cultural attache

My partner Mindy told me a couple months back she wanted to hire one of our former interns, Brielle, to join our staff. Mindy didn't exactly have a position as much as she knew Brielle is young, smart, creative and capable. There should always be a place for people who possess these qualities in our company. I agreed. 

We started by placing Brielle in production to help out Charlie and Mamta. Mindy asked what else could we assign to her. I suggested making her our cultural attache.

This is something I wanted to do for a while. I got the idea from who else, my wife. Dana had met with a young man who had worked for Imagine Entertainment. His job was to mine the cultural landscape for Brian Grazer. He researched whatever he thought Brian might find interesting. If there was 12 year old musical prodigy, a company working on telepathic technology or a scientest building a new rocket ship out of cardboard, Grazer wanted to meet them. I thought that was kinda cool. 

I don't think Epoch needed to go to the same extremes but the concept had real value. To provoke conversation within the company. To inspire ideas. To make us all more aware. 

When I was in NY in September, we briefed Brielle on her new role as Epoch's personal cultural ambassador. We requested she write a monthly report. It would contain articles, links, websites, the latest non-mainstream films and music, whatever information is relevant to our business and our world. We are fortunate that Brielle is an instinctive thinker and a talented writer. 

Brielle filed her second report last week. It was exactly what I was looking for. Topical insight. Short cuts to surfing. Blog fodder. It had it all the tidbits I was looking for from technology and the arts to advertising and innovation. 

Yesterday I shared the monthly cultural report with our entire staff including our directors. The initial response was positive. It didn't hurt that that opening salvo was in the NEWS section "Obama's new policy on medical marijuana will stop prosecuting marijuana users who abide by state laws" and ended with the INVENTION section informing us that "We need this: new machine that turns used office copy paper into toilet paper." There were other great tidbits, to name a few, a link to Spike Jonze's and Kanye West's short film, YouTube's most popular October video, and the newest trends in interactivity including sculpture and art. 

I hope they it's something that creates conversation within our company and becomes a mainstay of our culture. Now that the "Mad Men" season is over we need new stuff to talk about.