What do you do for a living?
For the past 10+ years I have been finding possibility in process. That means I am a consultant who helps magazine teams improve how they operate, alleviate burnout, find the audience they want to reach, use workflow to bolster the bottom line (really!), and get everyone home sooner at the end of the day. Usually we do all of those things at once.
What does that mean day-to-day?
My typical day involves helping a team discover their process, test a new process, or imagine new possibilities with existing resources. I do a lot of listening and guiding. And I often act as an interim COO whose main focus is to teach the team what they need to do to reach their leadership’s goals.
Often it’s clear to me what could be done, but I encourage the team to discover solutions from their own perspective, as that creates so much more engagement. Engagement is what makes change stick.
What do you love about magazines?
I love how they come together. The interplay of all the systems and people’s creative input makes something better than the sum of its parts.
What is one thing that people do not know about you?
When I used to work for the New Yorker, I would watch people read the magazine as they rode the Subway and use my observations to tweak how we designed the magazine.
For example, people would hold the magazine in one hand and read it folded in two vertically, which sometimes obscured captions and cartoons.
Where can we connect with you?
Follow me on LinkedIn.