Living in More Than One World

Many excellent business-related books were published in 2011; more than most people can either read (or write about) during the year. So we owe a debt of gratitude to the reviewers who help us make sense of what’s been published during that time. Matthew E. May, author of The Shibumi Strategy: A Powerful Way to Create Meaningful Change, has a really useful post on Open Forum, Best Business Books of 2011.  It’s got links to his original reviews of the top books, including one that is on many best-of lists this year, Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs. Matt’s reviews are concise, yet highly descriptive and informative.
Todd Sattersten weighs in with the 11 Best Business Books of 2011. His list includes three also charted by May: the Jobs biography, The Lean Startup by Eric Ries and Practically Radical by William C. Taylor. Todd wrote, with Jack Covert of 800-CEO-READ, the 100 Best Business Books of All Time, recently released in paperback. They have become perhaps the best-known commentators on business books in recent years. The 800-CEO-READ blog also has a running list of candidates for best business book of the year, in such categories as General Business, Leadership, Management and others.
Another helpful guide is the expert advice on offer in Marketplace radio’s best-of list. They polled a variety of people for their top choices, with brief explanations. Examples include author-professor Clay Shirky’s choice of Michael Nielsen’s Reinventing Discovery and Liaquat Ahamed, author of the award-winning Lords of Finance, with Ron Chernow’s Washington: A Life.
James Pressley’s article Lehman Trader Goes Mad, Geithner Saves Citi: Top Business Books is Bloomberg.com’s best-of roundup. It starts with 10 books on the financial crisis, five on general business and five on economics. Number one on the latter list is Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman; I wrote about Kahneman and other leading psychologists in a recent post. 2012 will no doubt present us very soon with many candidates for next year’s best-of lists. I hope everyone has a happy and prosperous new year!

I always look forward to The Economist’s great yearly publication, The World in…In recent years, a web component has been added. The World in 2012 gives us a great head start on the year ahead. The 162-page magazine has a number of thought-provoking articles in such editorial categories as the United States, Asia, Middle East and Africa, Europe, Business, Science and Culture. Unlike in The Economist itself, the articles have bylines; some from Economist writers and editors, but many from high-profile guest contributors. In the latter category, you’ll find Aung San Suu Kyi writing on “A Sense of Balance,” Nandan Nilekani on “India’s identity revolution,” and Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook, on “Sharing to the power of 2012.”

The site for TWI2012 also has a blog, Cassandra, and links for previous years of The World in, going back to 2004. As cool and convenient as the website is, I still find the glossy print edition to be handy and valuable, especially for the quick, concise references in the 15 page “The world in figures” section. No matter how all the predictions for the coming year pan out, reading this publication will make you feel smarter and more well-informed.

Margaret Heffernan poses a stark question in the title of her recent entry on Huffington Post, Is Daniel Kahneman Really the World’s Greatest Living Psychologist? Kahneman, the Princeton University Nobel laureate who currently has a huge best-seller in Thinking, Fast and Slow, has been getting lots of media attention as his book has climbed the charts. What’s really valuable about Heffernan’s post is bringing together short descriptions of other eminent psychologists who have developed followings beyond their own field.
Before his hit book, Kahneman’s work was often referenced in business books, especially those that are oriented towards the mind and personal/professional development. But other psychologists have gotten that treatment as well, including another in Heffernan’s post, Stanford University’s Carol Dweck. Like Kahneman, she wrote a book for a non-specialist readership, in her case the terrific Mindset:The New Psychology of  Success. Her work was featured prominently in Daniel Pink’s Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, and she’s also been written about by Malcolm Gladwell. Besides Dweck, two other Stanford psychologists are in the post, both of whom have done ground-breaking work: Albert Bandura (including his fascinating theory of self-efficacy) and Philip Zimbardo, whose infamous Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971 was later described in his own book for a general audience, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.
As Heffernan notes, whether or not Kahneman is our greatest living psychologist is ultimately beside the point.  She writes that it is wonderful that we live in a time when so many of these people “are alive and productive, doing elegant and thoughtful work with immediate and lasting relevance to how we live our lives.” And it’s also true that as a society, the fact that the works of mind-oriented authors like Kahneman (not to mention Gladwell, Pink, Dan Ariely and so many others) reach the best-seller lists is surely a good sign.

