Living in More Than One World

Seemingly random discoveries are part of the pleasure of reading the work of Jorge Luis Borges, and of reading about him. The latest is my discovery of a feature in today’s independent.co.uk, Jonathan Romney’s On cloud nine: Turner Prize-winner Keith Tyson reveals the surprising ideas behind Turner’s mind-bending work. I had never heard of Tyson, a celebrated British artist, before this article. What drew me to it was the notion that Borges’ short story “The Library of Babel” was an influence on Tyson’s wide-ranging art. Tyson was awarded the coveted Turner Prize in 2002. Perusing his website shows him to be a visual artist of startling originality and variety, much like Borges was with the written word.  The interview reveals Tyson’s varied and colorful life history, which indeed sounds like it could be fictional; if not written by Borges at least by a particularly imaginative author. Turner’s assertion that “My whole approach to life and everything comes from a series of existential traumas I experienced when I was about six” certainly makes you want to read on. Apparently the road to art fame — as well as his life now as a family man — was also paved with nervous breakdowns, a gambling addiction and working as a shipyard apprentice on nuclear submarines. He has an upcoming exhibition beginning September 16 at Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art London, Keith Tyson: Cloud Choreography and Other Emergent Systems. (Further searching for today’s post led me to an Alberto Manguel September 24, 2008 piece in The New York Sun, A Universe of Books: Borges’s ‘Library of Babel.’ Manguel is a wonderful writer who has written eloquently on Borges in the past. I have a feeling that Borges — were he still alive — Manguel and Tyson would all take pleasure in the nature of that discovery.)

I recently wrote a post about the intersection of two of my favorite subjects, music and literature. Now I have discovered a series of posts on the Los Angeles Times’ Jacket Copy blog about rock music books and related topics, capped by The 46 essential rock reads, on Sept. 1. Obviously a list of this sort is going to be not only incomplete but controversial, as shown by the comments. But it does provide interesting food for thought. Among the 46 books is Get in the Van, by Henry Rollins, an account of his early ‘80s days as lead singer of Black Flag. Right before he moved to California to join that band in 1981, he and I were neighbors in the same apartment building in Arlington, Va. I knew him even before that, having first met him around 1979 or 1980, when I was working a part time job at the late, lamented Olsson’s Books and Records. Henry has been highly successful for many years, and he’s an intriguing example of living in more than one world: as a singer, poet, actor, DJ, entrepreneur, public speaker, etc. I met him at the same time as his friend Ian MacKaye, who has also been a longtime, huge success both in music (with Minor Threat, Fugazi and The Evens) and in business (starting and leading Dischord Records). I know from experience how hard it is to start and run an independent record label – I didn’t last long — and his success over nearly 30 years is well-earned. Among the best LA Times posts is Robin Benway’s Favorite Storytelling Songs. I was unfamiliar with her before this, but Benway is an interesting writer, and has done well with her novel, Audrey, Wait! Let’s hope that Jacket Copy returns to rock themes before a year from now.

Although it’s been over for nearly a week, you can still find lots of material online to vicariously experience the Edinburgh International Book Festival, which is billed as the largest of its type in the world. Edinburgh is a lovely city, and I’m sure it was a great setting for this 17-day celebration of the written and spoken word.  There has been considerable coverage before, during and after the event in the British media; such as this September 1 report on guardian.co.uk and another, Scottish-centric one on the same day from the [Aberdeen] Press and Journal. Among the hundreds of authors featured this year were Garrison Keillor, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman, Karen Armstrong, Alexander McCall Smith, Tracy Chevalier, Margaret Drabble and Richard Dawkins. The media page of the festival’s site has lots of interesting material, including photos, blogs, and audio/video from 2009 and earlier years. I also liked the Staff Tops 10s lists. There are a number of archived stories about the festival from EdinburghGuides.com. Of course, J. K. Rowling is closely associated with Edinburgh and she read from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and answered questions at the 2004 Edinburgh Book Festival. The longtime director of the festival, Catherine Lockerbie, is stepping down this year and the occasion was commemorated in a poem by the poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy. Read more about it (and the text of the poem) at Magnus Linklater’s August 18 story on timesonline.co.uk, Carol Ann Duffy’s tribute to departing head of Edinburgh book festival. Next year’s festival dates are August 14-30, 2010. My new goal: to not just attend, but to be booked for a future Edinburgh International Book Festival.

