Living in More Than One World

For a highly interesting, in-depth look into the life of a book editor, and some important aspects of the current state of publishing, see An Interview With Johanna Vondeling Editor of Berrett-Koehler Publishing, a new blog post in Ask The Agent: Night Thoughts about Books and Publishing, from literary agent Andy Ross, the former owner of Cody’s Books in Berkeley, Calif. Johanna is Vice President, Editorial and Digital for B-K, which is located in San Francisco. She is also my editor and was the person responsible for bringing my new book, Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life, to the company. The book as it exists now would never have happened without her, as I noted in the acknowledgments: “She had the vision and patience to realize there was a strong central idea in my book, but that it was not the one I originally brought to her. She also helped give the book the structure it required.” In the Q&A, Johanna also discusses the unique publishing practices that have made B-K so successful as an independent publisher since its inception in 1992. For instance, each author is invited for an Author Day at headquarters, an entire day based around you and your book, held between deliverery of your first draft and final manuscript. Mine was held last November and was an exhilarating experience. As Johanna describes it, “Authors get to meet their editor in person, they talk to production about the internal design of the book, they strategize with marketing staff about the marketing plan for their book, and they make a presentation about their book over lunch to the whole staff and invited guests–it’s their first chance to pitch their book to the world.” More publishers may try to emulate the B-K model, which would be a positive sign for an industry undergoing a significant transition.

If, like me, you are reluctant to show your sketches to other people, be sure to read Art Markman’s new Psychology Today blog post, Tools for Innovation III: Sketches and your brain. Art is a friend and a cognitive scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. The post is one of three recent ones based on ideas (in this case from a chapter by Barbara Tversky and Masaki Suwa) from an Oxford University Press book he and UT engineering professor Kristin Wood co-edited, Tools for Innovation. When you have ideas for innovation, sometimes the best ways to think about, formulate and communicate them are by making some sort of visual representation, even if it is crude, dashed off and open to interpretation. But Art correctly points out that many of us are concerned about what people will think of our less-than-stellar artistic talents, so we either don’t make the sketch, or don’t show it to others. “But it is these very limitations in our ability to sketch perfect what we are thinking,” he writes, “that leaves room for those drawings to be reinterpreted.” If we can get over this limitation, there is a potential for a real breakthrough, because other people may have interpretations we wouldn’t have considered, and that can sharpen our thinking. Another concept he points out is that since so much of the brain is visually-oriented, limiting your ideas to either spoken words, or words on paper, can act as a damper on your creativity. In a similar vein, see Dan Roam’s bestselling book The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures.

I’ve written about a variety of festivals (music and otherwise) that I would have liked to have attended, but found that following on the web was the next best thing: the Aspen Ideas Festival, Glastonbury and The Guardian Hay Festival. Now there is another British entry, the Latitude Festival, which I had not heard of until now, but is four years old. It’s already over, having run from July 16-19. Check out Mark Savage’s Latitude festival is a class act and other BBC coverage. NME.com and others covered the solo set by Thom Yorke of Radiohead, in which he gave the debut of a new song, “The Present Tense.” (I used to read NME, then in its pre-online, weekly print-only days, as often as possible back in my music days of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Especially at first, it wasn’t easy to find in the States, so it’s a sign of the times how readily available it is on the web.) Check out the complete list of acts appearing on multiple stages; including four music stages, with the Pet Shop Boys, Regina Spektor, the Pretenders, Grace Jones, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds along with many others. There was also literature (including Orwell: A Celebration, billed as “an unprecedented theatrical tribute to the work of George Orwell”; Geoff Dyer, Blake Morrison and many others), plus films, comedy, cabaret and more. For additional media coverage, see The Guardian, The Independent and other UK media outlets.

Another brief entry today, to note a follow-up to yesterday’s blog about my guest post on the Leader to Leader Institute blog. My new book, Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life, is now featured as the recommended reading on Leader to Leader’s July online newsletter, Leading Today. The newsletter has lots of interesting material, including Susan Phillips Bari’s President’s Letter about the July 13th inaugural event of the Hesselbein Global Leadership Academy at the University of Pittsburgh. The Academy is named for Leader to Leader Institute Chairman and Founding President Frances Hesselbein, who wrote the foreword to my book. The keynote address was delivered by Jim Collins. The newsletter also has an account of a June conference in Seoul, South Korea (attended by Hesselbein, Bari and Leader to Leader Board Secretary Geneva Johnson) The Key to Responsible High-Performing Society, “the first of a series of events being held around the world to honor Peter Drucker’s life and work on the centennial of his birth.” My book was also the subject of a great July 23rd post by Stephen Abram, on his widely-followed Stephen’s Lighthouse blog.  Stephen is Vice President of Innovation for SirsiDynix. He references Drucker’s keynote address at the SLA annual conference in Los Angeles in 2002, and that “Drucker would have been 100 this year, just like SLA.”

