Whether in the creative, academic, or health and data, technology is evolving at a rapid pace. Adaptability is crucial to innovators and the business minded. Thought leaders agree that the human element will remain a key component to solving problems, as well as creating solutions across research and business.

How do you feel about the way artificial intelligence is modifying business practices?

We see AI as a collaborator, not a replacement. It’s a tool that amplifies human creativity rather than diminishing it. —Skye Bailey, Producer, Gannet Creative House

Artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing how academic labs operate. AI tools are increasingly being used to automate experimental design and enhance fabrication workflows through AI-guided optimization and property prediction. While this transformation is positive, it requires thoughtful oversight. —Dr. Jamel Ali, Professor of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering, FAMU-FSU College of Engineering and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, and Research Team

AI isn’t replacing people; it’s empowering them. The most successful organizations will blend human judgment with machine precision. We have been focused on moving folks from fear to fluency. —Eduardo Gonzalez Loumiet,  MBA, PMP, CPHIMS, Partner, Ruvos

→ How do you balance adopting new technologies with maintaining the human element in your business?

While we embrace innovation, we never lose sight of storytelling, emotion, and human connection. Those are the things technology can enhance but never replicate. Our goal is always to use tech to serve the story, not the other way around. —Skye Bailey, Producer, Gannet Creative House

Internally, it all comes down to making sure authority and accountability is given to a person in a position to grow and succeed. We have very different tools now than we did 11 years ago, but it’s still about giving our people hard problems, lots of sharp tools, and room to explore. —John Wargo, Chief Technology Officer, Beast Code

→ What innovation do you believe will have the biggest impact on your industry in the next five years?

The largest impact will likely come from hybrid fabrication platforms that combine high-resolution 3D printing
with multimaterial multiscale capabilities. —Dr. Jamel Ali, Professor of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering, FAMU-FSU College of Engineering and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, and Research Team

I strongly believe the combination of AI and interoperability will finally connect our nation’s public health infrastructure with the private health care space, creating a smarter, more resilient system for everyone. —Eduardo Gonzalez Loumiet, 
MBA, PMP, CPHIMS, Partner, Ruvos

I think that connectivity technologies (5G, Internet Constellations, etc.) are going to continue to connect previously disconnected environments. Lightweight data visualization has been in high demand, and years ago we pivoted to bring a web-based company to better take advantage of it. Right now, internet and internal network access continues to be a challenge, but with connectivity technology on the rise, I think a lot of those barriers will start breaking down. —John Wargo, Chief Technology Officer, Beast Code

→ In one word, how would you describe the pace of technological change in your field right now?

Relentless. —Skye Bailey, Producer, Gannet Creative House

Accelerating. —Dr. Jamel Ali, Professor of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering, FAMU-FSU College of Engineering and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, and Research Team

Exponential. —Eduardo Gonzalez Loumiet,  MBA, PMP, CPHIMS, Partner, Ruvos

→ Parting words of wisdom:

Technology should always serve people. The goal isn’t to chase the next big thing but to use innovation with intention … to solve real problems, empower communities, and make life better for others. —Eduardo Gonzalez Loumiet,  MBA, PMP, CPHIMS, Partner, Ruvos

In recent years, concern for inclusion and equality has been a focal point for discussion often fueled by a tremendous amount of emotional energy. Rightfully so.

From a societal perspective and consistent with the founding principles and ideals of our country, we can agree that all people are equal and should be treated in a similar manner, no matter what their race, ethnicity, religious beliefs, gender and physical abilities may be.

What a wonderful world it would be if it were dominated by tolerance, acceptance and understanding.

Always, there are differences between the real and the ideal. Throughout recorded history, collectives ranging from tribes to alliances of nations have engaged in conflict. Wars are being waged today.

Daily, we see scenes from the war in Ukraine in what has become a prolonged battle. Millions of people have been wounded, killed or displaced. Cities lie in ruins. Refugees flee to destinations unknown. We sympathize with the war’s victims, and wonder, “Isn’t the human race better than this?”

