Intern Report: My Summer Reading List

October 1, 2012

The first email I received as an intern at Resource Media was titled “Your Summer Reading List.” My first reaction was “Huh? You care if your interns read?” I was psyched to learn quickly that this is a place that believes bringing in and talking about new ideas is crucial to doing good work.

The email was an introduction to my team’s book club, a pan-office group of Resource Media staff who read books, directly or indirectly related to the work we do, about four times a year and meet to discuss. This time around we read Story Wars by Jonah Sachs, a new take on implementing storytelling in branding, drawing on ancient Greek mythology.

The book was great, but the biggest impact came from the discussion. People in different offices working on different projects came back with different take-aways. Liz in the Seattle office, who was preparing for several branding workshops came up with a new branding map based on Sachs’ Hero’s Journey. Cat in our DC office was thinking more about how to apply Sachs’ idea of empowerment marketing, the recent shift from product-focused to consumer-focused marketing, to her current work developing message recommendations for one of her partners. Without the “club” part of the book club, caught up in our own head spaces we might have missed these important angles. This is what Resource Media is about, not just staying on top of the new mediums for communication, but the ideas that birth them. It was fantastic to sit in on the conversation.

– Kate Guenther, Resource Media Seattle Summer Intern