I was a bit surprised to see Glenn Close’s byline on BusinessWeek.com. But I found her essay, Glenn Close on Warren Bennis, to be a fascinating read.  It’s an excerpt from a new collection of and about Bennis’ writing, The Essential Bennis. Like most people, I am mainly aware of her as a highly experienced and accomplished actor, not as a writer. Yet what she has written here is compelling. Close explores the similarities and differences between the role of the leader and the actor. Both must be based on truth, authenticity and connection; she observes, yet the actor plays many roles and is usually much different in real life from the person he or she portrays in the theater or onscreen. A leader must be genuine and worthy of trust 24/7; there can be no split between the person who inspires followers and the private self. An audience must care about the character an actor portrays, similar to the way people should care about what a leader believes in and deems important. “An actor has no other agenda,” Close writes, “but to be truthful and that truth is all about finding a point of nonjudgmental common humanity with the character to be portrayed—a common humanity between an imagined character and a very real actor.” Similarly, she writes that a leader “must be authentic in his integrity—in his understanding of, his connection to, and his empathy with the people he leads.” Bennis wrote a back cover endorsement for my new book, Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life. Charles Handy, who wrote the foreword to The Essential Bennis, also wrote a guest essay, The Odyssey Experience, for my book, about the class he and his wife Elizabeth taught at the Drucker School in 2007.

Managementtoday.com’s  If I had to start again… feature on September 1 spotlights Sir Alan Jones, Chairman Emeritus of Toyota UK. He says if he were starting out in business today, he would “still choose the science and engineering route,” and he believes that more young people in the UK need to consider a similar career path, if the country is to remain competitive globally. A big reason is that so many people who work in these fields are over the age of 45, and there may not be enough high quality people to replace them in the future. I can’t get enough of these brief, first-person, what-I’ve-learned features written by people who have been successful and want to share their knowledge and experience. A similar, bite-sized Q&A ran almost exactly two years ago on independent.co.uk, My way: Sir Alan Jones, Toyota UK’s Chairman Emeritus, on opportunity. In the Management Today essay, Sir Alan says that it’s important to look for opportunities, make your own decisions, and if there are problems, learn from them and try not to worry about what’s happened in the past. “When I joined Toyota,” Sir Alan writes, “there was almost a farming culture there and a real belief in continuous improvement (kaizen).” He believes that people need to be inspired to believe they can change the world; others have done it and there is no reason that each of us as individuals can’t do the same, in our own way. Beyond the executive lessons represented by these essays, If I had to start again… should give food for thought to everyone. Suppose Managementtoday.com asked you to write your thoughts. What would you say? And if it looks like a good idea, what is stopping you from starting again?

A very short post today, as I get ready to take a few days off. I’ll resume blogging on September 1. In the meantime, whether or not you are a CIO (Chief Information Officer), and whether or not you own a Kindle, have a look at CIO INSIGHT for the Books Slideshow: 10 Kindle Books for CIOs. There are thumbnail descriptions and covers for books aimed at busy technology executives. Many of these titles seem like they would have broader applicability for people who want to understand more about how technology is applied in organizations. The #1 book is CIO Best Practices: Enabling Strategic Value with Information Technology, by Joe Stenzel, Gary Cokins, et al; a 2007 title described as “the bible of technology leadership.” #2, CIO Survival Guide: The Roles and Responsibilities of the Chief Information Officer by Karl D. Schubert (2004), is described as “another IT leadership classic.” Some books are broader than just IT: #6  is Alignment: Using the Balanced Scorecard to Create Corporate Synergies, a 2006 title by Robert S. Kaplan, David P. Norton, the creators of the balanced scoreboard concept. Given that IT exists so an organization can do its work most successfully, #10 is The Business-Oriented CIO: A Guide to Market-Driven Management, by George Tillmann (2008), which “gives the straight dope on delivering business value through IT.” See you in September!

Justin Jacobs, in Paste magazine, combines two of my favorite topics in the August 24th article Ten Fantastic Songs Brought To You by Books. Numbers one (“Song for Myla Goldberg”, inspired by the Bee Season author) and nine, “The Tain,” on Jacobs’ list are from a great band, The Decemberists. (I also remember the ‘70s album The Tain by the Irish band Horslips.) The only other female writer to be serenaded in a title is “Sylvia Plath,” #4 by Ryan Adams. Another writer name-checked in a title is “Saul Bellow,” #8 by Sufjan Stevens. The source for #3, Radiohead’s “2+2=5,” says Jacobs, is George Orwell’s 1984. #10 is several Led Zeppelin songs (“Misty Mountain Hop,” “Ramble On,” and “The Battle of Evermore”) which Jacobs says were inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. “Although his long, blonde locks,” Jacobs writes, “and groupie-baiting ways may have suggested otherwise, Robert Plant was a big nerd.” As a lead-in to his list, Jacobs references Catherine Prewitt’s August 13th Paste interview with Jay Farrar (of Son Volt) and Ben Gibbard (of Death Cab for Cutie) about their upcoming Jack Kerouac-inspired album, One Fast Move or I’m Gone, and a related film of the same name. The Farrar-Gibbard project grew out of a documentary produced by Jim Sampas, Kerouac’s nephew, about the years when Kerouac wrote the autobiographically-based novel Big Sur, published in 1962. Gibbard portrays the book’s Kerouac-like character Jack Duluoz as a cautionary, anti-role model: “After all of the wild nights, he’s become just a fat drunk man at a bar who is now not drinking because he wants to, but drinking because he has to.” The Kerouac theme continues at #2 in the above list, The Hold Steady’s “Stuck Between Stations,” which has a line from On the Road.