It is easy to become discouraged by or even numbed by the news. Still, we must avoid thinking that war is unavoidable, and we must continuously embrace peace as a goal.

Within our own country, deep divisions exist. People have a tendency to gather information only from sources with whom they are philosophically and politically aligned, and differences harden. Cooperation, even conversation, becomes difficult.

Absolutely, it is not easy for someone to turn to another and say, “I find some of your actions and opinions to be hurtful. Can we talk?”

The audience for our magazines at Rowland Publishing is diverse, and we make a conscious effort to write stories about people with diverse backgrounds and frames of reference. That is, we are intentionally inclusive. But in being so, it is important that we always consider how any story we publish may affect readers with beliefs and points of view that may depart from those of the subject of a story.

Within the past few months, Rowland Publishing made an error in judgment in allowing a story to run without incorporating an opposing outlook. We should have done better. Because we did not, we appeared to be endorsing one opinion to the exclusion of others.

When I heard from people who were disturbed by the story, I extended them a heartfelt apology and immediately removed the story from our websites.

As an employer, Rowland Publishing strives in every aspect to be inclusive and treat every member of our team in an equal manner. That is the law, and it is the right thing to do. It is also the smart thing to do. Workplaces are enriched by diversity.

As a publisher, I deliver magazines to more people than I will ever know. But one day, you may be inclined to reach out to me and ask, “Can we talk?” When you do, please know that my answer will be yes.

Respectfully,

Brian Rowland
browland@rowlandpublishing.com

In this edition of 850 Business Magazine, we have poked around the subject of corporate values. My thanks go out to author Denise Lee Yohn for her helpful article about ensuring brand/values consistency and to the panel of students from FSU Panama City who fielded questions about their habits as consumers of products, services and information.

I have from time to time been involved in discussions aimed at arriving at values statements — or vision or mission statements or what have come to be known as diversity/equity/inclusion statements. Many of those meetings lacked genuineness. It was as if coming up with core values was a requirement that had been imposed by an outside authority; the effort, then, was to come up with something that sounded right.

But when honestly arrived at and consistently applied, values statements can serve a business or organization as guideposts. A company contemplating a new product initiative, relationship or acquisition may ask itself whether the action aligns with the values it espouses.

Today, I arrived at the following core values list …

Industriousness: We derive satisfaction and achieve a sense of purpose by working hard in pursuit of ambitious goals.

Loyalty: We benefit as individuals from the combined efforts of all members of our community and in exchange devote ourselves to shared pursuits.     

Perseverance: We meet setbacks with a renewed sense of resolve and a commitment to always building back better.

Cooperation: We demonstrate every day that we are greater than the sum of our parts. With all of our oars in the water and pulling in the same direction, we conquer tall challenges.   

Respect: We value and appreciate the contributions made and roles played by everyone with whom we work.

… and did so not with a particular business in mind. Rather, I wrote it to reflect an ant colony. While people may struggle to steadily live by the values listed, ants seem never to depart from them. Such consistency has brought ants great success. They have been around for some 140 million years, and according to a study published last year by researchers at the University of Hong Kong, there are 20 quadrillion ants on Earth — 2.5 million for every man, woman and child on the planet. Indeed, there seems sometimes to be 5 million fire ants in my backyard, alone.

Farhad Manjoo, writing in The New York Times, noted similarities between ants and humans: “They live in societies, they’ve all got jobs, they endure arduous daily commutes to work,” while also remarking that much of ant life confounds him.

“There’s the abject selflessness, the subsuming of the individual to the collective,” Manjoo wrote. “There’s the absence of any leadership or coordination, their lives dictated by instinct and algorithm, out of which emerges collective intelligence.”

Manjoo cites the late E.O. Wilson, for whom the Biolphilia Center on State 20 near Freeport is named. Wilson, a leading expert on ants in his day, marveled at ant nests that he viewed as “cities to rival anything in the human world.” In the latter stages of his career, he focused on people and the notion of self, concluding that the conscious mind cannot be separated from the neurobiological system of which it is a part.

