*Young and Fictitious Banner, Baker Poulshock, 2009(?) *

I’ve had a lot of ideas I wanted to write since I posted first thought, best thought but this is the idea I had over the long weekend.

The role I am the most helpful in at work is as an editor, patron, enabler, and steward. I don’t know when I first realized it, but I know it to be true today. It’s the main creative reason why I am still finding value in corporate life.

Years ago (2008? 2009?) I had a blog called Young and Fictitious. I swear that I archived it several times. I still hold out hope that it lives on old hard drives but for the most part it is gone.

My friend Greg and I had a commitment where I would send him the post and within 24 hours he would turn around a piece of art for it; dozens of “commissioned” guest posts; podcast before podcasts were podcasts; DJ mixes that were absolute bangers; not to mention a whole slew of my own writing.

I do still have the most interesting interview on record with the rapper Despot in which he was on mushrooms and said several things he probably wishes he hadn’t.

I don’t know where the name came from – Young and Fictitious – but it popped in my head when it did come. I’ve always been interested in blurring fact and fiction to tell real stories, “creative journalism to explore the creative process; let’s build.”

The blog was a way to work with creatives without holding a single discipline or craft myself. I learned just enough audio, design, web, and interactive to know what goes into making it. Most importantly, it gave me my nose. I learned to find what it was in an idea that made it touching and how to help that seed grow and get bigger. Now, once I find that, I don’t let go.

So much of getting great work done at brands is about stewardship. You can have the most creative, effective, brilliant idea but without tenderness and protection the matrix, politics, and mediocrity of corporate entropy will chip it away to a shell of itself or kill it entirely.

When we developed Hey Google, Ask Nike the heart of the idea was to sell sneakers through a voice app – the most innovative product deserves the most innovative product drop. Commerce wasn’t just essential to the creative innovation, it was the innovation. However, it also proved to be the most difficult.

The problem was twofold:

• We didn’t have the pipes – Nike had no turnkey commerce option for Google Actions and Shopify was off the table because of Nike’s DTC transformation. We had to find a way to connect the voice app directly to Nike’s supply system but that would require technology bandwidth and approval.

• We didn’t have the inventory to put through the pipes – Nike brand execs didn’t want to give us the inventory or couldn’t be bothered, it sounded too new and too risky and too much of a pain in the ass.

The commerce is what sold the idea in over months of pitching and storytelling, but when it came time for the upper tax bracket to help rather than just get presented to it was easier to chip away at the idea than to solve it: do we need to sell product? what if it was just the voice action? I love this work, let me know how it goes.

We had tried to tackle the pipes earlier in the project. Our best shot was when a friendly advisor recommended a potential solution, or rather, a potential contact who could provide a solution by standing up a custom Nike PDP page, but that still required technology allocation. Dead.

Fast-forward to a week or two before launch. My team is reminding me daily that we need to solve the commerce. Trust, I did not forget. I’ve written every passionate email I could to people within reach. Then, my brand partner walks into our desolate corner of the office. He got 300 pairs we could sell. We had our inventory, but we needed the pipes.

I looked up the org structure of the contact my friend had mentioned and picked the highest person who’s name I knew. I wrote him an email. I quoted Serena. I never heard back.

A day later another teammate who was supposed to be helping us figure out the pipes called asking if I’d sent an email to his boss’s boss. I said yes I did. We built the pipes in a week.

February 7th 2019. Lakers v. Celtics on TNT. Kuzma and Tatum in the Adapts. We took over halftime and accidentally sold 1,300 pairs. Everyone was really pissed. A lot of people had to help clean up our beautiful mess.

Afterward, that friendly advisor joked that sending that email was one way to do it, and I agree it wasn’t the best. There were consequences for real people who didn’t have skin in the game. But I know why I sent that email.

In the past, I have likened role on the team to a running back in American football. My job is to protect the rock from the limbs that swipe and get it over the line into the world with its heart intact. However, for me, protection is not enough. It is the editor’s eye of knowing and believing and seeing the potential of the idea that gives me both the zeal and navigational senses required to steward the work with passion and when needed, force.

I’m working on a project right now. Similar in the sense that I see it, I see the whole thing, even more so now, and it is the most magical thing I have ever seen in work. The people deserve this one and more importantly, it’s deserving of the people. It terrifies me because if we can’t get it over the line I’ll judge myself and my ego will hurt. My family will still love me though.

That’s my thought. Know why you’re doing something. Make every decision you make accountable to the work and the delivery of that work to the world with its heart intact. Surround yourself with people who believe and push off the others who don’t.

Like Stephen Jackson in his prime.