Economist.com has been running a web-only series of columns this summer spotlighting “hidden-gem museums” around the world. The pieces are beautifully written, and do an excellent job of placing the houses of art in historical context. The first was July18, about the National Museum of the Renaissance at the Chateau d’Ecouen. The column points out that although attendance rose to 85,000 visitors last year, that’s not particularly good, especially considering its location in Paris. July 25 spotlights the Museum of Handbags and Purses in Amsterdam.  On August 1 is the dryly-headlined Arles together now, about Museon Arlaten in Arles, France. Lack of marketing, promotion and amenities visitors have come to expect, such as a café and a catalogue, kept down visitor totals to 55,000 last year. Yet the back story is fascinating; blending its creator, the poet Frederic Mistral, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1904, and Vincent Van Gogh. The column points out that the latter admired Mistral, yet probably never met him. The loan of a Van Gogh would complete the picture: “Now that fate has reversed the reputations of the two men, the presence of a Van Gogh in the Museon Arlaten would send visitor numbers shooting up.” The three most recent museums covered are The Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, New York; designed by and filled with the art of the sculptor Isamu Noguchi (August 9); The Phillips Collection, in Washington, D.C., on August 15 (not far from where I live, and the only one of these spaces I’ve visited) and The Wallace Collection, in London on August 22.  The latter is due for a sudden boost in visitors beginning in October, when it begins an exhibition of 25 new paintings by Damien Hirst. The hidden-gems column has been a pleasant summer diversion. Let’s hope it gets extended for another season.

Rich Karlgaard, Forbes publisher and columnist, points out in his August 17 commentary Drucker’s Final Words On Leadership: Manage yourself before you take on responsibility for others, that people who aspire to become leaders must get their own life in order. It’s a brief and to-the-point column; mostly drawing attention to and setting the context for a link to the full text of Peter Drucker’s 1999 Harvard Business Review article Managing Oneself. The latter is an excerpt from Drucker’s important book from the same year, Management Challenges for the 21st Century. I was pleased to see Karlgaard’s column, since the subject matter dovetails perfectly with the self-development theme of my new book, Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life. Also read the insightful interview Peter Drucker On Leadership, conducted by Karlgaard for Forbes.com and published on Nov. 19, 2004, Drucker’s 95th birthday and almost exactly a year before he died. Excerpts from that interview are included in a book I reviewed in 2006 for USA TODAY, The Effective Executive in Action: A Journal for Getting the Right Things Done, a workbook by Drucker and Joseph A. Maciariello, based on Drucker’s classic 1967 book The Effective Executive. (Excerpts from the HBR article are also included.) Reading both the Drucker article/chapter and the Forbes.com interview shows how timeless Drucker’s ideas on self-management are, and why we need to learn about and apply them in today’s world of uncertainty. “Successful careers are not planned,” he writes in the HBR piece. “They develop when people are prepared for opportunities because they know their strengths, their method of work, and their values.” In the interview, he said: “I’ve seen a great many people who are exceedingly good at execution, but exceedingly poor at picking the important things. They are magnificent at getting the unimportant things done.”

Garr Reynolds, on his consistently useful Presentation Zen blog, has a handy and helpful recent post, 10 Tips on how to think like a designer. The ideas and insights he presents have applicability to a wide audience, which was his intention. Whether you are designing a presentation or anything else that people will have to look at and understand, you’re likely to discover things that will help you consider your project in new ways. One of the most provocative tips is the first: embrace constraints. The inclination for most of us is to complain about what we weren’t given to do something, rather than to focus on how to make the best of the situation. Reynolds suggests cold realism instead: “Your problem is what it is. How can you solve it given the resources and time that you have?” Reaching into Zen – Reynolds is based in Japan – tip #3 is to adopt the beginner’s mind. That way you are open and receptive to fresh new ideas and concepts because you are not jaded and shackled by your own experience. In a related manner, he suggests we sharpen our awareness and curiosity of the wonders all around us, all the time. “Good designers are skilled at noticing and observing,” he writes. “They are able to see both the big picture and the details of the world around them.” A running theme through some of the tips is to remember that what you are designing is about the audience — however that is defined — not you. Try to be empathetic and see things from their point of view. I enjoyed Reynolds’ 2008 book presentationzen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery. His next book, presentation zen Design: Basic design principles & techniques for the non-designer, will be published in November.