Nonetheless, we humans operate based on free will more than instinct and present more individual differences than any other species. Those FSU PC students I mentioned prize individuality. Young people arrive in workplaces today with the expectation that job sites will conform to them. The individual demands expression. Consider the young woman who bagged my groceries the other day. She wore a company green shirt and conformed to a dress code calling for black pants, a black belt and black sneakers. But she also wore purple pigtails. Her apron was dotted with pins and her wrists were spotted with tattoos. Tackle hung from her ears.

We live in interesting times. Paranoia strikes deep, the self sounds a beat, divisions are steep and yet we must somehow arrive at a kind of global cooperation the world has never seen if we are to survive ourselves. Can we summon what we need? Can we conquer the challenges that confront us? The ant-swers are blowin’ in the wind.

Value this day, 

Steve Bornhoft

Editor, 850 Business Magazine
sbornhoft@rowlandpublishing.com

In the 1930s, a great entrepreneur was taking his first steps in a remarkable journey to success. He sold sodas at baseball games and eventually saved enough money to buy a Sinclair gas station — for $360.

Jim Moran was in the right place at the right time. The auto industry was taking off, and Moran worked hard in making his business the highest-volume seller of gasoline in Chicago.

Moran, meanwhile, had a lot of gas in his tank. He went on to establish the world’s largest Hudson Ford dealership. His success in the car business led Toyota to approach him in 1968, and Moran brought about Southeast Toyota.

Today, Moran’s highly successful JM Family Enterprises employs more than 5,000 people and is one of the largest and most diversified companies in the auto industry. Its principal operations are vehicle distribution and processing, finance and insurance, and retail vehicle sales. Its interests also include home improvement specialty franchises.

The Chicago-born Moran has been a great friend to Tallahassee. He and his wife Jan donated $100 million, the largest gift in Florida State University’s history, to establish the Jim Moran College of Entrepreneurship. Flourishing in a building in downtown Tallahassee, the institute furnishes today’s budding entrepreneurs with valuable lessons as they start their own journeys to success.

I have had the privilege of being a founding member of the Tallahassee CEO Peer2Peer Group, which is an extension of the Jim Moran Institute. An initial group of 10 entrepreneurs was assembled based on characteristics of their businesses, such as annual sales and number
of employees.

Now, admission to the groups — several now exist in Tallahassee — is by invitation. Confidentiality agreements are signed, and regular attendance is expected. The group gets together monthly for a 90-minute lunch meeting guided by a facilitator from the Jim Moran Institute.

The members, representing businesses of a similar size, relate well to one another’s challenges. At each meeting, a couple of members raise a hand and describe a difficulty or concern they are experiencing. Other members then speak to how they handled a similar situation at their business. The hand-raisers can then apply those experiences as they see fit to their own circumstances.

I am in my third decade as a member of the CEO Peer2Peer Group. It is one of the best investments of time I have ever made. The lessons I have learned from others have been invaluable.

Thanks to Jan and Jim Moran, I am a better entrepreneur, leader and publisher. They have made a great difference in my life and that of FSU, Tallahassee and the state of Florida.

Be well,
Brian Rowland
browland@rowlandpublishing.com

My boat has become temperamental — slow to start some days and engaging in maddening work slowdowns on others when its exertion level tops out at 1,200 rpm — and I have gotten to know, better than I would have intended, the owner of a small business who makes his living working on outboard engines.

In Bay County where I live, there is far from a surfeit of boat mechanics, and as the dean among their small number — a man of my age for gosh sake — has begun to slow down, Daniel Thompson’s shop has become oh so busy. Getting an appointment with him can be something like getting in to see a leading cardiologist.

We chatted the other day for a few minutes, Thompson and I, after I dropped off my modest vessel, the Bullpen, for servicing. We spoke about TechFarms, a business incubator located next door to Thompson Marine Services.

