Nothing really prepares you for them. Even as you see them from afar. The terminal infliction points that we experience in our lifetimes. It is in moments like these we get to reflect, ponder and let some patterns emerge. Even if they are only imagined.

Religion has given us many things and before you close the tab and celebrate scientific research and modern achievements by going to the Moon and cloning a sheep; hear me out. This is not an article on religion. It is about faith. Faith in each other.

Religion has given us many things. With it’s rituals…

“May we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion” — President Eisenhower

Dear America,

I am immensely grateful to you. Since your birth the World has seen a development, previously stifled, hindered and even negated by empires, religions and cultures. Technology, commerce, medicine, ethics, math, the arts and sciences, culture. You decided to be at the frontier, and with your tenacity, you came to define almost all progress in recent history.

I moved here from another country (a country that, had it not been for you, probably would have been speaking German). Certainly I would not have come to this…

“Is it better to be loved or feared?” — Machiavelli, The Prince

After serving on a panel at Blouin Creative Leadership Summit together, Art Kleiner, editor-in-chief, invited me to attend pwc’ strategy+business’s 20th anniversary reception. For the people who don’t know the publication, it’s highly recommendable reading material, tangential to Harvard Business Review.

In fact the first editor-in-chief of the magazine, Joel Kurtzman, eloquently put it: “empires can be built in the wake of number one, and strategy+business did that with HBR”. Being number two can be a sweet deal.

But what struck me as significant is how the notion…

“We want to build a community around it, what do you think?”

Having worked with community design (on and off) for almost 15 years, you wouldn’t believe how often the question above has surfaced in conversations. What do I think? I think you need to ask yourself some questions before thinking about community building.

Every brand that has set out to build a community (or anything else for that matter) knows that, at the very core of it all, they are faced with two fundamental questions; What are we trying to achieve? And how do we do it?

A designed…