Living in More Than One World

I’ve been fascinated by Top 10, Top 40, Top 100 etc. lists since childhood, going back to local rock radio stations and their Top 40 lists, and the singles and album charts of Billboard and the late Cashbox.  The Guardian has a great series of Top 10 lists – all of which are on its website – in which various authors contribute annotated lists usually, but not exclusively, about books. Particularly good is Ian MacKenzie’s top 10 artworks in novels, the June 2 entry by novelist MacKenzie, author of City of Strangers. It makes for a concise, informative and insight-packed read. Despite the title, in his intro MacKenzie declares that he is presenting “10 of the most memorable” books in which fiction and art combine. In these books, from such varied authors as Geoff Dyer, V.S. Naipul, Tatyana Tolstaya, Henry James and John Updike; art is integral in some way, either artwork itself, its creator or even in the place in which it is displayed. In the latter instance, see particularly the entry on Updike, and the quote of the latter’s somewhat creepy description of the spiraling Guggenheim Museum in New York. Mackenzie writes eloquently and even passionately; as he drawing us, in a short space of time and attention, into two intertwined worlds. In this case, the art was created independently of the literature, and yet the latter can shine new meaning and significance on the artworks that their creators might not have considered. You may think and read differently next time you encounter the world of art in fiction, and may also consider things differently the next time you are in an art museum. Some may come to think of these spaces, as he does, “as a kind of secret writer’s retreat.”

Current, former or prospective students – and students of life in general — can learn a lot from A cheaper, smarter road to college, and career, a triple book review by novelist Caroline Leavitt, who writes about self-help for The Boston Globe. The piece focuses on three intriguing-sounding books that aim to help people travel down unconventional roads to learning and self-development: The New Global Student: Skip the SAT, Save Thousands on Tuition, and Get a Truly International Education (by Maya Frost, founder of Education Design Institute), You Majored in What?: Mapping your Path from Chaos to Career (by Katharine Brooks, director of career services for the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas, and Psychology Today blogger) and How to Love (by psychiatrist Gordon Livingston, also a Psychology Today blogger).  Since so many people are looking for new ways of thinking about life,  these titles seem timely and provocative. Leavitt favorably compares How to Love to Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving. Frost’s book is partially based on the decidedly unconventional higher education experience of her four daughters, which involved traveling far beyond their comfort zone to go to college. I was particularly drawn to Leavitt’s description of the “wise wandering” approach in Brooks’ book, “a system of positive psychology, chaos theory, and visual mapping techniques to help students – and anyone – figure out what skills they have, what personal values matter most to them, and how to channel it all into a career they’ll love.”

I have been a big fan of the Argentine short story writer/essayist/poet Jorge Luis Borges since his fiction was assigned by Professor Charles Larson for an undergrad literature course in the early 1970s at The American University. 2009 marks the 110th year of Borges’ birth. Take a few moments to read a perceptive, thought-provoking essay, Meeting Oneself by the Charles, in The Harvard Crimson on June 2nd by Pierpaolo Barbieri on the occasion of his graduation. Borges’ short story “The Other” is employed as a device by Barbieri to look back at the big picture of what he and his classmates learned and experienced at Harvard, and how that knowledge and awareness can guide them in the future. In the story, which was originally published in 1975 in The Book of Sand and is now available in Collected Fictions, Borges at the age of not quite 70 meets his younger self, aged not quite 20, on a bench near the Charles River in Cambridge. Borges is at Harvard to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton lectures, which years later were collected into the book and set of CDs This Craft of Verse. The book jacket says the lectures were given in 1967-68; Borges sets his story in February 1969. He says that he was writing it in 1972, which would have been around the time I was being introduced to his work at American. The fictional, dreamlike exchange between the younger and older Borges could serve as a useful device to many of us looking for perspective in life, whether we are under 20 or well beyond. What would we say, in a brief conversation on a park bench, to our much younger self, knowing that it is not going to change that person’s path? What would the younger self ask the older? What is it better not to know?