I had recently interviewed TechFarms’ founder Steve Millaway, and Thompson said he has gotten to know his mad entrepreneur neighbors.

He sees them venture outdoors to test their drones from time to time.

On one such occasion, the TechFarmers couldn’t get a large drone to fly right. Thompson took the liberty of happening by and inspecting the machine. It seemed to him that one of its flight levelers — the part resembles a gyroscope if I had to guess — needed to be adjusted. The drone pilots took Thompson’s suggestion, and the problem was solved.

Thompson knows a lot about how things work and he has, too, mechanical instincts that he draws upon. Call them a knack. He was a nerd in high school, he confessed, and designed a better mechanical pencil, one whose lead was advanced by a tiny cam and lever. He later sold the patent for the design for — let’s just say — a tidy sum.

Mr. Millaway, a venture capitalist among various things, might do well to further make Mr. Thompson’s acquaintance.

Not long ago, I asked St. Joe Company president/CEO Jorge Gonzalez to name people he admires. He did not list Elon Musk or Warren Buffett or Jimmy Buffett, for that matter. Rather, he said, he admires small-business owners, people “who risk their savings and their family’s well-being and are driven to pursue an idea or a concept and make a business work.”

Their passion, he said, is exceptional.

Gonzalez said he likes living in Northwest Florida in part because it is home to a good many small businesses, owned by people like Thompson who are passionately invested in what they do.

I have a grandson, Miles, who at this writing is about to start kindergarten. Smiley, I call him, is a cerebral kid content to entertain himself. He devotes hours to domino toppling and reading books intended for third graders. He and his parents are about to learn how a kindergarten teacher goes about simultaneously addressing precocious children and kids just beginning to learn the alphabet.

Mr. Millaway might do well one day to make Smiley’s acquaintance, but today the boy is far from ready to enter the world and start whatever his enterprise will be. Teachers will have much to do in preparing him for living.

As someone who has taught classes at Gulf Coast State College, Flagler College and Florida State University, I am disturbed these days to hear teachers maligned as contaminators versus revered as educators.

Teachers deserve our support, the kind of backing they receive from the St. Joe Community Foundation.

This fall, find a way to invest in the classroom of your choice. Rest assured, the teacher at the front of that classroom is investing her own dollars in it.

Be well,

Steve Bornhoft
EDITOR 850 MAGAZINE
sbornhoft@rowlandpublishing.com

By now, it is a quaint memory.

Panama City Beach’s chief tourism official announced with unbridled enthusiasm that a private businessman had plans to build a navigational skills-challenging maze right next to a miniature golf course. And that wasn’t all. The Tourism Development Council’s Events Committee had succeeded in securing a spot for Panama City Beach on a powerboat racing circuit’s calendar.

These developments, the official said, were sure to be game-changers of real and incalculable benefit to hospitality businesses and other enterprises tied to tourism.

My, how times have changed.

In consecutive weeks in April and May, that destination, which so looked forward to the arrival of a field of plastic panels, also hosted a jazz festival, a motorcycle rally and a triathlon. All put heads in beds. All attracted people with fat wallets.

Across North Florida, destinations ranging from resort properties to entire communities have worked for decades to refine and enlarge their appeal to visitors. That effort has involved a balancing act as proprietors, restaurateurs, tourism boards and policymakers have worked to preserve relationships with established visitors and markets while adding new ones.

In that, they have done well. Appeals across the region are various, and that diversity is a strength, as it is in all economies. In Northwest Florida, one can find a wine festival that features a corndog stand and blends supplied by Publix and another where a harpist is heard and VIP guests are treated on arrival to flutes of lavender champagne.

We do it fried, grilled, sauteed and blackened.

This edition of 850 Business Magazine is devoted in the main to stories about the hospitality and restaurant industry. As concerned as communities are about attracting other types of employment, that industry remains an essential pillar, as our experience during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic made clear. It’s a tough business that seems always to find a way to carry on despite its short-term vulnerability to plagues that have included an unprecedented oil spill, accumulations of June grass spiked by nutrient pollution, hurricanes, economic downturns and a coronavirus.

