Living in More Than One World

In his February 24 opinion piece for CIO.com, Why New Technology Demands New Business Models, Jack Bergstrand writes that CIOs (Chief Information Officers) are in a perfect spot to identify and lead significant innovation in their organizations. Yet the from-all-corners and at-all-times demands of their jobs make this a difficult proposition.

The solution, Bergstrand believes, is to apply Peter Drucker’s work on innovation to the technology issues that were barely in existence when Drucker was writing, such as social media and cloud computing. “He had brilliant insights about innovation,” Bergstrand writes, “that can help CIOs take the right risks on new technologies and avoid the failures that ultimately sank so many dotcom companies.”

Bergstrand is founder and CEO of the consulting company Brand Velocity. He was a longtime Coca-Cola Company executive, including being its CIO. And he is quite knowledgeable about Drucker, whose ideas on knowledge work and knowledge worker productivity form the backbone of Bergstrand’s book Reinvent Your Enterprise Through Better Knowledge Work. I met Jack last November when we were both panelists for the Drucker Authors Festival on Drucker Centennial Day 2010, in Claremont, Cal. In talking to him and reading his book, I was impressed that he (like Drucker) was able to draw from many different sources to convey information in a serious, yet accessible way. Besides business and technology, Bergstrand also applies such areas as chess, cybernetics, sports and particularly psychology.

Drucker’s major work on innovation is the 1985 book Innovation and Entrepreneurship, a classic that is not as dated as you might think a 26 year old book would be on these topics. The reason is that its principles can still be applied today, which gets back to Bergstrand’s argument. His CIO.com look at innovation and its problems is also applicable beyond the concerns of CIOs. How can we best innovate as people and within organizations, while making sure our daily work is done the best it can be? How can we discriminate among the countless technological tools that will not only enable but improve our life’s work? The people, and organizations, that find the right answers will help define the future in our uncertain world.

The most valuable books for personal transformation are often short, practical and to-the-point. That is an apt description of Laura Goodrich’s just-released Seeing Red Cars: Driving Yourself, Your Team, and Your Organization to a Positive Future. Laura is the co-owner of On Impact Productions; and also a consultant, radio/TV/film host and a fellow Berrett-Koehler author. You can read a free excerpt from her book and see her new promotional video at her page on the B-K website. I met Laura last June at the B-K Authors Cooperative Marketing Workshop. I wasn’t surprised that her book is full of solid, actionable advice, because in one of the exercises during the workshop, we were in the same “co-consulting” group to briefly discuss areas in our professional lives that we wanted to work on. I found her to be genuinely thoughtful and interesting/interested, while helping me to think about new ways to approach problems. That’s a big premise of her book: how we think about what we want in life determines not only how we act – or don’t act – but also what we create and receive, personally and professionally. We get more of what we focus on, and for many of us, we focus on what we don’t want, rather than what we do want. She covers both the personal and organizational levels, with exercises to help you determine your passions, interests, goals and values. What particularly interests me is her material on being well-rounded. Her added focus on family and friends, health/fitness, personal finance, spirituality/faith, volunteerism and other areas provides a strong added dimension beyond the workplace. Dr. Ellen Weber, a brain researcher who is interviewed in the book, also has an interesting post about it in her new Forbes blog, Mind Makeover. One final note: the company you keep has an effect on how you think and view the world. Remember this Goodrich suggestion from Seeing Red Cars this weekend and beyond: “Hang around with people who have very positive thinking.”

