C.C. Chapman

Every day I wake up to a warm embrace and a wet nose from my youngest pup Jaz. She sits quietly next to my side of the bed first to see if I’ll wake up and when I don’t she jumps up to say good morning. This happens at four am every day. This has been going on for at least a year now and I’ve grown used to it. Sometimes I even wake up moments before she does and I’ll grab and hug her when she says hello. It has shifted my night time routine to going to bed earlier than I ever use to so that I still get roughly seven hours of sleep every night. Rising, I feed the animals, pour my first cup of coffee and sit down in the silence of my living room to do my morning surf. While I know plenty of productivity experts would hate this, for me it works. I quickly know if anything pressing arose overnight and I catch up on what my friends are doing around the globe. Then I read through the New York Times and Apple News to be sure I’m updated on the day’s headlines. Lately, I’ve been thinking I should use the quiet time that follows more productively though. Perhaps I should go downstairs and throw a sandbag around or ruck a few miles on the treadmill. Maybe I should break out the laptop and work on my next book that has been boiling up to the surface over the last couple of weeks. The usual is to watch a documentary or whatever series I’m currently binging. (Loved the new Jack Ryan show by the way.) The more I thought about it this morning, the more I realized that I needed the quiet morning hours of nothing in my recent past to balance out everything else that was going on in my life. Today, things are more stable, prepared and organized. The chaos of last semester with new classes, lectures and day-to-day figuring things out at a new school have settled down into a new semester that has a solid foundation and I can build on top of rather than trying to clear the land and build at the same time. It feels good. It feels inspiring. Mentally, I feel comfortable spending time and brain cycles on my art. Those things that give me deep seeded satisfaction, but might not give my family immediate support. Writing, photography and other creative outlets have long since been put on a shelf and only allowed out to play from time to time. Now, I want to take them down, dust them off and let my imagination run wild. Stability is a new thing in my world and while we never know how long we’ll have it for it is simply refreshing to have it at all. My quiet moments are evolving. I like that.

This summer was busier and more rewarding than I ever imagined it would be. The hours spent teaching, mentoring and managing the Wheaton Innovates (WiN) Team of students challenged my mind and filled my heart. If you’ve been following along with my weekly posts, thanks for reading. If not, to catch you up I was given the reigns of the partnership between Wheaton College and MassChallenge. The ask was to choose a group of student and turn them into a successful consulting team that would work with some of the most promising new startups in New England. We spent several weeks in the classroom learning the basics. I already know that there were some lessons I didn’t teach and must be part of the curriculum in the future. The time on site at MassChallenge was inspiring and full of meetings, laughs, and excellent work. In the end, we had 31 different companies request our services and projects completed for 17 of them. Our work included developing marketing strategy plans, producing videos, taking headshots, creating social media content and developing a website. Not bad for a brand new team over six weeks is it? For some of the students, this was their first work experience. Many of them were working with technology and on projects that they had never thought of doing before. It was fun to watch them choose to shadow on projects where they didn’t yet feel comfortable to contribute but wanting to learn. They learned how you never know during a requirements gathering meeting if the client is going to be a joy or difficult to work with and that no matter how cool a project sounds if a client can’t get the logistics worked out on their side it doesn’t happen. Thank you to everyone at MassChallenge for making us feel welcomed and to the startups who we will be rooting for even now that our work together is complete. I’ve not mentioned the team members by name up until now because I wanted to wait until the end of our time together to share more about them. If you are looking to hire the next great junior member of your team, you should click through and hire one of these marvelous students. Angel Bird, Alex Stomberg, Jules Bibonimana, Zhuo Chen, Alvaro Guerra Rodriguez, Christina Smith and Keegan Dougless are all going to do amazing things in this world and whoever is smart enough to hire them is going to be happy they did. Thank you WiN Team for a great summer and working hard throughout. I hope you had as much fun as I did.