The industry succeeds in no small part because our region has retained its inherent and God-given appeal. We live in a beautiful place, one that wasn’t going to remain unflooded forever.

Increasingly, people are growing concerned that the destination may be overwhelmed. Back 30 years ago when the maze was news, we promised ourselves that we would not repeat the mistakes of South Florida. We would preserve a quality of life and visitor experience uncompromised by maddening crowds and environmental degradation. We would do our part to see to that, and state agencies, including the Department of Community Affairs and the Department of Environmental Protection, would have our backs.

Instead, it seems, we are adopting new sales tax levies to build more infrastructure so that we can hope to accommodate more and more people.

For four years, a project to add lanes to U.S. 98 in Destin has been underway. A project to widen that highway in Panama City Beach has been announced. A proposal to build a new road uniting highways 98 and 30A in South Walton has occasioned a furor among environmentalists because it would transect a state park.

At some point, adding roadways and traffic lanes is not the best move, Thomas Cordi, the executive director of the Seaside Institute, told Rowland Publishing’s Hannah Burke.

“If you have a weight problem, you can loosen your belt a few notches, but you still have a weight problem,” he said.

Cordi is right about that.

Let’s not run ourselves up against what was once Yogi Berra’s assessment of Toots Shor’s restaurant in New York: “That place is so crowded no one goes there anymore.”

Let’s not kill the pelican that laid the golden egg.

Take care,

Steve Bornhoft,
EDITOR, 850 MAGAZINE
sbornhoft@rowlandpublishing.com

Civil rights leader Clyde Bellecourt, a co-founder in ı968 of the American Indian Movement, began his remarks by acknowledging the special status of women and the indispensable roles they play as life-givers and as mindemooyenh, an Ojibwe word meaning one who holds things together.

As a reporter for the Daily Press in Ashland, Wisconsin, I had been assigned to cover Bellecourt’s speech to an assembly at the Bad River Indian Reservation, which had devolved into factionalism and wrangling about the use of federal funds.

I remember less about the political body of Bellecourt’s speech than I do about his praise for women and for Mother Earth. In Ojibwe culture, the earth is a woman, and it is women who are responsible for passing along cultural values and spirituality to succeeding generations.

They hold things together and because they do, women are venerated and accorded considerable power and authority in the Ojibwe world.

Over the course of recent years, I have interviewed dozens of women who were selected to receive Pinnacle Awards, presented annually by Rowland Publishing and 850 Business Magazine to honorees who have distinguished themselves professionally and as community servants.

These women represent diverse backgrounds, demographics, occupations, passions, strivings and life experiences. Still, there is a powerful common denominator that emerges among them. They are nurturers. They are mindemooyenh. They hold things together.

Profiles of the Pinnacle Award winners for 2021 appear in this edition of 850. Among them are two community bankers who work each day to help people reach their life goals; a broadcast journalist who uses her platform to elevate people in need; a college official dedicated to setting students up for success; a pastor and teacher who infects children with the joy of music; a community institute president who champions small-business owners; an attorney who dedicated much of her career working for a public defender’s office and North Florida Legal Services, doing her part to see that there is justice for all; a poet/professor who is an advocate and ambassador for disabled people; a career-long employee of the United Way with a huge heart for people living in poverty; a college dean who figured out how to start a college from scratch; a physician who stabilizes infants who enter the world with lungs too small and holes in their hearts; and a teenage business owner studying to become a speech pathologist.

They are nurturers not just of the people closest to them, but also of communities.

I stumbled the other day on a scholarly paper that looked at 25 community-level positive psychology exercises designed to foster optimal human flourishing. The report was published in the September 2021 edition of Frontiers in Psychology. Its authors, from the Université du Québec à Montréal and the University of Miami, note that positive psychology is a fast-growing discipline in the area of well-being research that focuses on factors that “contribute to the development of citizenship and communities such as social responsibility, nurturance, altruism, civility, tolerance, workplace ethics and positive institutions.”

