VP of Marketing, Bay Area

I was recently asked what I want from a job. Here was my response: I want to work at a place where I can be gutsy and smart and mighty and robust—where I can work with people like me and NOT like me. I want to laugh and enjoy myself at work. I want to be strong and aggressive and tough and resilient and full of feeling. I want to help people. I want to have chutzpah. I want a job that makes me do the kind of thinking that involves changing direction, reconsideration, wrestling with ideas. I want a job that is like a cubist painting—allowing me to look at ALL sides and aspects involved—and I want to make good decisions. And at the end of the day, I want to wonder if we could have done better. I want a job that doesn’t let me “mail it in” every day at work. I believe work can be an act of discovery; an opportunity to say something you had never before thought of saying. I never want to meet a client or a project and say, “no—we can’t do that.” I always want to say, “Yes, we can do that,” and then figure it out. I want to bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to everything I work on. (But rest assured, I will NEVER slow down the process.) I want a job that helps me guard that shine and glow I had as a kid—that eternal optimism of the untried, the untested, the inexperienced, the unimpressed. And I want a job that allows me to match that optimism up with my 15 years of work experience. I want to work at a place where rules are no substitution for a brain—where reasonability always trumps policy, and where kindness always overrides meanness. I want a job where I can and will be joyous, adventurous, cheeky, creative, inquisitive, demanding, competitive, caring, and defiant. I want to be potent; to do good when I can and to hold my wit and my intelligence like a shield against other people's banality. I want a job where I can make money. Please know also, I will always be a gentleman. I make dozens of paintings a year. I try to live life deliberately. I believe I can help people even if I only have a minute with them. I can make people laugh. I have good ideas—and bad ones—and I’m willing to share them all. I am passionate about art and people. I have made it a point in my life to acknowledge the introvert, the clown, the artist, the reserved, the distraught, the goofball, the thinker—these are my friends. I firmly believe that nature is overrated. I love my wife and kids. I collect books and chairs. I don’t have a favorite book—but I love books. I have fought, through my corporate life, to keep the hum of perpetual noticing in my ears—that hum we all had as kids. I am an optimist. I am not a rankist, nor am I a stuckist. I think I was addicted to Raman Noodles for a while. Thank you for reading this. John Beeson 925.286.8434 jsbeeson@gmail.com

Art Director

Walnut Creek, CA