My name is on the work. Quincy House is the house it comes from.

The company behind the keynotes, the newsletter, and the playbooks.

The name.

Quincy is a New England name. Say it like New Englanders do: Quin-zee.

I'm a Minnesotan by birth. My family and my oldest friends are still there, and that tie is real. But in the early '90s I moved to Boston for graduate school at BU's College of Communication, and (after two stints in D.C.) I never really left. My class was the first with email, and the first to be taught this new thing called the internet. One of my first courses was how to build a webpage. Stack that on top of the PR, journalism, and mass communication classes, and I had found the place that felt like home.

I didn't know yet that it actually was.

My family's line runs back to the Mayflower and spreads across four hundred years of New England. I've lived in Boston and on Cape Cod, near landmarks that carry my family's names, and the people in that tree kept showing up in the middle of history.

William Bradford, governor of Plymouth Colony and my grandfather many greats over, wrote the colony's history himself. Plainly. The failures too. He knew the story would get told, so he told it first and told it straight. I've built an entire career on that one move.

Rev. John Robinson was pastor to the Pilgrims. He prepared his congregation for a crossing he never made himself. That's the job. I get leaders ready for storms I won't be sailing into with them.

Fear Robinson Baker, his granddaughter, lived on Cape Cod. The women in my tree are named for the virtues: Fear, Mercy, Grace. Parents named their daughters for the things they wanted close at hand, and fear made the list on purpose. Centuries later, that's half of what I teach: under every backlash is fear, and mercy is how you answer it.

 Hezekiah Manning was a Connecticut farmer with a seat on his town's Committee of Correspondence in 1774. You didn't apply for that seat. Your neighbors handed it to you because they trusted your word. He also audited the town's books and settled its accounts fairly. Honest messages and honest books, same man. The family business, before it had a website.

The Adams family sits on a collateral branch of the same tree. Their branch wrote the grievances down, signed their names, and called it a Declaration. People don't rise up because they're angry. They rise up because something is unfair and nobody in charge will say so. My branch didn't sign it. My branch raised me to study it.

I raised my own family here. My kids are New Englanders through and through, and I was adopted into a Red Sox household. I've now lived out east longer than I lived in the Midwest, and somewhere along the way the family came full circle.

What matters to me isn't who these people were. It's what they represent: courage. Half my job is telling leaders in the barrel that this is the time to be courageous, and commending them when they take accountability. I'm a creature of history, and everything I teach rests on the same idea: the only way to do better in your crisis is to learn from what people got wrong before you. My tree just happens to keep the receipts.

Quincy House holds all of it now: the keynotes, The PR Breakdown, and the playbooks, all running on Indestructible PR®. The name on the door is new. The instructions are four hundred years old.