Might it be possible at the community level to bring about increased levels of tolerance, civility and more good stuff with mere interventions? Sounds utopian, doesn’t it?

One intervention targeted a group of older adults with the aim of improving their psychological well-being. Participants attended weekly 90-minute sessions that incorporated elements from the fields of stress management, cognitive/behavioral therapy and positive psychology. They engaged in practices including mindful eating, yoga and the keeping of journals of appreciation.

After nine weeks, coping self-efficacy and morale were measurably better, a good thing for the subjects involved. But did a better community result from the intervention?

The “Healthy Aging Mind/Body Intervention,” like the other interventions that figure in the report, “aimed to improve society one person at a time.” And, the report concludes, “Individual happiness does not necessarily translate into happier organizations and communities. … It’s not the same as creating settings based on fairness and equity.”

Countless little interventions will not bring about the cultural changes we need as a collective. When given a chance, the most effective cultural change agents among us are the mindemooyenh. We should do a better job of listening to them and elevating them.

I again offer my congratulations to this year’s Pinnacle honorees. I would do well to list you in my journal of appreciation.

Be well,

Steve Bornhoft,
EDITOR, 850 MAGAZINE
sbornhoft@rowlandpublishing.com

The news, as I write this, is dominated by reports of the resurgence of the COVID pandemic due to the Delta variant.

I have unpacked and washed my masks and today will begin wearing them again when in crowds and indoors.

Having to take those steps is disappointing, but there are times when we must set aside emotions. My educational background is in microbiology, and my thought processes are always based on facts, logic and science. That’s just the way I roll, professionally and personally.

Today, just less than 50% of the American population is fully vaccinated and about 95% of the new cases of COVID are occurring in unvaccinated people. When newly infected people are interviewed on the evening news, they almost without exception express regret for not having gotten vaccinated when the combined efforts of federal, state and local governments, the scientific community and businesses made it so easy to do so.

Trusting in science, logic and statistical facts as I do, I encourage everyone to get their shots. At this point, a fixation on “your rights” is not logical. We are talking about your life and those of your family members and friends. Let’s be mindful that polio and smallpox were eradicated because people got vaccinated.

The pandemic notwithstanding, lots of exciting developments are happening in Northwest Florida.

I invite you to read our stories about Steve Roden, the new CEO at Guy Harvey Enterprises, and the rollout in Bay County schools of marine science curriculum developed by the Guy Harvey Ocean Foundation.

Dr. Harvey and his organization are focused on instilling a marine conservation outlook and ethic in generations of school children. With the endorsement of the state Department of Education and in partnership with Bay District Schools and the St. Joe Community Foundation, newly developed and engaging curriculum was kid-tested at two elementary schools last spring. Having survived that test, it is being extended to schools district-wide in Bay County this fall.

Ultimately, the Guy Harvey Ocean Foundation plans to install the curriculum across the state and country and much of the world. To the extent that it succeeds in educating leaders of tomorrow about the critical importance of our oceans, we can expect that they will make decisions that will protect and perpetuate this foundational natural resource for centuries to come.

Steve has engaged Rowland Publishing as a strategic partner with Guy Harvey in the production of their magazine and in the procurement of financial support from people and corporations that share similar values. I could not be happier to help lead this charge.

In this edition of 850, you will also find a story about plans by the St. Joe Company, Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare and the FSU College of Medicine to develop a hospital north of Panama City Beach near the Latitude Margaritaville Watersound development for active seniors.

That development is the largest contemplated by St. Joe’s West Bay Sector Plan and is projected to eventually total ı70,000 homes. St. Joe, which once liked to call itself a “placemaker,” is now in the process of bringing about a new midsize city.

Check out, too, our Bay County Business Journal, which details the economic development efforts of Becca Hardin and the Bay County Economic Development Alliance. Hardin and her team are contributing to the diversification of the region’s economy in ways that will have lasting benefits.