One of the best examples of a multidimensional person living in more than one world is Chuck Leavell. He is probably best known as a top-level pianist who has played with The Rolling Stones for nearly 30 years and was with the Allman Brothers Band before that. He has also led his own band, Sea Level, and his discography is jaw-dropping. But as his recent bylined piece, A Rock ‘n’ Roll Tour de Forest, in The Wall Street Journal shows, he also operates on many other important levels: operator (with his wife, Rose Lane) of a tree farm in Georgia, conservationist, environmental/sustainable development advocate, author and tech entrepreneur.
His recent TedXAtlanta video about balance in life and balance in development demonstrates the personal characteristics that have made him a success: he comes across as passionate, articulate, genial and informed. Although I never met him during my music world days, I’ve known about him since the beginning of his music career in the early 1970s. I’m sure he meets and interacts with a fascinating diversity of people in each of his roles, and that his involvement in so many worlds feeds an intense intellectual curiosity.
It’s encouraging that he has attracted so much attention. His most recent book, Growing a Better America, was published earlier this year. In recent weeks, besides the WSJ piece, there has been a New York Times college football-themed blog post interview with him, Postcard From Alabama: Playing for the Stones, Rooting for the Tide; and Chuck Leavell On Piano Jazz, a recent piece on NPR.org that includes his enjoyable and informative 2003 interview/music appearance on Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz. We should all be grateful that Leavell is truly living in more than one world.

Last year, I spent the early days of November in Claremont, Ca., doing a presentation at the Drucker School and being on a panel of authors at  Drucker Day 2010, the culmination of a year’s celebration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Peter Drucker.
This year I was also in Claremont at the beginning of November, but for slightly different reasons: two days of intensive research in the Drucker Archives at the Drucker Institute, followed by Drucker Day 2011, the annual Drucker School event gathering together alumni, current students, faculty, staff and others.
Although there is a tremendous amount of free material that the archives maintain online, in cooperation with the Honnold/Mudd Library (the Claremont Colleges Library), there is still a lot of material that you can only access by being there. It’s truly a magical place.
The morning speaker for Drucker Day was Vivek Ranadivé, chairman and CEO of TIBCO; a pioneer of real-time computing technology and the author (with my former USA TODAY colleague Kevin Maney) of The Two-Second Advantage: How We Succeed by Anticipating the Future–Just Enough. Ranadivé was a captivating presenter,  weaving together business ideas with his compelling personal story, which began in India. He also recounted his adventures coaching his daughter’s basketball team. At first, he knew little about basketball, but the team’s eventual success was chronicled by Malcolm Gladwell in the 2009 New Yorker article How David Beats Goliath: When Underdogs Break the Rules. Ranadivé is now co-owner and Vice Chairman of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors.
The afternoon session was a dialogue on job creation in California, with Michael Rossi, the newly appointed Senior Advisor for Jobs and Business Development in the Office of the Governor, being interviewed by Matthew DeBord of KPCC radio. Rossi has his own compelling personal story, growing up in a modest household, and rising to the heights of the banking world. His affection for his alma mater, University of California, Berkeley, was touching. He is adamant that no matter how important college is to job creation, even more crucial is the need for improvement in K-12 education.
Drucker Day was not only educational for me, but also a networking paradise, as I saw old friends and met new ones. It has been nearly six years since Drucker’s death, but his spirit permeated the entire day.

