By Ted Leonhardt
The fantasy continues…
The smoke was thicker now. They were running down the stairs. Hitting the landings hard. Pivoting, attacking the next flight.
“Brie, Brie, how many more flights?”
“We’re close now, I think.”
Finally, the doors. The smoke was coming up from below. Fire in the garage? Who knew. Allison hit the panic bar. Sirens sounded. They were out.
Eyes streaming tears. Faces streaked with soot. Smoke out here, too, but at least they could breathe.
“The founders never had to deal with this.”
Allison answered: “Maybe not, but they did anticipate it.”
Allison had been interviewing Brie for a Times piece. Now she was in the thick of it.
Founders meeting
The planning meeting wasn’t going well. The only concrete progress was agreement on a name for the co-op, and that had been weeks ago. “Not surprising,” Tommy thought, “since most of the group came from design and branding. Good at creating lies; not so good at defining the future.”
The name was Overture. He liked the name, but unless it actually stood for something it was a waste of time.
They’d lost at least two of their most promising people during the laborious process of getting consensus. One of them, Stacy, was an immensely talented manager. Tommy thought she’d be a great CFO. So not only had they lost a talent, they had to reopen the search for a financial person. Shit.
And what had Stacy said when she quit? “Too much democracy for me. I guess I’m just too much of a capitalist.”
Overture
Overture Creative Cooperative. It was a great name. And their purpose was great, too: sustainable income for worker-owners. Work that was good for people and the planet.
“The founders had their hearts in the right place from the start,” Allison thought. “I’ll build the article around the founders’ foresight.”
Shooting now. Close.
“If I live to write it.”
Brie grabbed Allison’s hand: “This way!” And they ran.
They knew the recent protests had been about the city’s exclusion of the homeless, the “working poor” and much of the lower end of what was left of the middle class. But as far as Allison knew, there’d only been sporadic violence so far. This was much worse. There were fires in cars and shops, all around.
They kept running.
Slow and frustrating
Tommy looked around the room. There were only six of them in attendance: four women and two men. “At least we got that right,” he thought. Everything he’d read on teamwork said that teams with more women than men were the most productive. Three others of the currently active group—two men and a woman—weren’t in attendance.
“Let’s set an agenda. What should we focus on…?”
“Logo,” someone said.
“God,” Tommy thought, “how can we waste time on a logo when we don’t know what we’re going to be doing? There’re more than enough people focused on branding and logos in the world already.”
So he said “Offer—we need to pin down our offer.”