A note on meetings
They should have a purpose.
A friend recently sent me this July Atlantic article about meetings in the white-collar workplace. The Atlantic has carved out their own little cottage industry of writing (read: complaining) about meetings and someone sends me his their regular dispatches on The State of Meetings more often than I’d like to admit. This quote from the July column sums up how a lot of people feel about a calendar invite:
Complaining about meetings is like complaining about telemarketers, or modern political parties: an unoriginal protest, perhaps, but fundamentally justified. Perhaps the most common critique is that many meetings are theatrical presentations of information best conveyed in an email.
This newsletter is not an anti-meeting screed. It’s not a that-meeting-could-be-an-email meme. I love talking to people. We take phone calls, we meet people for coffee, we Zoom with clients daily! But from the day we launched Three Point Four Media we knew we didn’t want to be a place that has meetings for the sake of meetings—and we have stayed true to that, seven years in. The rise of people saying “let’s just do it async” has only aided our cause, but the reasoning behind our meeting philosophy is very straightforward: we only schedule a meeting if we need it. This dovetails nicely with another TPF pillar—ask clients fewer unnecessary questions, you can probably figure it out on your own.
I think they share the same DNA. Do what you can with the information you have and if you need to talk about it or ask for additional details, you can—via email, text, phone call, or scheduling a good old fashioned meeting.
An article
Great New Yorker profile of Grant Peterson, the founder of Rivendell Bicycle Works, and the very expensive steel bikes he makes. Rivendell is a cult and Peterson is a master marketer.
“In the simplest terms, I think of bicycles as rideable art that can just about save the world, or at least make you happy,” Peterson wrote in an old issue of The Rivendell Reader (seriously, it’s a thing—a newsletter before newsletters were cool). “Yet so many modern bicycles are promoted as tools for self-aggrandizement, status, and hammering the competition to a pulp, and the bikes themselves look like hoodlums, thugs, and ne’er-do-wells.
He’s a bit of a crank, in the best way. I won’t be riding a bike in Tevas anytime soon, though.
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A movie
Saw The Blair With Project at the Michigan Theater, which was not nearly as scary as I remembered it. I spent the majority of the movie thinking to myself, “I’d never let this happen. Also, how did they get that lost in Suburban Maryland! They had a river and the sun. That’s their fault. The sun sets in the west—grow up.”
This Times piece does a pretty good job of detailing why you couldn’t really pull off this movie today.
Sanchez, 55, recalled the director duo’s optimism that their unorthodox campaign would resonate. The internet was the perfect size, “the perfect kind of machine to spread things out,” Sanchez said. “There was enough time, enough room for the misinformation that we got out there.”
Unrelated to the late 90s guerilla marketing, but I want to emphasize here that I 100% would have led the crew back to safety no problem. As we say here at Three Point Four Media, “if you have a project we have a solution”—whether it’s brand story or successfully navigating the backwoods.
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A project
A new longform piece for Acumen America, highlighting two start-ups that are tackling climate justice: Unreasonable Impact and Barclays are supporting the next generation of climate entrepreneurs. Here’s how.
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A song
I really like this song off The Hard Quartet’s debut eponymous album. If you aren’t a middle-aged white guy, The Hard Quartet is an indie rock super group (LOL) headlined by Pavement frontman Stephen Malkmus. This quote from a recent GQ profile tells you all you need to know (if you’re still reading):
“I kinda know where we are. We’re geezers in a guitar band. It’s cool but it’s not that relevant,” Malkmus says with another squawky laugh. “You love it. I love it….”
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A (playoff baseball) run
It’s been a decade, but the Tigers are back in the playoffs. Took my mom to the game in Detroit Thursday. Sixty degrees, not a cloud in the sky, and a 3-0 Tigers victory? We’ll take it!
Noah will be back with you in a couple weeks. Thanks for your continued support—it’s almost time for the Three Point Four team to drop our Q1 takes.