Launching a new website is an interesting exercise in personal and corporate self-reflection. During all this navel pondering I noticed a repeating theme - both in my life and in those of the people I like to work with and be around: ‘idealism.’ It is a trait that some may consider naive, but for me it’s what gets me out of bed in the morning.

Mark and I both left comfortable jobs (amazing jobs, really) in the public sector to stake our future on an ideal: to do important work and to make a positive difference. In fairness, much of what we did for FEMA met that definition, but our idealism reached beyond assisting victims of disaster in the US. We wanted to use our skills to help a broad spectrum of clients working on issues we could really believe in. Pretty idealistic, huh?

Well it has worked out pretty well nonetheless. In the past couple of years we had the opportunity to play a small roll in supporting an effort to raise money for a new autism research center at Columbia; we helped promote an organization providing critical life services for mature adults in Delaware; we have been producing training videos for rural transit providers who do a lot more than drive busses - they preserve people’s mobility, independence, and access to work, family and opportunity; and we’ve helped humanitarian aid agencies tell their story of helping refugees, victims of conflict and war, the hungry and the forgotten.

Being a small business is not without its share of headaches, but the upside is every project we have worked on I’ve cared about, in fact been passionate about. Not a bad way to make a living.

Launching this new web site has been a bit of a struggle. Leveraging communication technology to tell a story is what NCI does best. We help government agencies, non-profits and other organizations to successfully communicate their stories every day. Yet for us to tell our own story, we faced a challenge. You see, the people of NCI are a bit complicated.

Take a look around the web site and see the expertise and experience of each NCI staffer, and you witness a minor renaissance. Bryan Dahlberg is an amazing photographer and designer, but he also builds cameras that are themselves works of art. Michael Rieger, another wonderfully talented photographer, is as comfortable with unformed clay as he is with a camera.

The NCI renaissance isn’t just limited to art. Bob Pearson, Cynthia Hunter and Susie Shapira have trained their lenses on some of the biggest events of our time – both domestic and international. NCI staffers have helped to tell stories on every continent but Antarctica.

And we can’t forget Gary Gleason. Not only does he contribute a wealth of knowledge about crisis communication and adult learning, but he’s also the best outdoor athlete I know.

At NCI we strive to achieve a superior creative process for our clients. We believe that the process can be as important as the product we help them to create. That simply would not be possible without the skills and creative insight that our people bring to every project. They are the reason why Jim and I believe so much in this company, and we’re lucky to be able to work with them.