Imran Khan sent us a thousand words from his holiday in Greece. They describe a man camouflaged in a pale pink suit and white polo that dissolve into the golden hour’s lavender-tipped amber light washing over the Aegean, the whitewashed walls, even the tablecloths of the repurposed fortification where he stands.
For someone who has spent years making himself visible as PRESS in the world’s darkest corners—to bear witness and document what others couldn’t or wouldn’t see—there’s something profoundly moving in seeing him appear and disappear in a Rorschach of serene beauty instead.
His companion in the image: our Sun, with its widening reflection on the water forming a golden body alongside his. One, ethereal, radiating its warmth with indifference— its golden light falling equally on celebration and carnage. The other, a man of memories painfully seared into his mind by flashes of light that turned flesh to ash.
The cannon beside him creates a perfect visual trick: in one dimension it seems aimed right at his heart, in another it looks past him toward the sea, and in another still it is inert, a relic stripped of all its menace by time and tourism. A fitting metaphor for someone in his line of work—how perspective can transform the same scene from threatening to benign, how what looks dangerous from one angle might actually be safe from another. How all this exists in minds that make a mess of it all.
There he stands with the expression of someone who harbors life’s joys alongside its sorrows. His lips at once a smile and a frown. Hands easy in his pockets, his stance relaxed against that ancient rigid fortification. Meanwhile below, humanity watches another Earthen sunset with the romance that can only exist in compartmentalized minds, but he’s standing there like someone who can see both sides of the coin at the same time.
There is art in standing beside the sun as an equal, invisible not because he’s hiding but because he has harmonized with his setting. After all the burning front-lines, killing grounds and shattered cities, here’s our friend melding into a sunset. May there be many more sunsets like this one, Imran. And happy Father’s Day.
Why every organization needs a resident historian—not just a marketing department
I’ve been thinking a lot about organizational effectiveness lately. I’m working on a primer for innocent bystanders thrust into high-stakes managerial roles, as a prelude to something even more ambitious—one that concerns a titan of industry—and since then, everything around me seems to be speaking in that language.
Last night, I attended the premiere of Tempest, an orchestral work by a composer friend, performed by the Q**** Philharmonic. The piece draws from the rhythmic foundations of Q***** pearl diving percussion and blends them with the seafaring musical traditions of Nordic, Celtic, and Baltic cultures. Beneath the obvious differences lies deep resonance and a shared rhythm shaped by wind, water, and survival at sea.
It was a remarkable experience. But I struggled to follow the modes or recognize the sonic codes. I was moved, but, unmoored, I drifted. Knowing the composer, I was certain that the work was layered with meaning that eluded me for lack of a processing framework.
That disorientation allowed my mind to drift to my daily plat du jour—management terrine—shaped by the mold in which it is made. I was reminded of the first time I stepped into an organizational leadership role without any bearings.
Despite your best efforts to discover, intuit, or interrogate a coherent picture of the organization, you struggle to find a critical mass of overlap. You sense there’s a rhythm to how things are done—a set of inherited assumptions, values, and buried conflicts—but no one can quite explain them. You’re handed a PowerPoint deck and a set of KPIs, but no backstory. No context. No through-line.
And without context, even the most brilliant efforts are susceptible to falling flat. It’s like entering a story halfway through—every action is vivid, but the meaning is lost. Worse, such efforts may lead to misalignment. At best, energy is spent—but not compounded.
Once upon a time, context was maintained through epic poems and tales transmitted down the generational line. Earlier civilizations may not have pursued coherence for its own sake, but they understood the power of story to legitimize rule, stabilize succession, and elevate victories into destiny. That’s why empires employed court historians. Their job wasn’t to report—it was to narrate. And while the motive was often glorification, the byproduct was cohesion: a shared encyclopedia, a sense of continuity, a framework through which people could make sense of the present. They helped a polity remember itself—not always truthfully, but usefully.
Today, that role has been quietly outsourced—if not erased. The modern equivalent, if one exists at all, is marketing.
