Living in More Than One World

A great example of a person living a multidimensional life in more than one world is Edward Tufte, profiled recently by Adam Aston in BusinessWeek, Tufte’s Invisible Yet Ubiquitous Influence. Tufte is perhaps best known for his large, elaborate and beautifully-produced books (from his own company, Graphics Press) on the best ways to present and interpret data and information, such as The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. But he is also a consultant to large corporations and master teacher (Professor Emeritus at Yale) who now spends considerable time on the road each year delivering a one day course, Presenting Data and Information, to big audiences at auditoriums nationwide. I went to one several years ago in Arlington, Virginia, and found it to be stimulating and highly informative. The cost is relatively steep, but copies of his books are included in the admission. Even so, back-of-the-room sales of his books were brisk as people bought extra copies as gifts or for their office. I also discovered that day that he is a serious rock music listener (the background music played during the breaks and during the book signing afterwards came from his collection) and an artist of large-scale sculptures and outdoor installations. The Cheshire Herald in Connecticut (Tufte’s home state) has a story, Tufte Continues To Dazzle With Larger Than Life Works, about a new exhibit of these installations, Edward Tufte: Seeing Around, at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, in Ridgefield, Ct. It runs until January 17, 2010. For more on these works, and Tufte’s philosophy of art, see the interview from Modern Painters and more on Tufte’s website. The site as a whole has a considerable amount of information (including writing by and about Tufte) and stunning visual imagery.

The science of creativity in The Globe and Mail provided a reminder to me about Jacob Bronowski, the scientist/author who achieved a degree of fame in the early 1970s with his BBC documentary The Ascent of Man. It also introduced me to the writer of this compelling essay, the Canadian poet/essayist/short story writer Robyn Sarah. In the space of her short piece, she weaves together background on Bronowski, whom she describes as “mathematician, physicist, biologist, humanist, lover of the arts, incomparable teacher, passionate believer in progress;” a brief anecdote about her daughter’s reaction to a Leonardo da Vinci painting in a picture book and a thoughtful review of Bronowski’s collection of essays Science and Human Values. Originally delivered as lectures at M.I.T. in 1953, they explore, among other things, the nature of, and similarity between, creativity in science and the arts. Sarah describes Bronowski’s work in Science and Human Values as “dense with thought and information, but lucid in style and beautifully written.” The same might be said about her own essay. The science of creativity is part of the “Buried Treasures” series in The Globe and Mail’s excellent book section. Among other reviews, essays, lists and special features in this section is a new one, Summer is short…, in which a short story appears every week until Labor Day weekend. It’s being done in partnership with HarperCollins, and intersperses contemporary and classic writers. The most recent story is from Joyce Carol Oates, and next week’s will be by Herman Melville. A nice bonus in the book section from June 27 is the cleverly-titled Alain de Botton is packing your suitcase, as the ubiquitous de Botton lets us in on his summer travel reading.

Although it was written for a journalism-related readership, I think any knowledge worker can gain valuable insights from a guest column I wrote this week for the website 21st News, Lessons Learned from Peter Drucker: A Guide For the Future. It’s partly a personal look at how I have been living and applying some of the principles in my forthcoming book, Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life, before and after my layoff last December from USA TODAY. But it is mainly a short guide to how people can apply some of the principles in their own lives, based around five areas: teaching, continuous learning, mentoring, volunteering and reflecting. I pointed out Drucker’s stellar journalism credentials: besides his many books, he contributed for many years to such publications as The Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic Monthly, Forbes, Harvard Business Review and many others. He embodied high-minded achievement, delivered with integrity. He was the kind of role model that knowledge workers can emulate if they are working or not working, looking for a new job or thinking of changing professions. 21st News describes itself as  “a comprehensive Web site about the future of journalism and the news business.” The guest column was for Grant’s Angle, the blog by the site’s founder and editor, Grant Perry. Judging from his bio, he is a great example of being multidimensional and living in more than one world. I’m grateful for the opportunity he provided me to contribute to his site.

