Medium Short: Prepare and stay open

Words to work and get hacked and live by

B. Lorraine Smith
9 min readJul 21, 2023
Coming in for a landing in the plane that brought us home after engine trouble on a field trip the day after I got cyber-hacked. A good week to have prepared and stayed open. (All photos by me in airspace between Beloeil and Sorel, QC July 2023)

Welcome to the latest Medium Short, a weekly accountability practice highlighting what I’m up to along the unmarked — mostly functional, not completely hacked — trail to #IndustrialHealing. Reminder: all my Medium articles are linked for free here.

Among the mottos I aim to live by, “prepare and stay open” was the dominant one that served me this past week. This phrase pushes me to keep improving in preparation for what’s ahead, and to stay open to the unknown that inevitably shows up to test the prep in unexpected ways.

This motto came in handy in this week’s work, trouble, and play.

Work: mining for meaningful lobbying data

I have been in the salt mines on a hard-hitting piece about lobbying. I finally struck the vein of data I was looking for and have built a solid set of reference material from which to tell a (hopefully) useful story.

The main finding is how much *publicly* traded companies are paying *publicly* elected officials to *privately* override the interests of the public in the name of profit.

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B. Lorraine Smith

Former sustainability consultant replacing ESG with reality-based insights about corporate purpose and impact. https://www.blorrainesmith.com/