I was a researcher for Robert McKee during and after my PhD. It was a fabulous job. McKee is a brilliant writing teacher who also publishes books on writing. My job was to read background material and write summaries investigating questions McKee covered in his books and lectures.
These questions included:
Do we have free will?
How do we construct our self-identities?
What is self-deception and how does it work?
What is love and how does it work?
I was enjoying the research immensely when I sold my EdTech company, WelcomeToType1.com. McKee invited me to be managing director for his company and allowed me to hire my previous team. We started with a mountain of research establishing the personas of the current attendees, then we began trying out ads, content changes, messaging, emails, and direct outreach in order to:
grow the audience
encourage more evangelism amongst the audience
gain more seminar attendees from the audience
There was low-hanging fruit concerning trackable digital efforts. The key—we learned—was to implement these tactics in a way that did not cheapen the brand. Along the way we ran seminars in Brazil, New York, Los Angeles, London, and Amsterdam, mixing real-life qualitative research and customer service with our ramp-up of online efforts. It was a beautiful project with a beautiful team, who are still with McKee to this day. But as research turned to implementation, and I discovered an unusual allergy in the beautiful local of that beautiful crew, I turned my sights to California.