My long business career has included managing a variety of people. My shorter teaching career has included teaching a variety of students. This summer, as I manage seven students in a classroom and an office, has been a challenging and rewarding experience for me. When you are a professor, the goal is to manage the knowledge that the students learn and try to help them earn the best grade possible. The focus is on them directly. As a manager, the goal is to deliver the best result for the business you are working for. While independent development and growth of the individual employee is essential, you have to look out for the greater good of the client and business first sometimes. But, where are the lines when your employees are also your students? That has shown itself to be a fascinating relationship. This past week the work continued. We held our usual status meeting, and each member of the team was instructed to come with a detailed update of where each of their projects stood, any obstacles from successful completion of those projects and any help they needed from the team. During this meeting, a member of the team broke one of my few rules for the summer when they shared that they had delivered a completed project to the client without me seeing it and approving it first. This went from being irritating to infuriating when after the meeting I looked at the work, and it was less than stellar.  The mistake wasn’t going to cause a stock price to plummet or even a reaction from the client (thankfully), but I am not one for pushing out less than excellent work, and this didn’t fit that criteria. I worked with the student/employee to make sure things were fixed, and everything worked out fine. Today, though I needed to sit down and talk through the whole situation with them. The key for me is that we all make mistakes and we are always learning. I want to make sure that they never do this again in and to make them as successful as possible in whatever career path they walk down. It wasn’t a comfortable meeting. The important ones rarely are.  In the end, it was worth it and in my heart, I know that this student will make a great employee for their future managers. We laughed as I mentioned to them someday in the future they’d need to have a talk like this with an employee and they’d look back and laugh as they remembered.  The more I think about, and the more I reflect, this is precisely why Wheaton College puts such an emphasis on experiential learning. Why we push the students beyond the assignments in the classroom and out in the real world where memorizing facts alone does little for your success. This summer the WiN Team has spent time in the classroom and the trenches learning. Nothing ever goes wholly smooth, and while there have been a few hiccups this summer, there has been nothing that has dampened how proud I am of the team and the work they’ve done. The line between professor and manager may be a wiggly one, but I’m glad I got to navigate it this summer. 

One of the most exciting aspects of being a manager is watching your employees grow and prosper. The hard part is that when you hire someone, you only guess how they are going to perform. You wouldn’t hire them in the first place if you didn’t believe they’d be able to deliver. But, it isn’t until they start working that you find out if they live up to your expectations or not. As talented and dedicated all the Wheaton College students on the WiN Team are, this past week began to show me how different each member of the team is. They bring different work ethics, approaches to projects and personalities. It is crunch time for all of us with only two weeks left in the program and numerous projects are being worked on. While these students have completed plenty of group projects in school, none of them have been part of so many different project teams at one time. Some have handled it well. Carving out blocks of time to focus on a single deliverable. Others jump back and forth hoping to cover all the bases. A few learned how much I despise the statement of, “I have nothing to work on at the moment.” This week, the team focusing on Kushae by BK Naturals put their heads down and did nothing but create social media content for them one day. This may sound like a simple undertaking, but some of that time was spent learning Photoshop and Canva so that everyone could contribute to the image creations. There was a big smile on my face as I reviewed the images and messages they developed. I was a little worried when they first signed the contract because of how much work needed to be done, but they stepped up and delivered. It’ll be fun to see the clients reaction to them all and even better when they start going live across their accounts. We also had a big win this week with the delivery of a promotional video for the findSisterhood app.  This company was one that the team identified they’d like to work with earlier in the summer, so going from that desire all the way to a satisfied client was an excellent experience for all involved. Founder, Ana Pompa Alarcón Rawls had this to say about our work: “The WiN Team was amazing. When we worked together, they had the best attitude and were very professional. The result of their work is incredible. I’d immediately hire them for my own team. I especially want to point out how extremely friendly every single team member is, it makes all the difference.” On top of this work, there is a lot of brainstorming and strategizing going on for a variety of clients. We took some time to hole up in a conference room and focus specifically on the differences in the B2B world because three documents are being written for startups in this arena. There is also research being done for an Influencer Marketing campaign and reviewing of financial documents to help a client do better. While not the focus of our work, our team caught a mistake in a client’s financial calculations that hopefully will help them in the future. There is plenty of work still to be done in our final days. I know a lot of my time will be spent reviewing deliverables before turning them over to our clients. From the beginning, my hope for this team was that they’d all learn new skills that would help them in their future careers and it feels like that is precisely what is happening.