I’m always fascinated by the ability of British newspapers (and their websites) to come up with brief, clever columns based on Q&As. I’ve just discovered the Telegraph.co.uk’s Culture Clinic feature, written by Kate Weinberg. The celebrity in the clinic on June 8 is creativity guru/consultant Edward de Bono.  He introduced the concept of lateral thinking more than 40 years ago, and it has become a staple of creativity tools in the business world and beyond.  His new book, Think! Before It’s Too Late, comes out in the UK next month. You can discover a bit about his taste in the arts in his Q&A, though he frustratingly answers the question about last book read with “I never remember the titles.” Another surprise is that he replies to the question about his greatest discovery online with “I’m not a great online person.” Maybe some of his answers and non-answers are meant to stimulate the creative, lateral thinking of the column’s readers. Weinberg recommends the following doses of culture (complete with brief reasons why) for de Bono: the Robert Altman film Gosford Park, the novel The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro; and since de Bono says he likes opera, Verdi’s Aida with Maria Callas. There are five other Culture Clinics online on the Telegraph.co.uk site; the previous one features Sister Wendy Beckett, the contemplative nun/TV arts presenter. Her answers are more forthcoming and straightforward. She also provides some interesting personal nuggets, such as that J.R.R. Tolkien was president of her finals board at Oxford. Her last music heard was Bach, but Weinberg recommends she try Eric Clapton’s Me and Mr. Johnson, his tribute to the blues legend Robert Johnson. Weinberg writes that this CD is a “reminder to let others remember you.”

I’ve been a longtime viewer of the Nightly Business Report on PBS, which went on the air 30 years ago. In 1994, I visited the studio in Miami where it is broadcast, saw a show going out live and met some of the people who produced it. Of course, that was before TV programs had websites, and NBR now has an extensive one; with transcripts, special features, lots of video, statistics, investor education and blogs. Susie Gharib, one of the anchors, has an intriguing post on June 4th, The Recovery Alphabet. It’s an unusual take on the nature of the economic recovery (when it comes); in the shapes of the letters it would look like, based on her talks with economists. The four letters are L, U, V and W. The simplified scenarios: L-Shape of the recovery eventually after a sharp falloff of the economy followed by years of stagnation. Not likely, she says. U-The economy eventually bounces back after a dramatic drop, followed by gradually growing. V- A big gain follows a big drop. “Fat chance that will happen this time,” Gharib writes. W-Down, up, back down, then back up. She says this is the consensus view.  Finally, no matter what letter ends up being the right one, she thinks it will be a couple of years to get back to “normal.” Gharib is half of a longtime anchor partnership with Paul Kangas, who has been rightly called, by the Detroit Free Press, “the Walter Cronkite of business broadcasting.” NBR recently announced that Kangas will leave his anchor position at the end of the year, but will stay active in the financial world. The economy may remain lousy for longer than we would like, but the Nightly Business Report at least helps us make sense of it.

Coverage of religion and spirituality has been downsized or eliminated by many newspapers in recent years. But there still is a lot of writing and reporting about these topics online, on radio and television and in magazines. Some newspapers have shifted more of their coverage away from print into blogs. Cathy Lynn Grossman, who covers this beat for USA TODAY both in the newspaper itself and in her Faith & Reason blog, presents four concise profiles of journalists who currently or have reported on religion, each of whom have personal books on the subject, in A window into the faith of religion reporters. The four, and their books are: Barbara Bradley Hagerty (National Public Radio; Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality); Peter Manseau (editor of Search: The Magazine of Science, Religion and Culture; Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World’s Holy Dead); Cathleen Falsani, (Chicago Sun-Times religion columnist and blogger; Sin Boldly: A Field Guide for Grace) and William Lobdell (former Los Angeles Times religion reporter; Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America — and Found Unexpected Peace).  Cathy, who is a former colleague of mine at USA TODAY, does a nice job of weaving together material about the books with personal information on the authors and quotes from each. The different takes by each author on their state of belief (and now unbelief, in Lobdell’s case) hints at the immensity of the world of religion, and why it’s a subject that deserves to be explored and covered seriously by the media.