A short post today to note that I’ve written more on the back story of my new book, Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life, in a guest post, The Privilege of Writing a Book about Peter Drucker, on the Leader to Leader Institute blog. Frances Hesselbein, the Chairman and Founding President of Leader to Leader, wrote the foreword to my book. From 1990-2002, the organization was called the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management, and Drucker played an active role. But well before those years, Hesselbein also worked with him when she was the CEO of the Girl Scouts of the USA, and he did considerable pro bono work for the organization. Besides the above guest post, I did another, Drucker’s Wisdom: Five Nuggets, for my publisher, Berrett-Koehler, in the July 23 edition of their lively and informative bi-weekly online newsletter, the BKCommuniqué. My book is also one of the spotlight features in the newsletter, which is free and well worth subscribing to. It continues to be an exciting time for me as I’m starting to hear early, encouraging feedback from people who have read the book. I would love to hear more, whether or not you’ve finished reading it!

Somehow I missed until now Newsweek’s Top 100 Books: The Meta-List, a highly elaborate online exclusive from June 29th. Top book lists are always fun to read, and somewhat controversial. But what makes this one especially interesting is that they “crunched the numbers from 10 top books lists (Modern Library, the New York Public Library, St. John’s College reading list, Oprah’s, and more) to come up with The Top 100 Books of All Time. It’s a list of lists — a meta-list.” At a basic level, you can view the list as a straight ranking: author, title, year, cover with Amazon link, brief description of the book and which sources recommended it. Number 1 on the overall ranking is Tolstoy’s War and Peace. But what gives it added value is that you can filter the selections so many different ways. If you filter by year, Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey, from the 8th century B.C., get top ranking, with an overall ranking of #8. You can also filter by fiction or nonfiction, date range and recommending sources. Filters can be combined to check, for instance, Oprah’s Book Club recommendations of fiction from 1921-1940. (In that category, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury comes up first, and is #5 overall.) For more information on the list, see Peter W. Bernstein’s Building a Better List: Inside Newsweek’s Top 100 Books: The Meta-List, and especially A Note on Methodology: How We Compiled Newsweek’s Top 100 Books: The Meta-List. The latter includes links to the original lists. And by the way, how sporting to include Time’s 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present. There is yet another intriguing compilation, Newsweek’s What to Read Now. And Why. This has 50 recommended titles, topped by Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now. Among the other features is Chip Kidd’s annotated photo gallery My Favorite Covers. Kidd is a renowned designer and associate art director of Alfred A. Knopf, as well as a novelist. Whether or not you agree with the choices or rankings on any of these lists, they are guaranteed to keep you busy, and Newsweek is to be commended for its bold approach.

It’s always encouraging when a first-rate mind is celebrated in the media. That’s been the case recently with Amartya Sen, an economics Nobel Laureate who will shortly publish a new book, The Idea of Justice. Sholto Byrnes of London’s The Independent has an interesting interview with Sen on July 19, The thinker: Inside the mind of prized intellectual Amartya Sen. Byrnes points out that Sen’s work has had a significant impact on the world and that he is going strong well past what would be retirement years for some others. “Sen is 75,” Byrnes writes, “but his mind has a sharpness that those decades his junior would envy.” The interview was conducted at Trinity College, Cambridge, where Sen was master from 1998-2004. He was then off to Dublin to receive an honorary degree from Trinity College, Dublin. His official Nobel autobiography lists a mind-boggling number of universities in which he has taught, including “Delhi University, the London School of Economics, Oxford University, and Harvard University, and on a visiting basis, at M.I.T., Stanford, Berkeley, and Cornell.” Sen was also recently featured in Jon Snow’s blog on Britain’s Channel 4, Meetings with remarkable men: Amartya Sen. (Snow muses that Sen would be one of eight people he would sit at dinner with Nelson Mandela). Also see Paul Cullen’s interview with Sen, Beacon of light in a dismal science, in The Irish Times on July 11. Cullen notes that more than 500 people came to hear Sen speak in Dublin, with many more turned away. All these pieces celebrate not only the power of the mind, but also the importance of intellectual curiosity. Cullen describes Sen as “a soft-spoken polymath whose work spans an impressive number of fields – economics, philosophy, social theory, ethics, even feminism.” Besides his honorary degree, Sen was also in Dublin to receive an honorary membership in the Royal Irish Academy, and spent the morning before at the National Gallery. Clearly a man who makes the most of his time!

