My friend Alan, personable owner of Hearts and Flowers in Charlottetown, invited me to speak to his regular Wednesday morning “breakfast club” this week. The club, which meets for breakfast every morning at the Rodd Royalty hotel, is an interesting cross-section of Charlottetown businesspeople; it’s a testament to how small a place this is that around the table were the guy who sold me my life insurance, the guy I get my auto insurance from, and someone whose son I once hired.
They meet to socialize, talk about business, and generate “leads,” the later a concept that, thank goodness, I’ve a stable enough client base to be completely unfamiliar with.
I joked with them that I’d always suspected there was a secret cabal meeting in a hotel that actually ran the city; while I was exaggerating, I’d imagine that with the collected knowledge and resources of the people around that breakfast table you could get an awful lot done.
Alan asked me to come in and speak for 20 minutes about “what it is that I do,” a notion that threw me into a temporary existential crisis – what do I do? do I actually do anything? I managed to pull out a common thread joining together enough of the things that I do to turn into a 20 minute encapsulation, boiled down to its essence in this infographic:
Although the slides for my talk won’t make a lot of sense without the witty banter overlaid on top of them, here they are for posterity.
The breakfast clubbers asked some good questions, I enjoyed a cup of luke-warm hotel coffee, and by 9:00 a.m. I was on my way back to the office.
Comments
Although I’ve been following your blog and Twitter feed for a couple of years now, Peter, I never really could put my finger on exactly what it is that you do… other than champion the cause of open data, obviously :-)
The slideshow sums it up nicely. Much more elegant than the standard GIGO idiom!
Thanks!
HI Peter,
You sure work with some interesting ideas…some of them make my head spin! I work with singer-songwriter Peter Bradley Adams. I noticed that you’re a fan of his music and wanted to thank you, and let you know that Peter has a brand new CD “Between Us” coming out on June 14. He’s offering his fans a free download from it now at www.peterbradleyadams.com/free…
Also, each week between now and June 14, we will be streaming a new track from BETWEEN US on our website (misharamusic.com) so you can hear it before worldwide release.
This week’s song is “My Love is My Love”. Come back each weekend to hear another new song from the CD.
Mishara Music is home to some other really wonderful singer-songwriters as well, including Irish singer Colin Devlin, Barnaby Bright (an amazing husband/wife duo from Brooklyn who recently won Grand Prize in the SongCircle competition), Kat Maslich-Bode (Peter’s former partner in ‘eastmountainsouth”) and Merlowe and the Dry Tear.
I hope you enjoy our music and if so, feel free to share with your friends. We know the best way to spread great songs is through word of mouth.
Regards,
Linda Baker
Mishara Music
Generally speaking, the ultimate secret cabal has to be the bank rollers, but yours could be the cabal of wealthy merchants or bourgeoisie, meaning you’d still be pernicious in Marxist terms.