Most of us will not be able to attend Britain’s annual Glastonbury Festival, which starts Thursday. But we can live vicariously by checking out the festival’s extensive website, and the media coverage that’s already begun.  Today, The Independent has Elisa Bray’s The guide to Glastonbury. She notes that there will be 177,000 people and 300 bands, playing on 10 main stages and a dozen smaller ones. Guardian.co.uk has a page with news, blogs, videos and weather updates. The full lineup on the festival’s site is pretty amazing; there will be so many choices that it seems like it would be hard to decide which artists to see and which ones you’d have to miss. The Pyramid Stage has some of the biggest names, such as Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Neil Young, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Madness, Fleet Foxes, Lily Allen and many more. The Acoustic Stage sounds particularly appealing, with the likes of Roger McGuinn, Fairport Convention, Ray Davies and the duo of Gary Louris and Mark Olson. I particularly like the fact that there is a John Peel Stage, in honor of the late BBC DJ. It has Echo and the Bunnymen, Jarvis Cocker and many more. The official site has a history page going back to the first festival, in 1970. More media coverage: The BBC has a page on the festival and Ian Youngs’ The secrets of Glastonbury’s line-up, in which he notes that festival organizer Michael Eavis, who has run it since the beginning, “may be one of the coolest 73-year-olds around…” He was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People this year, complete with an essay about him by Chris Martin of Coldplay. Eavis’ daughter Emily now also organizes the festival. The Glastonbury coverage is a reminder about what a wonderful place Britain is for music and pop culture.

If you like lists as much as I do, you’ll be kept busy for a long time perusing the 100 Most Creative People in Business on FastCompany.com. It’s an intriguing mix of executives, designers, writers, directors, academics, artists, musicians and more. Although a number of names were familiar to me, many were not. The thumbnail descriptions are to-the-point and informative. Beyond a quick education about people who are doing cool, useful things at a high level, it provides many role models who demonstrate what’s possible by stretching our knowledge, imagination and abilities. When you see the list, you’ll recognize names, companies, products and services that have enriched your life in one way or the other. Obviously such a list is quite subjective, and bound to be confounding to some people. But it provides tremendous food for thought and makes for compulsive clicking and reading. A sampling of people and their rank: #1 Jonathan Ive, #4 Reed Hastings, #13 Stella McCartney, #22 Damien Hirst, #35 Peter Senge, #40 Neil Gaiman, #49 Tyra Banks, #68 Zaha Hadid, #83 Brian Eno…you get the picture.  A neat value-added feature is a page of links for top ten creative people by industry, e.g., Movies and Television (#3, JJ Abrams), Sports (#5, Shaun White), Health Care (#1 Melinda Gates), Architecture (#4, Rem Koolhaas), the Web Business (#5 Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter), Music Business, (#2, Tim Westergren of Pandora) and so on. Fast Company knows it can’t please everyone. Their suggestion is to “Enjoy. Quibble. Complain.”

One of the best ways to start your week is to read Bill Taylor’s concise leadership advice on HarvardBusiness.org, The 10 Questions Every Change Agent Must Answer. I first found this on BusinessWeek.com as Change-Agent Checklist. Taylor, author of Mavericks at Work and co-founder of Fast Company magazine, provides a neat conceptualization of how leaders should be thinking about their companies, and their personal self-development, in these still-scary times. He points out that we can’t control markets or current events, but we can think about our situations in new ways and figure out how companies can differentiate themselves. The questions are deceptively simple and speak to how we can find new opportunities, new ideas, new contributions from employees and crucially, new customers.  Leaders, in his view, should ponder whether or not customers care about you and your company, and what would happen to those customers if your company disappeared. He also comes down on the side of focusing on your most important customers, even if it means ignoring others. Finally, he reminds leaders to never stop learning. “How do you push yourself as an individual,” Taylor asks, “to keep growing and evolving — so that your company can do the same?” The list of questions is not from original research, but it is a handy synthesis and analysis referencing such disparate sources as the psychologist Jerome Bruner, Albert Einstein, Marcel Proust, Gary Hamel and Jim Collins. A big takeaway for me is that the future belongs to eclectic, reflective thinkers who can translate the most relevant thoughts into meaningful actions.