I’m one of the few people who have not read a Harry Potter book, and I haven’t seen any of the movies, either. However, I have been fascinated by the phenomenon of the books, and of the personal story and success of J.K. Rowling, since 1998, when I read one of the early reviews of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, written by my friend and former USA TODAY colleague Cathy Hainer, a year before Cathy died of breast cancer. I continued to read a lot about Rowling and the books over the years, and enjoyed the opportunity to do reference questions at USAT about Rowling, especially when the series-ending Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was published in 2007. So it was interesting to read about The Harry Potter Alliance, which had escaped my attention until now, in Deborah Netburn’s July 20 Los Angeles Times feature story Finding lessons for life in Harry Potter books. Netburn interviews the nonprofit alliance’s director, Andrew Slack, about the good work being done in the cause of social justice, inspired by Rowling’s messages. “Slack’s organization uses parallels from the Potter books,” Netburn writes, “to educate and mobilize Potter fans around such issues as workers’ rights and combating genocide.” What is further fascinating to me is that Slack describes himself as a “Harry Potter rabbi.” There is more on the alliance recently in the July 16 CNN report For some fans, lessons of ‘Potter’ carry over into real world and July 14 on Newsweek.com, How Crazy Are Harry Potter Fans? Perhaps one day I’ll start reading a Potter book, but in the meantime, reading about the world and community that has been built around Rowling and her books remains enough for me.

On July 11th, the day of my book signing at the American Library Association annual conference in Chicago, I met three highly interesting people who were also either signing or performing: Amy Krouse Rosenthal, George Watsky and Mieka Pauley. I had never met them before, and had not even heard of George or Mieka. When I found out that Amy would be at the Chronicle Books booth that morning, I knew that I wanted to meet her, as I had enjoyed her book Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life. I had a nice conversation with her after she finished a signing for one of her children’s books. Be sure to check out her compelling short video, The Beckoning of Lovely, shot last summer in Chicago’s Millennium Park. I discovered George and Mieka in a providential way. A friend had told me earlier in the day that I should meet a friend of hers, an editor at a library-related publication that had a booth at the conference. When I went to find her soon after I finished my signing, I was told she would be at the LIVE! @ your library Reading Stage. When I arrived, she was not there, but I quickly became mesmerized by George’s poetry performance, in which Mieka accompanied him at times on guitar and vocals. Although I only caught the tail-end, they continued with an impromptu performance (separately) at the booth of their representatives, the Auburn Moon Agency. They also talked with those of us who assembled. What was amazing was that neither had performed together before George’s appearance on stage. Check out the material on each of their websites. I would gladly pay to see either of them perform again. And yes, I did find the editor later on. Amy, George and Mieka are each cool, super-creative people I could have easily missed out on meeting if circumstances had been only slightly different. If anyone at the conference (or perhaps any similar recent gathering) has had similar experiences, please let me know so I can share them with other readers of this blog!

As I noted in my previous post, the major reason I attended the American Library Association annual conference in Chicago from July 10-14 was to do the first signing for my new book Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life. Today I’ll briefly note some of the sessions I attended, with links to investigate further. Although I have been teaching since 1996, I still learned a lot from Preparing Yourself to Teach: Touching all the Bases, sponsored by LIRT (Library Instruction Round Table). The three presenters (Lisa Hinchliffe and Beth Woodard, both of the University of Illinois-Urbana; and Monika Antonelli, Minnesota State University) all had interesting perspectives on developing teaching skills. The increasing importance and intricacies of digital collections was examined in Collecting for Digital Repositories: New Ways to Disseminate and Share Information. The three speakers (Paul Royster; University of Nebraska-Lincoln; Sayeed Choudhury, Johns Hopkins University and Dianne McCutcheon, National Library of Medicine) made their subject seem doable, even with its inherent complexities. Michigan-based public librarians Holly Hibner and Mary Kelly led a lively session aimed at public library reference librarians, Thingamabobs and Doodads: Why Tech Support IS Reference. I enjoyed talking to both afterwards, and discovered that their blog, Awful Library Books, is developing a cult following. The Power of XML to Enhance Work Flow and Discovery explained and demystified a lot about the history and practical applications of XML in libraries. I had interesting conversations afterwards with both presenters, Patrick Yott of Brown University and David Ruddy of Cornell University. Finally, the Library History Round Table Edward G. Holley Lecture, Five Studies of Readers of Journalism, by David Paul Nord, a journalism and history professor at Indiana University, Bloomington, was a thought-provoking way for me to end the conference. I also enjoyed my brief talk with him after his lecture. Tomorrow, one final ALA-related post on my encounters with a few participants who are not librarians, and have no connection to my book.