Kevin Maney takes an interesting first-person angle in his Fortune profile My death-defying climb with Jim Collins. The latter is now promoting his new book How the Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In. He is one of the best-selling business authors of recent times, especially for the multi-million selling Good to Great. Although he’s known for his writing, teaching and painstaking, number-crunching research, a major part of his life is rock climbing. For the profile, Maney — who had never climbed before — climbs with Collins the 1,000 foot First Flatiron rock face in Colorado, near Collins’ home. The article is an intriguing combination of Maney’s observations of his experience on the climb, and a portrait of what makes Collins tick. He also talks to Joanne, Collins’ wife of 29 years, as well as Collins’ research partner Morten Hansen and Collins’ climbing coach Tommy Caldwell, whom Maney calls “the Tiger Woods of rock climbing.” Maney’s profile draws out some keen insights into Collins’ thoughts and actions that can act as a guide for others. “The guy is the J.K. Rowling of management literature,” Maney writes, “and he suffers from self-doubt like the rest of us.” Maney notes that driven people are prone to insecurity and happiness can breed complacency. And we know where that can lead. Collins helps conquer complacency and the fear of failure by being super-prepared and diving into the minutiae of research, whether it’s for his books or preparing for a big climb. Kevin Maney and I were colleagues in our USA TODAY days. His third book, Trade-Off: Why Some Things Catch On and Others Don’t, will be published in September. Like Collins, Maney is well-rounded. While Collins climbs rocks, Maney is a rock musician when he’s not writing. Check out some of his songs on his website.

My second and final day at the ASTD International Conference & Exposition, in Washington, D.C. was a big success. I met more training and development professionals, and a number of people working for vendors/exhibitors who are attempting to sell products and services to this community.  I am including links to a handful of the companies and organizations of booths I visited. Since most people reading this will not have been at the conference, checking out their websites is the next best thing. WildWorks, a Dallas-based facilitation company, is featuring a new product, Drucker Unpacked, that gives organizations the capability to conduct self-facilitated workshops around Peter Drucker’s principles. They have ten kits based around various topics of Drucker’s management concepts. As of this writing, the package is not yet featured on their site. There are also a number of interesting publishers represented at the conference, including Wiley, HRD Press (Human Resource Development Press) and Simple Truths, which specializes in short inspirational and leadership books and DVDs. And as I mentioned Monday and Tuesday, my own publisher, Berrett-Koehler has a booth. Other organizations/sites worth checking out include GS Graduate School, American Management Association and Soundview Executive Book Summaries. If you couldn’t attend this year, the ASTD 2010 International Conference & Exposition will be held in Chicago, May 16-19, 2010.

Another brief post today, as I’ll return to the Expo hall of the ASTD International Conference & Exposition, in Washington, D.C. Monday was fun and informative. Besides visiting the booth of my publisher, Berrett-Koehler, I talked to a number of people from a variety of organizations, and learned a lot more about the world of training and development. A big highlight of the day was getting to meet the legendary Ken Blanchard – who publishes some of his books through B-K –at the booth of the Ken Blanchard Companies. Blanchard is known for co-authoring many books, especially the multi-million selling The One Minute Manager. His presentation at the booth (meaning anyone in the hall could see it without charge or registration) was based on his new book Who Killed Change? Afterwards, he signed copies of a number of his books that were on sale through his company for a long line of people, many of whom had their picture taken with him.  I’m looking forward to learning more on day 2!

A very brief post today, as I will be spending most of the day at the Expo hall of the ASTD International Conference & Exposition, in Washington, D.C. I’ll be there to learn more about the training and development field, especially because I believe people in this profession will be interested in my forthcoming book, Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life. The self-development and lifelong learning values in the book seem to fit nicely with the work they do. I’ll also be checking in at the booth of my publisher, Berrett-Koehler. A number of B-K authors will be speaking at the event and signing books at the B-K booth, and I hope to meet some of them. I plan to write about my impressions of the Expo – I am not registered for any of the seminars or other activities – later in the week. If you see me there, please introduce yourself!