I spent seven days, from last Sunday through Friday, at three different conferences and workshops, beginning with the American Independent Writers Annual Conference in Washington, D.C, on June 13, the 100th annual conference of the Special Libraries Association/SLA, also in D.C., June 14-17, and the Berrett-Koehler Authors Cooperative marketing workshop, hosted by ASTD, the American Society of Training & Development, in Alexandria, Va., on June 18-19. Berrett-Koehler is publishing my first book, Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life, in August. I had the opportunity to meet and learn from a number of my fellow B-K authors at the workshop. I found them all to be talented, generous people. Over the two days there were many top-notch speakers and workshop leaders to guide us through such areas as marketing, publicity, selling, the effective use of social networking technology and finding public speaking opportunities. At the end of the workshop, everyone participated in a brief but intense co-consulting session, in which groups of four or five people helped each other think through something we want to work on immediately, and we had to report to the larger group what we’re going to do about it. This was a great vehicle for helping me focus my efforts on promoting the book, as we get closer to publication. Thanks to everyone who put on the workshop and ran it so smoothly, and to the many people who shared their knowledge and experience with a first time author.

My four days at the 100th annual conference of the Special Libraries Association/SLA, in Washington, D.C are over. As I mentioned in earlier posts, I met many new people, reconnected with old friends and colleagues – including a number I had worked with during my 21 years at USA TODAY – and saw many of my former students, including two from the first class I taught, in 1996.  Nearly 6,000 information professionals from around the world attended, a 16% increase over last year’s conference; quite an accomplishment in this economy. The information sessions I attended were very good, and the INFO-EXPO hall had many interesting vendors. It was a great way to learn not only about new products and services, but to find out about information products and services from a wide variety of large and small organizations through quick demos and talking with people working at the booths. A conference of this size would not be possible without vendors’ financial participation.  Check out more about the conference – either if you didn’t attend, or if you attended but want to find out what you missed, since there were so many things going on simultaneously – at these blogs: SLA blog, Infotoday blog (from the editors of Information Today) and Stephen’s Lighthouse, the regular blog of information world luminary Stephen Abram. There are handouts from the conference on the SLA site, which I found through Gary Price’s ever-helpful Resource Shelf.  Next year’s SLA Annual Conference will be held June 13-16, 2010 in New Orleans. I’ll resume blogging in a few days, so I can concentrate on a two-day Berrett-Koehler Authors Cooperative marketing workshop, starting Thursday and hosted by ASTD, the American Society of Training & Development, in Alexandria, Va.

The highlight of my time Monday at the 100th annual conference of the Special Libraries Association/SLA, in Washington, D.C.  – besides meeting many interesting new people and reconnecting with friends and former students – was the 14th Special Libraries Symposium. I produce this event every year for the course I teach at the Catholic University School of Library and Information Science, The Special Library/Information Center. I bring together a group of librarians, who are generous with their time in giving back to the profession, to meet with my students to talk about their career journeys and the state-of-the-art in their work. Yesterday we had a large, talented and highly experienced group that shared their knowledge, experience and advice. Some of the common themes are applicable beyond the world of librarianship to the wider world of knowledge work: continuous learning (with formal classes, new degrees or otherwise), continually upgrading your technology skills and experience, marketing your services, being entrepreneurial, trying different areas of the profession before you find the one that’s right for you, being visible in your organization and developing your managerial and leadership talents, whether or not manager is your title. A number of the librarians had more than one graduate degree, including one with an MBA. Many came to the profession as a second career. Some are working, or have worked, for software vendors. All proved to be wonderful role models to the students and to other librarians and knowledge workers. Thanks to all who participated in this memorable event!

It’s appropriate that this week I am at the 100th annual conference of the Special Libraries Association/SLA, in Washington, D.C., and also carrying around the galleys of my book, Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life, which will be published by Berrett-Koehler on August 10th.  Drucker was born in 1909, the year SLA began. He gave one of the keynotes at the 2002 annual conference in Los Angeles. I interviewed him for a feature story in USA TODAY the night before he gave his address, and I started work on my book later that year. At the 2006 SLA annual conference in Baltimore, I gave a work-in-progress presentation on my book, screening my 21 minute video interview with Drucker, which was conducted in 2005. Now things have more or less come full circle:  I’m back at SLA – the course I teach at the Catholic University School of Library and Information Science is built around the conference – and my book will be published shortly. If you see me at the conference, please introduce yourself!