One more reminder as I close: Please get vaccinated and be safe. We look forward to doing business with you for many years to come.

Be well,

Brian Rowland

browland@rowlandpublishing.com

In 2005, the novelist David Foster Wallace delivered a commencement address at Kenyon College, a small Ohio school with tall admission standards. The speech subsequently was published in book form and has come to be for freshly minted college graduates much as Dr. Seuss’ Oh, The Places You’ll Go is for high school grads.

Wallace opened his remarks with a story about two small fish that encounter an older fish as it swims toward them. “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” the senior fish asks. Some moments later, one small fish asks the other, “What the hell is water?” The fish, you see, are so immersed in something intrinsic to their existence that they have no awareness of it as a separate reality.

I read Wallace’s speech the other day after seeing a reference to it in an article by The New Yorker’s Idrees Kahloon about trust as an essential and often overlooked element in commerce and economics (“Believe You Me,” July 26). In modern economies, “… everything is predicated on its existence,” Kahloon writes. “(Economist) Adam Smith concluded that trust was a fundamental feature of humanity.”

Smith wrote, as Kahloon notes, “Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog.”

Kahloon finds that the modern sharing economy heavily relies on trust and cites as an example people who rent homes or condos listed on Airbnb or Vrbo. I am newly returned from a family vacation spent at a home in the mountains of western North Carolina. We found the spot on Vrbo. About its owners, I know nothing. Based on an area code, we think they may live in Atlanta. About me, the owners, upon furnishing me with the combination to a key lockbox, knew only that I was good for a deposit.

The transaction was enveloped in trust, something I did not think about. It was as water to fish.

Trust survives, even thrives, unseen and sufficient to allow commerce to proceed. Meanwhile, however, we have seen trust in institutions, including government and the press, drop off precipitously. According to the pollster Gallup, 75% of Americans said in 1964 that they trusted the federal government. What do you think that figure is today? Nope, lower.

According to Gallup, only 40 percent of U.S. adults today have a “great deal” (9%) or a “fair amount” (31%) of trust and confidence in the media to “fully, accurately and fairly report the news.” In the 1970s, trust ranged between 68% and 72%.

What’s going on?

Trust declines when genuine engagement falls off. Politicians don’t engage with voters as they once did. Too many do not pledge fealty to ideals, ideas, the Constitution or constituents but to bombastic pretenders. The media, to a great extent, deliver all the news that’s fit to print — so long as it aligns with corporate philosophies, goals, advertisers and targeted niche audiences. Interaction between reporters and sources tends to be superficial and guarded.

Under today’s circumstances — and, mind you, I started writing and reporting in the halcyon days of 72% trust — I make sure to take a conversational approach to interviews and begin by making it clear to sources that I have taken time to research them, their passions and what they do. From there, I proceed without a prepared set of questions, preferring instead to let the conversation take its own course, like water released from an impoundment.

Recently, I interviewed the poet, FSU professor and amputee Jillian Weise, one of whose legs is computerized and surveys the surfaces she traverses, preventing her from falling. Amazing. We found ourselves talking about efforts to destigmatize or soften the word “disabled” by employing alternatives. I had referred to “people living with disabilities.”

“If I may,” said Jillian, “I don’t like ‘with’ language. I have no problem referring to myself as a disabled poet or a disabled professor.”

“Sure, I see what you are saying,” I said. “As someone in his 60s, I would not refer to myself as a ‘writer with years.’ ”

“Yes!” Jillian laughed. “I am so glad we are collaborating.”

And, silently, I recognized that collaboration results from trust.

In a story for today’s magazine, Matt Thompson, the managing partner of For the Table hospitality in Tallahassee, commented to writer Riley O’Bryant about how personal food is to people, how restaurants have but one chance to do it right.

Interviews in which a person is asked to share of himself and trust that a writer will “accurately and fairly” report the conversation are even more personal.

Thank you, Dr. Weise, for using that word, “collaborate.” Perfect. Two heads are better than one.

Believe you me,

Steve Bornhoft