Yesterday, the rain didn’t want to stop and when it did a gray humidity stuck around to remind you that it wasn’t a day to be outside enjoying the world. Most of my day was spent reading and finishing Creative Quest. A must-read for anyone who knows in their bones that they are creative. We had the rug in our living room cleaned so that isolated us to our sunroom and my office. Pausing, I looked around my office. The dog beds were in here, so Jaz was fast asleep on hers. I laughed as I composed the photo and still am not sure how she sleeps this way. The photo switched me into observer mode. The variety of books, photography and outdoor gear, my choice of art on the wall and the randomness of the souvenirs that could be seen. A friend from college on Facebook mentioned that all of these things had been part of my life as long as she had known me. That made me smile, but also made me realize how right she is. Looking around the rest of my office, on my desk around my fingers as I type this and in any backpack, I have with me on any given day there is the same variety. Books – They feed my soul. My Kindle has a never-ending library of books that I want to read. Having that library with me at all times makes me feel good. The stack of books to read and ones available to flip though make me happy. I’ve had friends who decided to get rid of all their books because of the space they take up, and that baffles me. While I appreciate downsizing and the minimalism lifestyle it isn’t for me. Any time I need a jolt, I can slide a book off the shelf and get what I need. There are photography books, travel memoirs, cookbooks and a few comic books. When I need a reminder that I am creating things of value, I only need look at my shelf of the books I’ve written that have been translated to other languages and it helps balance my mood back out. Gear – My name is C.C., and I’m a gear lover. It doesn’t matter if it is for camping, photography, video or anything else. I love gear. I’m always trying to find the best gear to use in every situation. That is why you’ll see a GORUCK GR1 sitting next to my Evergoods CP24L and my Eagle Creek suitcase still sitting here from my recent trip to London. My Canon camera is laying next to an old Samsung one and a Google Pixel. My Benchmade folder is laying next to my Serepick kit. To put down my coffee cup this morning, I had to relocate the new microphones that arrived last week from Shure and R0DE to test out and review. There is an endless sea of cables and connectors. No matter how much I prune down and focus in on the best gear for me, there will always be plenty around me to choose from. Art – Hanging on my office walls are a couple of Chank Diesels and a bunch of Hugh MacLeods. There are also a few of my photographs, my prized signed Dogma poster and a poem my Great-Grandfather wrote. Part of me thinks I should change out the art from time to time, but each was hung for a reason, so it keeps me from changing them. But, I need to have creativity hanging around me to help inspire me. It adds a layer of comfort and a blanket of inspiration. Walk through our house, and you’ll find a different variety of art. Paintings from Laura’s Great-Grandfather, a painting we bought on a trip to New Orleans and a couple of special photographs from friends. Everyone has different tastes and styles, but art is something to be appreciated, and I’m always interested in looking at more. Souvenirs – These are not the shot glasses and t-shirts you find in every airport, but more personal mementos from my travels over the years. The crystal Coke bottle from one of my favorite client projects, a hand-turned mug from Fargo, the challenge coin given to me by a loving fan, the rug I bought in Istanbul and my iron buffalo from speaking in South Dakota. While they all may appear random and without thought, each of them is on display for a particular reason, and I can tell you the story behind every one of them. Sure, they get dusty and take up space, but they also give me an instant smile. One look at the top of my desk and I’m instantly transported back to Ghana, Amsterdam or my fifth-grade performance of The Lorax. Why do I tell you these things? Why not? I write to get the words out of my head and into the soul of a few that might read them. Perhaps a bit of it is because as I looked around, I realized how badly I need to clean my office, and while I know this has to be done, I know that piles of new things will appear in the coming weeks and months. Having a home office and studio is a true blessing for me. It empowers me to do the work I need to do in an environment that benefits my soul. Being surrounded by that which makes me happy is the icing on the cake. What do you surround yourself with? Take a few minutes to think about it. If nothing else, I hope it makes you smile.