Many of us sense a gap between where we are now, and where we’d like to be, personally and professionally. If you’re in that category, the January 31 post from Tony Schwartz, The Exhilarating Power of Purpose, makes for inspirational reading. In a mini-biography, Schwartz details his journey from frustration to fulfillment. His earlier career was totally based on writing. Now, he still writes — The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working was a bestseller last year – and he is also the CEO of  his own company, The Energy Project. I don’t know him personally, but I still treasure my inscribed copy of his book What Really Matters: Searching for Wisdom in America. I went to a talk he gave in April, 1996 at Marble Collegiate Church in New York City, where the pastor for 52 years was Norman Vincent Peale, author of the classic The Power of Positive Thinking. The paperback of Schwartz’s book had just been published, and the talk was given in a sort of annex/church basement, for a weeknight lecture series. He interviewed and profiled many people for What Really Matters in a highly personal cross-country odyssey to learn more about personal growth, human potential and mind-body work; including Ram Dass, Betty Edwards, Michael Murphy, Helen Palmer and Ken Wilber. Another interviewee was the pioneering sports psychologist Jim Loehr. Years later, Schwartz became a business partner in Loehr’s company, Human Performance Institute, and a co-author with Loehr of the bestseller The Power of Full Engagement, in 2003. (I reviewed Loehr’s Stress for Success for USA TODAY in 1997.) Eventually, Schwartz made the leap to starting The Energy Project. In his post, he says that the joy and satisfaction he gets from running the business reinvigorated his writing, which somewhat surprisingly, he had come to dread. In the inscription to me when I bought a copy of What Really Matters at his talk 15 years ago, Schwartz wrote “To Bruce-Hoping this serves your journey! Warmly, Tony Schwartz.” Thanks, Tony; it did, and it still does.

Many of us are pursuing goals, aspirations or resolutions for the current year, and probably on an ongoing basis. We need all the inner tools and resources we can get; techniques and methods that cut across boundaries and can be applied in different areas of life. Several recent articles and posts about mindfulness remind us that it can be a helpful tool for personal development, if applied well. They also demonstrate that it comes in many different forms: meditation, as part of therapy and as a way of approaching life. Mindfulness meditation is covered by Mark Vernon’s post in the Guardian, How to meditate: An introduction. Be sure to see the sidebar, How to meditate in 10 easy steps, which combines brief text and great graphics. The mindfulness in therapy angle, complete with reports of encouraging scientific studies, is covered in Dave McGinn’s Stressed out? Try mindfulness meditation, in the Globe and Mail, Melinda Beck’s Conquering Fear in the Wall Street Journal and Chris Woolston’s Mindfulness therapy is no fad, experts say in the Los Angeles Times. Nomi Morris’ story from the same source last October, Fully experiencing the present: a practice for everyone, religious or not, is an interview with the super-articulate Jon Kabat-Zinn, a major authority on mindfulness, and author of the classic Wherever You Go, There You Are. In 1998, I took a helpful and memorable day-long, interactive introduction to mindfulness and yoga workshop, with hundreds of other people, led by Kabat-Zinn, who gave a lecture the night before. Finally, and especially for business people and leaders, I recommend a book I reviewed in 2005 for USA TODAY, Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee’s Resonant Leadership: Renewing Yourself and Connecting with Others Through Mindfulness, Hope and Compassion. Mindfulness is not the only focus, but it gives succinct descriptions, such as this: “Living mindfully means,” the authors write, “that we are constantly and consciously in tune with ourselves – listening carefully to our bodies, minds, hearts and spirits. The best among us consciously develop the capacity for deep self-awareness, noting and building on our understanding of our inner experiences.” In that sense, mindful living looks like a worthy aspiration on its own.

I have been intently reading an advance copy of My Life in Leadership: The Journey and Lessons Learned Along the Way, the powerful new memoir by Frances Hesselbein, President and CEO of the Leader to Leader Institute. The book details the life of an initially reluctant leader from Johnstown, Pa., who rose through the ranks of the local leadership of the Girl Scouts of the USA to eventually serving as the national organization’s CEO. During those years, Frances worked with Peter Drucker, who did considerable pro bono work for the Girl Scouts after the two met for the first time in 1981. His followers will particularly enjoy the chapter “My Journey with Peter Drucker.” Frances relates how he helped transform the organization, urging it to view itself “life size.” (This is sound advice for all us, personally or organizationally.) After retiring as CEO, she became one of the co-founders of the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management, now the Leader to Leader Institute. The story of that organization is well-told here. However, it is her leadership of the Girl Scouts, and the personal self-development that it produced in her, going back to her days as a Troop Leader, that remains the moral center of the book. Yet her many years of work with that organization, and with Drucker, are still only part of the book’s message. There is a lot about her family and her work with the U.S. Army and other organizations. Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, wrote the compelling foreword, and Frances also discusses nearly 30 years of working with Marshall Goldsmith, long before he became a best-selling author. I am really honored that in 2009, Frances wrote the foreword to my book, Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life. As with Peter, she has been a longtime, worldwide agent of inspiration and transformation. The two also represent something else: contributing mightily to the world long beyond traditional retirement age. My Life in Leadership is a great vehicle for sharing in her learning, lessons and experience.