Today’s post has two aims: to point towards my two recent guest posts, and to thank the people who provided me the opportunities to write them.  The more recent is An Appreciation of the Life of My Father, Paul Rosenstein (1916-2011), on Santo (Sandy) Costa’s Humanity at Work blog. My dad died at 95 on August 5th, and I think Sandy’s blog is the perfect forum for me to celebrate the life of a man whose work ethic meant that he did not retire until he was 92. Sandy has written a terrific book, also called Humanity at Work, which shows him to be a wonderful example of the Living in More Than One World principle.
In that same category is his colleague Dianne Legro, whom I got to work with during the planning for publication on the blog. She exemplifies emotional intelligence in action.
During the summer, my post Building a Framework to Embrace the New and Expand Your Horizons ran on the SLA Future Ready 365 blog. However, it started life as an entry in 2011 Best Practices for Government Libraries, the excellent publication produced and edited by Marie Kaddell of LexisNexis. Marie was also the person who chose to include it as a group of guest posts for SLA. She has provided me with writing opportunities before, including guest posts on her Government Info Pro blog, and also an entry in 2010 Best Practices for Government Libraries. And she also provided me with the opportunity to do one of my favorite author presentations, giving the keynote for a government librarians event last year at the National Press Club, in Washington, D.C., The New Face of Value: Creating and Sustaining Value in Your Professional and Personal Life.
So I am happy to begin my work week with a big thank you and shout out to the generosity of Sandy Costa, Dianne Legro and Marie Kaddell!

I’m always on the alert to learn about people who live multidimensional lives. By all accounts, Dr. Robert Buckman fit that description perfectly. He was, among other things, an oncologist, professor, writer, broadcaster and humorist. Unfortunately, he died in his sleep on October 9 at 63, on an airplane returning from England (his country of birth) to Canada, where he lived for the last 25 years of his life. Since 1979, he coped with life-threatening illnesses and still managed a whirlwind schedule. From everything I’ve seen, he touched a lot of lives in person, in print, on television and through videos made with John Cleese, of Monty Python fame.
I had never heard of Robert Buckman before two weeks ago, but I’ve found the accounts of his life to be very moving. I had just arrived in Toronto to do a presentation the next day at The University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. I read obits/tributes to him in the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star (for which he was once a columnist) and the National Post.  There have also been pieces in the UK by The Guardian (written by Terry Jones, a Monty Python alumnus with whom Buckman had been working in the UK), The Independent and no doubt others.
When I got back to my hotel the next evening, I began to watch a show about cancer research featuring Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of All Maladies, on The Agenda with Steve Paikin, on Canada’s TVO network. During the show, I was stunned to see Dr. Buckman appear as a panelist. I figured that it must have been a rerun, but it turns out that he had been a frequent guest, and had taped this appearance right before he flew to the UK. Paikin wrote a nice tribute, Remembering Rob Buckman, on the TVO website. Buckman seems like he would have been a great person to know. And had I not been in Toronto for those two days, I may never have heard of him at all.

On October 13 I was privileged to give a presentation for the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management Getting it Done Expert Speakers Series. My topic, “How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Transform Your Life,” was based on my book, and fit in well with Professor Brendan Calder’s course for second year MBA students, GettingItDone®, which prominently features Drucker’s work. Brendan invited me to speak not just to the class, but to alumni and other members of the Toronto business and nonprofit communities. The great venue (the Fleck Atrium), the size of the audience and the sophisticated engagement demonstrated by their questions made this an event I’ll never forget.

Then something truly extraordinary happened. Brendan had been invited to a special dinner, across the street, at the iSchool of the University of Toronto, honoring the first McLuhan Centenary Visiting Fellows. This is the 100^th anniversary of Marshall McLuhan’s birth, and the school has created a fellowship program for a select group of scholars to spend between three and twelve months in residence in the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the Faculty of Information. I was able to attend as Brendan’s guest; and it was an honor to spend a few hours at the center of the McLuhan world.

