Have you tested your vision lately?

Gertrude Stein arrived in Paris in 1903 and within a few years would found one of the city’s renowned salons with her brother Leo. The weekly explorations in their studio at 27 rue de Fleurus drew iconic visionaries from Hemingway to Picasso and Ford Maddox Ford to Apollinaire for weekly discussions about art and literature. Though Stein claimed she didn’t tutor young writers, she was known for being very opinionated about the craft of writing and was outspoken as to what it took to be a good scribe. “When the vision is not complete,” she insisted, “the words are flat, it is very simple, there can be no mistake about it.”

Though she was referring to a writer’s vision before and during the process of creating a literary work, Stein could have been advising a business creating a social media campaign: without strong perceptions to back up its intentions, the effort will ring false. I’ve been fascinated by the stories I’ve heard about the liveliness of the rue de Fleurus salon gatherings since I learned of them, and I’ve always wanted to be able to build a community of thinkers that would bring the same level of vivacity to life but, as so many of us have, I’ve been concentrating on doing whatever it takes to “pay the rent” during my career thus far. 

When Rich and I first joined forces to found adroyt, we realized we both felt strongly about creating a company with depth. We’ve been working for the past four months to articulate that vision for ourselves so that what we bring to the table—both for our clients and in our own online platform—goes beyond the superficial noise the subject of social media often inspires. During the past few weeks, it occurred to us that if we strike the depth we wish to strike with our articulation of what it is we do and how we go about it, adroyt’s model will be very “salon-like.” 

This has inspired us to begin a tradition, which we are announcing today: our adroyt salon. We hope it will create a lively interchange of ideas as we intermingle our lighthearted posts and factual posts (like #WhyteWednesday™) with explorations that reflect our deeper vision. As this unfolds, we will be lobbing questions at you that we believe will inspire important discussions for those of us who value the act of thinking more deeply than the six-o’clock-news sound-bites allow. If you are interested in participating, let us know by leaving a comment. If this does appeal to you, we will be “saloning” on Thursdays, sending a question out one week to be discussed the following week here on our blog (at which point we’ll keep the ball rolling with another question). 

Though intended to inspire debate, the explorations won’t be intimidating and we want to make this fun. We’re giving you two weeks for this first question, which we will discuss on July 21st—we’ll remind you beforehand, of course, because we know how vaca-brain tends to take hold this time of year. We’ve noticed the publication of a flurry of books on the Beat Poets lately so our first question is “Do you believe it’s the outsiders in a society or a culture who usually become the catalysts for change?” We can’t wait to hear what you think: welcome to our salon!

This is a participating post in #LetsBlogOff. To see our compatriots in tradition-bound crime, click here for a linked-up list.