Anna Aizic's memoir in letters manages to transcend numerous potential hazards of the form to engage and enlighten her readers. While she initially put this collection together in order to pay homage to her loved ones and preserve for her children the history of their fascinating family, I believe she has also managed to produce an important historical document. The personal accounts she includes of life during and after World War II in the stunning port city of Odessa, Ukraine, echo with her remarkable extended family's indefatigable hope and humor and, as Anna would say, love of Life. Yet...

Early in my career I had the honor to serve in the Navy on fast attack submarines. At the time, submarines were focused on intelligence gathering, strategic deterrence, and preparing to fight WWIII against the Soviets. To accomplish such missions, submariners had to operate fairly complex machinery in a hostile environment with a crew made up of personnel in their twenties. On the surface, marketing and being a submariner are not exactly similar. But as a new digital CMO at a purely inbound B2B-driven software company, the more I dug into the problem of building the operating framework for my...