Fouroboros | Huh?

What's a Fouroboros?

Subtract the "F" and you get Ouroboros: the sideways figure "8", an ancient icon used by alchemists, symbolized by a snake eating its own tail. That's not as terminal as it sounds. The symbol represents a state of constant flux and reinvention, based on a search for value and values. Yeah, it also the parent of the mathematical symbol for infinity.

Why the "F" then?

Because Ouroboros is confusing for some to pronounce on first reading. And "Youroboros" would have been too cute. And, because I like the number four.

Who are are you?

Mark. Brady. A guy with opinions, obviously. Married way above my station in 1989, 2 great kids: 8 and 5. Elon College, NC; Portfolio Center, Atlanta; MBA study, Freeman School of Business, Tulane Univ, LA. Born 1961, on RAF Alcolnbury, not far from Cambridge, England to a British mother and Oregon-born, USAF father. Have one older brother who captains Bombardier's for EasyJet out of Birmingham, England. Moved back to the US at age 14. Family settled in Richmond VA, were I finished school, attempting to unlearn cricket for baseball, rugby for football. (No high school soccer team then.)

What did you do?

Grandfather said "there's no better education than digging a ditch, selling a product and serving a meal." So I did that, in a different order: Framing houses paid for college where I studied Public Administration and Marketing. Got out in '83 and became unemployed with everybody else. So, bartending and restaurant management fed me till I got fed up with the hours. Went to work for a regular customer who kept telling me I was wasting my potential. His company sent me to Xerox school, after which I sold copier and fax machines. Once I learned how not to starve doing that I became a sales trainer, then sales manager. Got offered a job by the honcho of one of my major accounts and landed right in the middle of the S&L-fired building boom of the late eighties, selling to major national builders. Made lots of money, played lots of expense account golf with builders and developers named "Skeeter" or "Cecil" or "Palmer." Learned how to take a dive. As the building market crashed around '91, I decided to beat the rush and had my midlife crisis at 30. I went to Portfolio Center in Atlanta, a grad school program for advertising, and became an advertising copywriter. Won some awards, had a few ads on those Funniest Commercials shows. Did this for 8 years for clients like Bank One, Mercedes, Georgetown, Colonial Williamsburg and others, including various political causes, rising to creative director and partner in a few agencies. One of which, in DC, wanted to be resuscitated. That gave me a taste for triage, business development and the leverage that unconventional, yet principled leadership can bring to bear. Success with that led me to another agency which, as they say, wanted to get to the promised land, but wasn't willing to pay the ticket price.

What do you do now?

After 2 year s of ulcerated struggle, I left the last agency and helped cofound a boutique business development consultancy called Alchemy LLC, consisting of an architect, an organizational specialist, and me--an ad guy, along with a few alliance relationships in finance, process management, head-shrinking and cultural anthropology. We're problem solvers, what the French call Bricoleurs (or Bricolage), cerebral when we have to be, but ferocious simplifiers when at all possible. We help small to mid-cap companies get healthy, and push healthy ones to get outrageous. It's great fun and very rewarding. Our clients are usually up aganst the wall and looking for fresh thinking. We aim to please. People have come to us looking for a business plan or marketing and we designed them a better distribution system or sales approach, instead. A branding study led to a city's revamped and integrated economic development and tourism plan. A utility had an environmental PR problem, we gave them an Investment Recovery Act hero story: Cool recycled furniture, made out of old PCB- laden transformers. We get angry neighbors to find common cause with commercial real-estate developers, we help get VC's to see beyond less than attractive balance sheets, and we teach kids in elementary schools how to think creatively and middle schoolers to become balanced leaders. We design work places, make TV commercials and help people make nice and make money. People say we do these things well. One long-time client introduced us to a CEO retreat by saying we're "at the top of an industry that doesn't exist--yet." We like that. We're immensely curious and, humble. We speak very candidly. We don't take our selves too seriously. If you'll notice, all these things have one element in common: moving people, figuratively and literally. That's the real stuff. The rest is just tactics. I love what I do. I like to share, hence this blog. Life is good.

Added 4-29-04:

What's your job description, Monkey-boy?

I'm having an email conversation with a certain blogger who shall remain nameless. (Likes commerce, disfavors the idea of creationism, you do the etymology.) [Okay, it's Jon at Business Evoutionist.] Anyway, the topic has turned to "Why do workspace design, branding, and business development belong in the same sentence? What kind of strange animal are you, fouro?" or words to that effect.

What a can of worms. McGuyver with a Sharpie^®? Hmm. Not very descriptive. Uhh, a balance sheet handyman? Not if I can help it. A marketing person? Depends. Is that intended as praise or an insult?

Wow. Let's see. I did framing carpentry (building new homes) to pay for college. Where I studied political science and marketing. Then became a bartender and restaurant manager. Which led to cold-call selling photocopiers (stay with me, it get's weirder.) That led to a Sales Management job selling to the national building trade. Then back to school for an advertising/marketing grad program which made me a copywriter, then creative director and ad agency partner. There I sold cars, sub sandwiches, healthcare, tourism, real estate, and politicians or their issues. Then came reorganizing some ad agencies, which led to some independent business-development, which led to economic development, which led back to school for some MBA work, which leaves us today at "What kind of strange animal are you, fouro?"

Well, one could infer "shiftless layabout" from the above. But I did learn a lot. About stuff. About different people. From different people. Some with fat wallets, some with none. Maybe that makes me a Social Entrepreneur. Yeah. Like a dummy, I actually believed my parents, my high school guidance counselor and Thomas Jefferson when they said, essentially, "the real education begins after college." So I learned that the guy who swings a hammer is not so different from the CEO who waves an annual report. I learned that nurses and waiters and customer service techs--the best ones--share brain patterns and can teach each other a lot. In fact, they can literally finish each others sentences when brought together. And I learned that people are hungry for the power of ideas and creativity pressed into service of their ideals. And angry at people and institutions that get in their way. And, yeah, I learned that people are loyal to ideals and ambition, not companies, brands or mission statements.

Bumping into all these ideas and people, you tend to pick up a few new words. I learned that the French really do love words that end in -age and -eur:

Bricolage is a French term for which there is no English equivalent. The closest would be "invention", but that's insufficient. The bricoleur uses the latent energy or utility in an existing system or material to create new opportunities, new uses. Besides being a resourceful individual, the bricoleur brings a different outlook to work and life. Call it optimism or energy, call it creativity or craft. Just don't call it "punching in". However defined, a bricoleur is unlike the engineer or theorist who may need a specific set of circumstances or tools in order to begin do their thing 'properly'. Limitations or finite resources or conventional opposition are a wall for them. Not so for the bricoleur. She's the epitome of the accomplishment-minded person who focuses on what has to happen to achieve what she has decided needs to be done. The bricoleur equips herself to be the instrument of her own destiny--no matter what. she looks for utility and ambition in people and things, equipping herself to perform as necessary in spite of (and not because of) the circumstances, and with no thought as to "why it can't be done". The bricoleur believes that contempt before exploration not only leaves you in ignorance, it puts you in the red.

It's also a fair description of the people I most admire in this world. Compared to them, I'm just an evolving typing monkey. How do I know this? One of them, my first big advertising boss, an agency president, turned to the guy who'd just hired me and asked simply "Does he have opposable thumbs?" "Maybe. We'll see," was the response. I really learned a lot from those two. They deserve some credit for my job title: Bricoleur. A problem-solver primate; an optimist with brass knuckles and one opposable thumb. I even have a sign to remind me:

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