In my working career, I have taken many types of vacations. They have ranged in duration from a rather luxurious 6 weeks to nothing at all, and experience has shown that a contiguous period of at least two weeks is the most valuable.
Probably the two most valuable things that have happened to me as a business person were:
1) Being laid off from a corporate job and having to start a business on my own, forcing the question of how to survive and support a family without a regular salary, benefits, or anything to rely on but myself.
2) My former business partner's choice to walk off with all our clients, leaving me with the company debt and virtually no business.
“Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution.” (Ansel Adams)
Our initial reaction to photographic images often leans towards belief or trust that the picture tells a true, unbiased story. By following these gut reactions, we are often led by the hand toward manipulation by advertisers, marketers, and product designers. But if we aren’t going to get the thing that we are shown, why even bother?
What impresses me most about nuclear materials is the inhuman scale of their behavior. For example, what does it mean that some radioactive materials, like Plutonium 244, have a half life of 80 million years? This "half-life" is 8,000 times longer than all of recorded human history. This has to make you wonder, at least a little, if we are out of our league when we mess with this kind of stuff.
"Reason should investigate its own parameters before declaring its omniscience."
(Immanuel Kant)
When I was in junior high school, I remember being both arrogant and stupid. I say this because I remember thinking I was the smartest kid in the class. I thought this because I got the best grades and I spent time thinking about things that did not seem to interest others. Only later did I learn there are many forms of intelligence.
For any organization, arguably your most important brand asset is your name. Some names are better than others at explaining why you exist and why you matter. So, along with the name, most organizations also need a tagline. For a nonprofit the tagline's most important role is clarification.
There is no such thing as a branded $5,000 website.
There certainly exist many people who will design and build a business or even a nonprofit website for $5,000 or even less for that matter, but in doing this, they are inevitably leaving aside much of the essential stuff that makes a website effective.
Branding is often managed like a propaganda war for the hearts and minds of brand consumers. This aligns with Wikipedia's basic description of propaganda: "As opposed to impartially providing information, propaganda, in its most basic sense, presents information primarily to influence an audience." Propaganda is not really about the truth, but about influencing minds, and so may resort to a variety of tactics such as errors of omission, selective truths and the straw man fallacy to make its case. Interestingly, if you look at the history of advertising and propaganda, they both came of age as vehicles of mass persuasion during and after World War I and they continue to rely on the same essential insights about human behavior. Advertising is white propaganda.