To be sure, marketing has evolved to craft compelling narratives that insinuate themselves into the psyche and make you yearn for goods and services you never imagined needing. It knows how to mythologize products, how to dramatize launches, how to harness the emotional grammar of storytelling to build brands that feel like legends.
But marketing is built for speed. Its job is to chase relevance. It tells the story the market wants to hear—not necessarily the one the organization needs to remember.
And therein lies the irony: we understand the ancient power of narrative when it comes to our offerings. We hire agencies to weave myth into packaging. We pour millions into commercials that echo the Hero’s Journey. Our products have origin myths—but our people have amnesia.
Intra-organizationally, the story breaks down. Knowledge is managed, not narrated. Culture is defined in bullet points. “Lessons learned” are archived in shared drives no one visits. Strategy is deployed without memory. And slowly, coherence erodes.
The result? A kind of institutional drift. A feeling of disconnection. A lack of narrative ballast. And in moments of stress—mergers, pivots, leadership transitions—this absence becomes acute. People can’t see the pattern. They don’t know what came before, or why. They don’t know if this storm is survivable—because no one has told them that the organization has weathered worse.
This is where the historian belongs.
Not as an archivist. Not as a content generator. But as a resident meaning-maker.
The historian listens. Connects. Synthesizes. They draw lines from past to present and surface the stories that help people understand who they are part of, and why it matters. They recover buried episodes that deserve to be part of the institutional identity. They interrogate values—not just by asking what they are, but where they came from, when they held, and when they broke.
They don’t produce slogans. They craft coherence.
This is not a romantic gesture. It is good business. A single hire, a modest role—yet the benefits ripple: more resilient cultures, more grounded strategies, more humane onboarding, and a richer capacity to learn from experience.
It remains a wonder that Fortune 500s don’t all have resident historians. Especially when we know what stories can do. Especially when we invest so much in telling them—except when it comes to ourselves.
Levi’s has Tracey Panek. American Express employs Ira Galtman. A handful of others—Ford, CocaCola, IBM—have long maintained archives and occasionally retained in-house historical expertise. But these examples are exceptions, not the rule. And even they are often misdirected into brand archivists—curators of memorabilia rather than interpreters of meaning.
Slow thinking isn’t indulgence. It is infrastructure. And story—internal story—is the infrastructure of identity.
It’s time to bring back the historian. And give them a seat on the board.
With the guardrails down and the bus dangerously tilting into the ravine on the turns, the talking heads upfront joined together to repeat the refrain “Shalom, he should just go home” on the daily news as the First Amendment was turned into an irrelevant detail. This post was supposed to be a follow-up to My Last reaching out to those in the Jewish community who are fighting the madness that is being perpetrated in their name by MAGA in concert with Jewish Supremacy groups.
But something more urgent has come up.
Expressions of foodgasms are reaching pandemic levels. No matter your algorithm, a few swipes in—if not the very first post—you’ll be assailed by someone taking a fist-sized bite of their latest culinary triumph and melting into a slow-motion orgasm. Eyes shut, body swaying, moaning with pleasure.
When was this normalized?
Far be it from me to police people’s joy. Food is pleasure, and maybe—just maybe—some people really do experience deep-throated arousal from a well-toasted grilled cheese. Fine. I will allow that. But who, exactly, asked to see their faces inflagrante delicto?
If we were being forced to witness the rare moment when someone encounters an orchestra of flavors they’ve never experienced, I would simply have looked the other way. Although I would have thought a genuine experience along those lines would be more wonder than whoopee, had this been the case, I would have just gone on my merry way. But no, this is now every food post, every day.
Not to go all slippery slope on you but someone will soon up the ante and so we must ask ourselves, what’s next? In-mouth cameras streaming the dirty act of mastication.
Let’s be honest – if food is your profession, if you taste and critique it every day, are you really experiencing daily papillae erections?Every single thing you slap together—every slice of avocado toast, every sip of bone broth—is just so exquisite that your gustatory cells blow your eyes shut?
Have you no decency Sir? Madam? Siredam?
Please stop.
And if you share my distress, please reach out to the billionaire dictating online decency in your part of the world and ask them to show some integrity by putting foodgasms behind a paywall. Do it for the children.
