NPR recently flipped their iconic three-letter logo from NPR to WHY — a campaign defending the public's right to curiosity at a moment when the organization is fighting for its funding and its future. It's a simple typographic swap that perfectly encapsulates its goal.

It sent me straight back to the first decade of my career, when getting a single idea approved that so much as suggested changing a small brand element felt like pulling teeth. Brand guidelines are sacred text and deviation is a crisis. And I understand the logic — consistency builds recognition, recognition builds trust. But somewhere along the way, rigidity started getting mistaken for integrity. NPR's WHY moment is a useful example: what other dusty brand rules are we protecting out of habit rather than purpose? The most interesting creative work often lives right at the edge of the guidelines or just past them.

There's a podcast called Expanded by the manifestation platform To Be Magnetic. I know my L.A. is showing, but I promise this goes somewhere marketing-related. In a recent episode, a guest named Allie Carr, who spent years writing for brands like Olipop, said something that stopped me mid-walk, "It's okay to know when you don't have something to say. I would rather say nothing for months than say things that everyone else is saying in a different way."

Meanwhile, I get scoped constantly for fifty social posts a month. Fifty. But we're not in a volume game anymore — we're in an attention economy where the average person is drowning in content that all looks and sounds the same. Most brands are just trying to copy Rhode or whatever the latest cool girl brand is, convinced that keeping up is the same as standing out. The brands that will actually win aren't the ones showing up every week with an Instagram Carousel. They're the ones with something specific, strange, and true to say. Silence, it turns out, can be a strategy.

One of the reasons I started Mise En Place Co is that I got tired of my time feeling like it belonged to someone else. The corporate calendar of mandatory team-bonding improv classes and weekly status calls that existed, as far as I could tell, primarily to justify the existence of other meetings. So much of corporate life is spent on things that feel forced, performative, and completely disconnected from the actual work — and at the end of the day it's just a time suck that you can never get back.

So I've been genuinely relieved by the resurgence of analog — and find it funny that we even have to give it a name. Journaling, ceramics, cooking something that takes three hours. It's not a trend, it's human need that was lost and is going to continue to require course-correction. The companies that will last are the ones that recognize this — building systems that actually give people their time back, and creating products or content that adds something real to people's lives instead of just competing for their attention. That's true whether you're designing a product, building a team, or deciding what to post on Tuesday.