Helping front office teams grow better

Here you’ll find an archive of Nathanael’s weekly email. In it, he features an essay and curated reading on technology + marketing + simplicity.

You can subscribe Nathanael's weekly email to get new posts every Friday:

An essay about leaving work for parenting

Want to walk into a trap? Venture any kind of opinion about how people with kids can or should balance working and parenting. There’s almost no right answer, and a lot of common sense takes you right into some almost-political arguments about gender norms, social standards, and the like.

Read

About Albany


At a library booksale in the late 1990s, I found an old paperback of James Howard Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere. After years of playing sim City, I was vaguely interested in how real places were zoned and constructed. Kunstler gave me a language about urbanism and walk-ability and such that helped me explain why the swathes of parking lots surrounding everything were useless and ugly. He clued me into the truth: most new places being build and zones were being done badly.

Read

In search of dynamism

Why would you want to find dynamism?

I think it’s because too many of our institutions and leaders pride themselves on stopping change or returning things to how they used to be.

Read
laptop and table doing digital strategy planning

The Digital Marketing Strategy of 2022 & Beyond

Marketing success requires knowing your business and how to reach your customers. The secret sauce for digital success adds an eye for the opportunities in the evolving digital space. For example, when I was a digital marketer for a political non-profit, I generated good results by borrowing ideas from B2C digital (emails like Apple) and political campaigns (Facebook like Obama).

Read

Reading - Fiction vs. Autofiction

This July, I’ve been slowly reading The Stories of John Cheever. He published short fiction in The New Yorker for half a century and won the Pulitzer for this 1978 collection.

Read
CRM Needs Chart

How to Choose a CRM System (and Keep It)

I’ve picked CRM systems a few times. Some flopped immediately, others worked at first but were outgrown, and only rarely did the CRM provide long-term value. But it’s those CRMs that stuck around that were the best: CRMs only add value if you keep them!

Read

Reading: Highways, Silos, & Alcohol

We’re about to push off for Plymouth. Like the Pilgrims of yore, we’ll have a minivan full of beach games, towels, and our beach wedding best on some hangers. It’s an early summer wedding, of my older brother.

Read

Reading: What's Wrong with Us?

BEVERLY, MA In our last local election, my longtime city councilor’s re-election message was a list of the things he’d opposed. Highlights on the list were stopping a gymnastics place from opening and successfully blocking the licensing of a new day care in our part of town; his lowlight was that he’d tried and failed to stop the new Whole Foods from going in. Happily for the neighborhood, his failure to stop the Whole Foods ensured that the old dump by the highway overpass was turned into an ok little shopping plaza.

Read

Nathanael's Reading

More than a hundred and fifty  people read the weekly email “Nathanael’s Reading,” which he’s sent every Friday since 2016. Nathanael includes original thoughts and curated reading on technology + marketing + simplicity. Subscribe by entering your email here