An Introduction: On Being Expansive
By: Annie Baierl
Tags: Personal Essay, Workplace, Beer, Business, Labor

What I do, what I am capable of doing, is being expansive — to extract a node or notion and draw it outward, enable multiple dimensions and tangents for it — all through an incredibly critical and strategic lens. I do not call myself a visionary. Seeing the unseen is different than having good foresight and intuition. What I do, and work hard at doing, is find iterative life for my work because I reject stagnancy. I think all that is done well and done right, can be boundless. This is how I operate as a creative and innovator within business.

After resigning from the craft beer industry, the last sector I worked in, it took many affirmations and readings to realize the truth of my expansiveness — that which I knew was already present, but was rarely permitted to actualize, and was constantly questioned while working in the industry. To even form these words, the words for my own ability to push boundaries, took time, distance and separation from certain systems and people — time to pull apart what I felt and wanted, from what they expected I wanted. Here I am today with this clarity.

I can’t help that which was shaped, encouraged and coached by empowering peers, professors, and mentors. Experiences I honor with privilege and fortune. I’ll never forget the first time a professor reviewed my work and said, “Annie, I know you are more creative than this.” A comment that sharpened me then and emboldens me now with a lasting and special stickiness.

When I began working in the craft beer industry, I knew I was entering a mostly white, male industry. What surprised me was how self-protective it was of that narrow monoculture. I was surprised to find throttled ideation and thought leadership, instead of an entrepreneurial broadening that practiced new business approaches. I watched new businesses open as templated copycats of each other, and I worked for breweries during the industry’s time of burgeoning coolness.

Nor did I find a self-aware industry — one that wanted to acknowledge its lacking, contradictions, and in-actions — which meant finding others who, like me, were looking for routes to correct course, was hard. So many repetitive replays of things that just weren’t working, but alas, that was the way it would be. Many times, the industry and business felt exactly that directionless.

I struggled to find an exploratory will within others. It’s not hard to pinpoint some reasons why — reasons of risk assessment in a low margin industry, and beer production preoccupations are not lost on me. My industry experience is sound and I do have a firm understanding of brewery business realities and resources. Expansiveness is not the cause for financial depleting and over-extending, as they would tell me. I can and will drop into my imagination, and be rooted to know scope, execution, and impact at the same time.

I firmly stand by my own pathway forward in business as a creative, a future-thinker, an upturning imagineer. If this sounds chaotic, then are you really innovative?

This series of essays will point a high beam light at the industry, and push against what you think you know about it, or how you’ve existed in it. Yes. It’s going to get punchy. But if you worked with me, or connected with me during my 4 years at 2 different breweries, I encourage you to read because I’m not really sure you knew the real expansive me. You will now.

While much of this will be written to identify points for change and action, I reject my own urgency, and the ask from others, to provide just that. I am in reality, just one writer — a writer with valid experiences, but I am careful to not travel too quickly through my expansiveness to a definitive solution on some fixed linear plot. And as a victim of many industry ills, that work does not need to be a part of my healing. And finally, my contributions and labor were painfully under-valued and under-compensated, so why would I provide a fix for free. What I hope is to point towards the pathways and alignments that I think are needed for cultural and structural improvements in the industry. That’s as far as I am comfortable taking it…for now.