If I lived in or near London, I know where I would be tomorrow: attending the four hour (and now sold out) Self-Help Summit. The event will look at the state of the self-help industry from a variety of perspectives, including seeking to determine its relation to happiness. The pursuit of the latter has become a booming industry on its own, complete with social science research, books and blogs. The panelists will include several people I have blogged about in the past, including Alain de Botton, Mark Vernon and Oliver Burkeman. The latter has a new book, HELP!: How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done, a compilation of his columns from the Guardian. The title reflects the tone of many of the columns, which balance being studious, respectful and skeptical to self-help ideas and concepts. The focus on the practical/doable side plays out in his recent article, The 10 best self-help gurus. I compared the list to the selections from Tom Butler-Bowdon’s 50 Self-Help Classics and found the following people on both lists: Richard Carlson (whom I blogged about recently), Tony Robbins, David Burns, Susan Jeffers and Eckhart Tolle (though he appears in Butler-Bowdon’s 50 Spiritual Classics). I recently interviewed Butler-Bowdon for the 300 Words With…feature on my blog. The emphasis on Burkeman’s list is on contemporary names; of the ten, only two are no longer alive (Carlson and Seneca the Stoic). The major happiness guru included is Sonja Lyubomirsky, author of The How of Happiness. I doubt that Burkeman meant the list to be scientific or particularly definitive, and many people will have their own favorites that are not included. Self-help has always struck me as mix-and-match among authors and ideas. It would be difficult to follow just one person or school of thought. If you are attending the Self-Help Summit, that might provide a good spark for questions and answers. And if you do attend, your impressions as comments on this post would be appreciated!

When I heard last week about the death of 93 year old Alfred Kahn, widely known as the “father of airline deregulation,” I immediately thought of two things. The first was Dan Reed’s wonderful 2007 profile/interview of Kahn in USA TODAY. The other was the enjoyment I got in the 1980s when I regularly watched Kahn’s commentaries on the Nightly Business Report, on PBS. (Another regular commentator on the show in those days was a pre-Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan.) Kahn’s TV essays were models of good communication: brief, clearly written and crisply delivered. What I didn’t know until reading Dan Reed’s story when it was originally published was how full and varied a life Kahn lived. It contained prodigious amounts of work, but also considerable time spent with family. There was also a detail that I found telling and touching. He had been singing and performing on the musical stage since high school, and deep into advanced age performed the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan with the Cornell Savoyards. (Kahn was an emeritus economics professor at Cornell, and had a longtime association with the school.) Kahn’s amateur acting career has been noted often since his death. Especially interesting is the post from Lisa Gold, “Remember, darling?”: Alfred Kahn was my Fredrik in “A Little Night Music,” in which she reminisces about casting him as the male lead in Stephen Sondheim’s musical in 1985 at Cornell. “Fred was wonderful in the role,” Lisa writes, “and a delight to work with and talk to.” In a sidebar to the 2007 USA TODAY interview, Kahn provided this quote about his future: “I don’t know what I would do if I couldn’t continue working. I’ll never retire. I plan to keep living until I die.” He did keep working, but he also had a wider perspective that made for a life exceptionally well lived.

As the year winds down, some useful best-of-business-book posts have been published recently, particularly Todd Sattersten’s The Top 10 Business Books of 2010. I saw Todd do terrific presentations at the 2009 and 2010 BK authors marketing workshops, and last year he was the first person to review Living in More Than One World, when he was with 800ceoread. Todd and Jack Covert, the Founder and President of 800ceoread, are the co-authors of a great book, The 100 Best Business Books of All Time. Todd’s new post also includes links to podcast interviews he did with some of the authors on his 10 best list, including Daniel Pink, Seth Godin, Chip Heath and William Poundstone.  Another author on the list, Steven Johnson, was interviewed recently on the 800ceoread blog. In 2008, I interviewed Daniel Pink and reviewed his book The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need, for USA TODAY. In 2003, I reviewed Poundstone’s How Would You Move Mount Fuji? Microsoft’s Cult of the Puzzle; How the World’s Smartest Company Selects the Most Creative Thinkers, for USAT. Miami Herald columnist Richard Pachter has Pachter’s Picks: The best business books of 2010. It includes three that also made Sattersten’s list: Pink’s Drive, Godin’s Linchpin and Chip Heath and Dan Heath’s Switch. Bloomberg.com’s best-of article is James Pressley’s Paulson Plays Chicken, Rich Get Richer in Best Business Books. Also on his list is Poundstone’s Priceless and Michael Lewis’ The Big Short, and such titles as Crash of the Titans, by my former USAT colleague Greg Farrell, now of the Financial Times. Finally, McCombs Today, the blog of the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, has The Best Business Books of 2010, including The Big Short and, in agreement with Pachter, The Great Reset by Richard Florida; and in common with Bloomberg, Fault Lines by Raghuram G. Rajan and Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of an Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager, by Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager, n+1 and Keith Gessen. We will soon start seeing how the best business books of 2011 will unfold. Happy New Year!

