Free Agent – On a personal note
Looking ahead into 2025, it‘s shaping up to be a year of exciting and meaningful collaborations around the topics I’m most passionate about. Here’s to new endeavors!
It’s been an exciting week. After almost three years, I’ll be leaving Stark at the end of January to focus more on my own passions and projects (more on that below). While I figure out what’s next long-term, I’m looking forward to taking a few weeks off to recharge.
As for the free agency part: I believe more companies than ever are in need to transform both their culture and processes to meet the paradigm shifts we’re seeing in the market. They need help. Help that can’t be delivered with PowerPoint slides, business model canvases, or post-it notes on the wall.
So, starting January, I will open a limited number of time slots to partner with 3-5 CEOs, executives, and boards who are at pivotal moments with their companies and are looking for hands-on 1:1 guidance or interim creative leadership. These will be personal, honest, challenging, and impactful collaborations between 6-12 months in length to guarantee measurable, sustainable impact.
So, if you’re interested and in need of a someone who can go deep into the muck with you and your team, get in touch. I’d love to hear about your business’ gnarliest challenge!
With AI being an explosive catalyst for socio-economic change across all sectors and disciplines, I’ll also be investing more time in my research and teaching at Princeton University on how it will affect the intersection of entrepreneurship, business, and co-creativity. An excerpt from my early notes (from about 2 years ago) below.
Lastly, a huge thank you to the entire Stark team and our customers! Accessibility is one of the biggest design problems in the world, and the team Cat and Michael have assembled is by far the best in the industry. I’ve had an absolute blast working on an early-stage startup again, especially one that’s truly improving people’s daily lives.
And as always, thank you for reading. Please let me know which of these thoughts resonate with you, what you’d like to read more of or send any ideas, questions, and feedback my way via email or the comments.
Meet The Punx
It all started with a chance meeting at Princeton, when John and I discovered our shared fascination (some might call it obsession) with typography and the written word. Specifically, punctation – and how to teach kids about it.
Fast forward a year and a little, and we’re truly thrilled to reveal the first bits of what we’ve been working on: Meet The PUNX – a crew of funny, curious, and opinionated characters bringing punctuation to life.
Punctuation is powerful. The course of history has been changed many times over by punctuation marks, love letters have been written, and entire creative universes emerged with their help. But learning about them typically isn’t much fun.
So, we’ve been trying to figure out how we might change that. What if these little characters could speak? What would their personalities be like? And how might they teach kids (and grown-ups) about making meaning, communicating ideas (big and small), and appreciating the fact that one tiny mark can have such an outsized impact.
If you’d like to learn about our project and each of the PUNX:
Check out our website and leave your email address to get updates: www.meetthepunx.com
Follow the PUNX on Instagram for regular educational and fun learning content: https://www.instagram.com/meetthepunx/
And if you’re a parent, educator, writer, producer, publisher, or simply fellow typography and grammar enthusiast who would like to get involved, drop us a note at hello@meetthepunx.com
By the way: What’s your favorite punctuation mark? Why that one?
From my notes: Artistic Intelligence
AI is going to be everywhere. It’s eating the world – anything from attention minutes to corporate budgets. And as AI is accelerating and automatic most of the mundane business tasks, humans will need to focus on what we do best: be creative, and connect to other humans.
So, we how do we build organizations that can unlock and foster human creativity, critical thinking, and courageous inventiveness?
This question holds a 180-turn from the predictable, high output management philosophies of the last Industrial Revolution. Business leaders and companies everywhere aren’t yet equipped to handle this paradigm shift in management needs.
Executives in all departments need to evolve to become Creative Leaders. Artistic Intelligence is the human skills counterpart to AI technology. And it’s going to be a requirement for the entire C-Suite and the board room.
I think of Artistic Intelligence as a set of internal and external skills for every business leader to master: from self awareness and creative confidence, to better ways to measure the connection between experience quality and shareholder value.
Artistic Intelligence is knowing how to build, lead, and manage organizations (at scale) that have the creative process of exploration as their SOP (standard operating procedure) and measure the quality of the human experience as a leading indicator that drives customer and shareholder value.
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