder and more complex -- more often. If you're leading well, and you're learning from your challenges and successes, the harder work begins to become a new norm. It doesn't become easier, but your ability to engage well increases.

It might seem odd for me to be quoting the Navy SEALS but I've recently been thumbing through a book a friend who operates in that field gave me.

"Small Unit Leadership" is built around the very real principle that "platoons (small units of soldiers) seal the fate of armies." The front line leaders of those small units, the sergeants and corporals, can determine the success or failure of armies.

I'd suggest the same is true of any organization. Your front line managers determine the success or failure of your organization.

We recently started new efforts with several organizations focused around targeted coaching to strengthen the focus, skills and leadership of mid-level managers -- small unit leaders, in the military vernacular. While the intention of our coaching work with these managers is not to put them through Navy SEAL training, our team believes that effective coaching involves a lot of stretching, clear outcomes and accountability.

It's exciting to be able to add another dimension to the work we can offer our clients, and to see our management/leadership coaches, Debra and Jim, apply their unique talents.

Of course, it adds to the complexity of our work. Raising the bar on ourselves as an organization is in our DNA, and it often means that the only easy day was yesterday.

That, we'd argue, is the nature of doing our best work.

Playground Perspective: Maintaining an Energetic Beat

I'm not an emotionally expressive guy. Which explains how I found myself parenting an exceptionally expressive daughter with Nikole; they both exist in my life to teach me important things.

Thea combines the frenetic energy rattling through my brain with her mother's deep empathy and creative bent -- and then marches steadily to her own beat. Usually not in the direction I'd like her to march.

She&# 39;s also relentlessly curious.

It would be maddening if she weren't such a happy kid. Okay, sometimes it's still pretty maddening. Mostly, it's sort of wonderful. 

I delight in watching her burst into her own day after day:

• She might have had the BEST DAY EVER at the Virginia State Fair this past weekend, and she didn't even have any fried food! (Seriously, do you know how happy we were to discover the King of Pops selling his natural popsicles near the tractors? Very happy.) Watching your child explode with delight as she swirls around in a spinning teacup ride can't be beat.

• But you really haven't lived until your four-year-old dances around the house singing Cyndi Lauper songs. (Thea singing, "Oh, daddy dear, you know you're still number one, but girls they want to have fun..." has an entirely different energy than the original version of that song.)

• Did I mention her curiosity? Thea and I sat on the couch the other morning for 20 minutes talking about chimpanzees and watching Jane Goodall videos. She explained where trees came from on an evening walk with me last week. That was after she explained transportation to me...

None of this is new to some of you, but I find I'm constantly amazed by the restorative energy of children, and by the unique energy of my own child.

There was a version of me that wondered where that energy went as we aged, only to discover that much of it goes into protecting ourselves from others.

When I let go of the need for control, for protection, that's when I find myself leaning into a conversation of curiosity, inspired by possibilities for change and disruption, mesmerized by someone else's story. It is hard -- HARD -- to do. I count myself fortunate that I have created a job that allows me to be so open to others.

I can climb onto the teacup ride, dance around the kitchen and explore the world of Jane Goodall almost every day in the work that I do. I enjoy this version of myself much more -- it reminds me, when I glimpse it in the mirror, of a small child I know sleeping just down the hallway.