300 Words With is a new, semi-regular feature on my blog, in which I interview people I admire, especially those who exemplify the spirit of living in more than one world. Their responses are (in the range of) 300 words. Today’s interviewee is the artist/writer/musician/NPR radio commentator David Greenberger, who also has done innovative work with the elderly. I knew David back in my music writing/selling days in the late seventies and early eighties, and then lost touch with him until becoming reconnected earlier this year on Facebook.

1. Can you briefly describe your life’s professional journey so far, including Duplex Planet and your art?

Duplex Planet is my art, or one aspect of it. I won’t take up the limited word space here to describe it, but will say that I started out as a painter – art school, showings, the whole thing – and after I created the earliest issues of the periodical in 1979, I purposefully set aside painting a year or so later so that I could truly allow this other medium to become my voice. That said, for the past half decade, I’ve returned to visual art as well (though there are also visual components in The Duplex Planet) and it picks up around where I left off thirty years ago. For the past 15 years I’ve been most interested in the creation of monologues with music, further abstracting the underlying source material to make for a more universal, less documentary-specific focus.

2. Has music been a running thread through your personal and professional life, and if so, in what ways?

Music has been a constant since I was ten or eleven years old. I’ve always been nourished by hearing something new, as well as finding new in the familiar. I played bass guitar in bands in my hometown of Erie, PA, through high school and into college. I returned to performing when I lived in Boston and formed a band called Men & Volts. We did five albums and numerous other releases over the course of the eighties. Putting together an issue of The Duplex Planet has always been like assembling an album: the rhythmic flow, the juxtapositions, the slow reveal. My recordings and performances now – monologues with music – I liken to a band with a guy (me) talking.

3. What non-work activities do you find particularly meaningful in your life?

As an artist, I find very little divide between my daily endeavors and the notion of work. They are the same; they are who I am and what I do. That said, stepping away from the various processes is necessary for the growth and integrity of the art. So there are friends, the aesthetic pleasures of food, film, literature and every other medium, to baffle, amuse, delight and enrich.

Today marks the fourth anniversary of the sudden, untimely death at forty-five of Richard Carlson, the psychologist/author of the best-selling Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff series of self-help books.  I devoted nearly a page and a half of my book, in a section on leaving your legacy, to Carlson’s example. I wrote that I twice interviewed and wrote about him for USA TODAY. In our telephone conversations, he seemed very in line with his image: a genuinely nice guy, who had important things to say, and who was adept at getting his ideas across in reader/listener friendly ways. (I happened to come across his phone number in an old address book the other day; a somewhat eerie experience, considering how close it was to the anniversary of his death.) At this time of year especially, it would benefit many of us to consider two things about his legacy: 1. The importance – despite the difficulty – of heeding his message about not getting too stressed out about little things (even if they don’t seem little at the time). His books conveyed the related message that many of our problems can be dealt with by stopping to consider options before leaping to negative conclusions. 2. He put a lot of care and devotion into his work each day, and part of the result was many books, web materials and articles that will continue to nourish people for years. His life example helps prove that it is what we do daily that contributes to our legacy for the future. Carlson also wrote about the fact that not all problems are small: his 2002 book What About the Big Stuff? Finding Strength and Moving Forward When the Stakes Are High deals with tough topics in ways that are ultimately positive, optimistic and life-affirming. His work has been extended and expanded upon by his widow, Kristine Carlson, who is a prolific author and media presence in her own right.