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About Ken Renshaw
Dear Reader, I was Chief Scientist and Marketing Manager at a Fortune 500 company that manufactured communications satellites. We launched them on the Space Shuttle and other rockets. My job was to sell commercial satellites to companies that used them to broadcast TV and telephone services. AT&T and its foreign counterparts were typical customers. The trouble with selling satellites is nobody can see them. I couldn’t take a sample case around or sell them out of the back of my car. All I had to sell was the memes about satellites we could build. At the end of our four-year sales campaign, I wanted my customers to hold a large number of positive memes about our product: our company had more successful satellites in space than our competitors, our management was better than the competitors’, customers could make a lot of money from our product, and so forth. I had to orchestrate the communication of memes about good design from about a hundred of our technical specialists (most with technical Ph.Ds) with their counterparts in the customers’ organizations. Their memes were of the best way to build solar cells, transmitters, batteries, etc. I also had to sell the memes of who the specialists were as personalities: that our guys would be good to work with in overseeing the four-year design and building of the satellite. This process made me sensitive to the personal memes people held, their secret agendas and life patterns. It was good to identify the memes of people who played the games of life to lose and try to keep them out of our game. It was good to identify winners and those of high integrity. I made a lifelong study of recognizing the memes and patterns in peoples' lives. I came to understand that everybody’s life is a masterfully created story, their life work. I also understood that their life a year from now would be a logical and perhaps a creative extension of their life up to now. I call this process that everybody uses to make tomorrow the same as today and next month the same as last, Everyday Magic. It comes from our memes. I would love to hear from you about how you liked this book and your experiences in dealing with memes.-Ken Renshaw
Click here to read about the book and see the introduction.
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en is a native Californian, born in 1934. He is a retired scientist-engineer who worked as a satellite designer and marketing manager. He lives with his wife, Joyce, in Cambria, California.