Charles Buchwald & Friends » deep thoughts

Our Goal: Your Meaningful Growth

Charles — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 07:44:06 +0000

Here at Charles Buchwald & Friends we keep focused on one goal: your meaningful growth. We’ll help you and your business, organization or community achieve that through bigger margins, a better triple bottom line, or renewed clarity and focus… however you define meaning and success.

Sometimes it means going back to basics and working with success coaches and advisors to refine or redefine your goals. Often it means our coordinated efforts help integrate all your business materials across a range of media with focus and clarity, making for a message that is direct, consistent, and powerful.

Whether yours is a small solopreneurship, a charity, or an established Fortune 500™ firm, we have worked with clients like you, and we can help. Our experience and capabilities encompass mobile, social, web, print, photo/video, illustration, animation, software, and identity systems in traditional advertising, marketing and PR, and business systems. Small or large, we treat you and yours with intention, care and respect.

Our network of local collaborators is unique, offering a suite of services that include:

mobile marketing, including custom app development for iOS, Android and Win Mobile 6.5
social media marketing, including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn
environmentally and socially responsible business planning and strategy
business identity development, incl. logos, signage, stationary systems
user-maintainable web sites built with the best Content Management Systems
green hosting, on 130% wind-powered servers with streaming media capacity
print design for marketing collateral, packaging and signage
multi-channel, integrated publishing systems
marketing, advertising and public relations

Projects of all kinds have benefited from our unique blend of extraordinary creativity, out-of-the-box thinking, and remarkable experience…. Will you be next?

On Competition vs. Community

Charles — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 21:34:14 +0000

I believe that competition and the mindset that accompanies it are a form of scarcity consciousness. Focusing on “beating competitors” and the associated conflict may be exciting for some, but ultimately it hurts both the business community and the social community.

I believe in abundance consciousness. I believe there is enough work, food, love and compassion to go around… if we open to it.

(This is not to say that our environmental problems will go away, and we’ll suddenly have unlimited natural resources if we so believe. But I do believe that we have the capacity to tackle even these big issues with creativity and kindness, and that putting our intention in the direction of a safe, clean, kind world is a lot more likely to get us there.)

Another local design and development group is tacitly advocating competition, by censuring all such fellow groups from their “community” efforts. This does not support a growing professional network, or a sustainable business community, or a vibrant and developing social community. Pulling together as a community, whether local professionals in a network, or other participants in the local business landscape, is a way to enhance professional strengths, work towards a sustainable business community, and contribute to a more vibrant and developing social community.

After some thought, I am listing below, all the businesses and individuals I know in the area that are working in web design, graphic design, software development, and marketing. I have personally worked with many of them, and continue to seek opportunities to collaborate. It is my personal policy to direct potential new clients to anyone I think will better serve them, or to bring such collaborators into projects, and I will continue to do so.

Do you know of other Gulf Island’s businesses in this field? Please let me know via email or comments, and I’ll list them here.

Are you involved in this field? If so, please consider your professional, business and social communities, and advocate collaboration and network building over destructive, zero-sum competitive practices. I hope to work with you soon!

- Charles Buchwald

This list has been moved here.

Abundance vs. Scarcity Thinking in Tech

Charles — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 23:46:12 +0000

Chris Anderson, Wired Magazine’s Editor in Chief, has written a thought-provoking article for the latest edition of said magazine. Tech Is Too Cheap to Meter: It’s Time to Manage for Abundance, Not Scarcity presents views from his latest book about how the falling prices for information technology have the potential to change our thinking and feeling.

The central premise is that most of our business and organization thinking is based on promoting scarce materials, products and ideas. But falling tech prices present a different paradigm, where it’s our thinking and creativity that are the main limitations. This chart was very helpful:

Note that the audio version of the book is currently available for download within the body of the article.

What do you think? Please leave a comment and let me know!

The Zen of Sherlock Holmes

Charles — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 03:00:39 +0000

I found this fascinating blog a while ago, with simple variations on David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) philosophy.

The Sherlock Holmes Guide to Recovering Your Stolen Identity isn’t really about design… unless maybe you consider it as an aspect of designing your life or your experience. As such, it’s a very interesting take on how we define ourselves, and how we relate to the material world. That relationship is certainly part of any designers consciousness.

Please do take a look at this, and leave a comment, if you would, about your thoughts on the subject….