McLuhan, who gave us the ideas of the “the medium is the message” and the “global village,” became famous in the 1960s, when he was teaching at the University of Toronto, but he was a friend of Drucker’s long before that. Their relationship is described in a chapter (“The Prophets: Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan”) of Drucker’s 1978 memoir, Adventures of a Bystander. McLuhan co-authored a brief tribute to Drucker, “The Man Who Came to Listen,” in 1970’s Peter Drucker: Contributions to Business Enterprise. They were nearly the same age. Drucker, who died at 95 in 2005, had his centenary marked in 2009, with major events held worldwide for a year. There are also a number of events marking McLuhan’s 100^th, including several this week as part of Toronto’s International Festival of Authors. For a closer look at McLuhan’s time at the university, read Alec Scott’s  “Marshall’s Laws” in UofT Magazine.

I’d like to think that Drucker would have been pleased that I could, even if only unofficially, bring together the Drucker and McLuhan worlds in Toronto on October 13. And I can’t even guess what McLuhan would think!

Peter Drucker would have appreciated the tone of the essays that comprise Rick Wartzman’s What Would Drucker Do Now? Wartzman writes in the Drucker spirit: tough-minded yet positive and fair, with a dose of good humor. He has been writing “The Drucker Difference” biweekly column for Bloomberg BusinessWeek since 2007, when he became Executive Director of The Drucker Institute, at the time a new entity. (Drucker died at 95 in November, 2005.) This collection shows how Wartzman plays off on topics in the news; generally in business but also politics, technology and other subjects, and relates their relevance to Drucker’s work.

The broad sweep of the material reflects Drucker’s diversity. The first three chapters are management-focused, but the next four are on Wall Street/Finance, Values/Responsibility, the Public and Social Sectors; and one that I find particularly interesting: Art, Music and Sports. In the latter we learn about his mid-1980s brief engagement as a consultant for baseball’s Cleveland Indians, how his teachings have influenced the Grammy-winning ensemble Southwest Chamber Music, and the relevance to his writing on how to cost products to Radiohead’s 2007 pay-as-you-like experiment for the album In Rainbows. Wartzman is particularly tough on executive compensation (a familiar Drucker theme) and the fate of the automakers. Drucker had intimate knowledge of this sector, stretching back to the 1940s and his book about General Motors, Concept of the Corporation.

As I noted in my post about The Drucker Lectures, Wartzman answered questions for a 2 ½ page Q&A in my book, Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life. That the writing in his new collection is so strong is not surprising, given his background as a longtime journalist for The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times, and his work as an author. In particular, he consistently does something that not all journalists/columnists can do: write compelling intros and thought-provoking conclusions. Years from now, people who want an overview of how the business world and society in general unfolded in real time from mid-2007 to early 2011 will find a valuable time capsule in What Would Drucker Do Now?

I returned a few days ago from the 2011 Berrett-Koehler Authors Cooperative Retreat, at the Stillheart Institute, located among the redwoods, not far from San Francisco. Last year, after attending the 2010 retreat, I wrote about the benefits knowledge workers can gain from similar events. Here are some further reflections after this year’s experience:

1. Conferences/conventions vs. retreats. I love conferences, and there are certainly similarities with retreats. But consider the difference in scale between a place like Stillheart (and the locations of the two previous retreats) and a typical large convention center, where you spend a considerable amount of time each day in transit. There are often long waits in line at the lone Starbucks, and limited food choices. At Stillheart, the three communal meals a day were delicious and healthy, and coffee/tea and snacks were always available.

2. A sense of the “other.” Retreats, however structured, get you out of your routine and normal physical settings. Unless you live in or near a redwood forest, you’re not likely to be surrounded by this type of scenery in your daily life.

3. Seeing a different side of friends/colleagues. Each year a highlight has been the Saturday night talent show. I was knocked out by the comedic, singing and musical ability of some of the authors.

4. The element of surprise. Some of the best moments of the retreat came from listening to ideas in different session “threads” that I did not anticipate would be relevant for me. It provided a lesson in the wisdom of suspended judgment.

I am grateful to the BK authors who volunteered their time to organize another wonderful retreat. I’d love to hear other thoughts on the benefits of a retreat, especially from the people who attended this year.