Delve into Jaffa's story and you'll appreciate Gaza's complexity more. My brothers were there a few days ago.
You would have to be senseless (literally and figuratively) not to notice the main news stories in the U.S. and internationally right now. Various groups are seeking to “break the blockade” of Gaza while oil pours out of a man-made hole in the Gulf of Mexico. Within the noise of the propaganda and public relations machinery, individuals and communities respond both predictability and within surprising frameworks. People take their “preconceived notions” (a phrase I learned from bewildered white Rhodesians in 1978-80) to spin their stories both sincerely and cynically. Most of us, either directly involved or distant from the actual issues, only have an inkling of what is going on, and even fewer seek to delve deeply and objectively enough into the underlying history and relationships to understand a semblance of the truth.
So goes the story for your own business and the people you hope will do business with you. You need to crack many barriers to get deep enough into the process to reach the magic “click” of insight and understanding and even hope to change the perceptions of the marketplace towards your business, its relationships and its brand (how others — especially potential and current clients — perceive you and whether that perception matches your own understanding.)
Today, for example, my two brothers are about to discover the Old City of Jerusalem. If you’ve ever been there, you can appreciate that this part of the universe is both an amazing tourist trap and wildly complex piece of geography and history as Muslims, Jews, Christians and Armenians all claim a portion of the land and all have their own special relationship with it. More interestingly, things are designed to minimize unpleasant interfaces — Jews wishing to pray at the Wailing Wall should not need to encounter the Muslims heading to the Al As-qua mosque. Occasionally, however things get tense when bulldozers or perhaps even tourists take a wrong turn.
I’m something of a narrow but deep thinker. That is, within areas or topics that interest me, I can quickly become an expert. Ive certainly read more books and had more first-hand experience about construction marketing and with geopolitical issues than most When I have the fortune to meet with someone who actually knows more about these specialized topics than I do, I can tune my journalistic ear quickly and gain understandings that take me further than most. (We can add an understanding of Internet fraud and crime to the list — including my latest fight which resulted in a wonderfully blunt yet invisible face-off with a U.S. war vet with a really warped perception of how to make money fast on the Web. I won.)
These skills and traits ultimately led to my career in construction industry publishing and marketing. And they cause me sometimes to shake my head in frustration about industry practices and perceptions and the sloppy — often incompetent — approach that many architects, engineers, contractors and suppliers have towards media relations and marketing.
Unless you are building stuff in the Mid-East or provide construction products and services for the Gulf Coast, you probably aren’t directly affected by the major news stories today — and some motivational gurus suggest you should simply turn the “news” off to avoid distractions and unnecessary frustration. But you can look at these issues as opportunities to understand how conflict and communication operate on the world stage and how you can determine where, if you dare, to reach beyond conventional expectations and take a media/marketing risk. Or how your life (and the perceptions of others to you) can be changed by a few minutes of ill-thought conversation in front of a video camera.
You can learn more if you wish at my Webinar on Wednesday, June 9.