Living in More Than One World

Last week I wrote a guest post for LexisNexis Government Info Pro, Creating Your Total Life List for 2012. Much has been written at the end of last year and the beginning of this one about new beginnings. But as we get deeper into January, it’s easy for the fresh feeling to wear off. No matter how many systems you use to better your life, having handy reminders for self-improvement are always helpful:
1. Time management and productivity: Jason Womack, whose book Your Best Just Got Better: Work Smarter, Think Bigger, Make More, will be released next month, is interviewed by Meridith Levinson for CIO.com, in Time Management: 6 Ways to Improve Your Productivity. (Meridith  interviewed me in 2009, for Peter Drucker as Life Coach: Book Shares His Wisdom.) What’s valuable about Jason’s advice is that it is work-specific, and we can never get enough good tips in this realm.
2. Happiness: This a topic gets hotter every year. For evidence see the January-February 2012 Harvard Business Review, with a number of happiness-themed articles, including Shawn Achor’s Positive Intelligence. Shawn wrote a terrific book, The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work, in 2010. Also check out The Happiness Advantage: An Interview with Shawn Achor, on the World of Psychology blog.
3.  Mindfulness and Stress Reduction: The British duo of Danny Penman and Mark Williams, authors of Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World, have a guest piece for CNN.com, Destress your life in 10 easy steps. Also have a look at their recent posts for Psychology Today. For a personal account of the benefits of mindfulness meditation, see Newsweek’s Mindfulness Meditation Is Rediscovered, by Amy Gross, the former editor in chief of O, the Oprah Magazine.
4. Lifelong Learning: Opportunities abound, from taking classes (both in person and online) to self-directed learning from books and articles in print and online. For quick, painless tips and idea-starters, check out Newsweek’s 31 Ways to Get Smarter in 2012.
Obviously there are many other categories, strategies and techniques for improving your life this year. But any one of the four above would be a great place to start.

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.

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.

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.

Living in more than one world can be demanding. One of the Peter Drucker-related life lessons I’ve applied is to revise my schedule of activities when new realities demand it. That’s why I am resuming writing my blog, after not blogging since late June.

It’s been a whirlwind summer. Shortly after my presentation at the SLA Annual Conference in Philadelphia came an intensive, six-week teaching semester for the course The Special Library/Information Center, at the Catholic University School of Library and Information Science. The students completed two major papers: a site visit at a Washington, D.C.-area special library, as well as a Virtual SLA project, in which they followed online, after the fact, and reported on the SLA Annual Conference. In one part of the paper, each student had to interview two librarians who had been at the conference, but whom they did not know previously. A major highlight of the course was the 16th Special Libraries Symposium, where a panel of local librarians met with the class and special guests to discuss their career journeys and the state-of-the-art in the profession.

While teaching I was also working on my first complete issue (the forthcoming Winter 2012, which will be out in mid-December) as Managing Editor of Leader to Leader. I’m learning a lot every day and interacting with a whole new set of people within and related to the leadership world. There are many deadlines involved, but I have always prided myself on making them in a timely fashion. In this I agree with Drucker, who once told me that “deadlines are sacred.”

Sadly, the summer also saw the illness, and eventual death, of my 95 year old father, Paul Rosenstein. His funeral, in Scranton, Pa., where I was born and raised, was a deeply moving experience. I will write more in the future about his great, long life.

Now blog writing beckons again. If anyone else had a similar experience of adapting to new schedules, demands and routines this summer, I’d love to hear about it!

It’s been nearly two weeks since I attended the one-day annual conference of American Independent Writers. And it has been more than a week since I’ve returned from presenting at the 2011 SLA Annual Conference in Philadelphia. The ALA Annual Conference is beginning in New Orleans, but I won’t be there this year. I attended last year and in 2009, when I did the first book signing for Living in More Than One World. Professional conferences are great experiences, on many levels. They are a valuable way to learn a lot about a particular discipline in a relatively short period of time. In that spirit, last year I gave a thought exercise to my students at the Catholic University School of Library and Information Science. If you could attend any conference, anywhere, that was outside your professional discipline, but in an area of interest, what would you choose? The trick here is not to get sidetracked by location. Just because a conference happens to be in a city you’d like to visit isn’t a reason for choosing it. Rather, what professional discipline outside of your field would you like to learn more about, enough that you would spend three or four days immersed in it? I think this is a worthy thought process for any knowledge worker. It allows you to consider subjects you are curious about, and gives you the opportunity for checking online to see how those disciplines present their conferences. A quick source of ideas, for academic conferences, is Conference Alerts. Ideally, you are picking a field that is a stretch in terms of your current knowledge and experience. It’s true that this is all speculative, and in reality you are not going to be transported there. But just reading through the conference information online gives you worthwhile information about topics and people important to that subject. And who knows, maybe next year you’ll take a leap of faith and attend the conference on your own?

Even though it is graced with a photo of Keith Richards and a nod to his new autobiography, Life; Kerry Hannon’s Forbes.com post 10 Great Books for Career Changers, Give The Gift of Possibility has to-the-point thumbnails on self-help, career-changing and personal finance books to aid people in transition.  She mentions job hunters and retirees as potential recipients of the books, but the list should hold appeal for people in various types and stages of transition, which is pretty much everyone. Our transitions take place at different paces and in varying levels of awareness. So reading thoughtful books can often be valuable companions for our journeys. Kerry is a former colleague of mine at USA TODAY, and she now has a super-active career as a writer and editor, including as contributing editor and retirement correspondent for U.S. News & World Report. #7 on her list is her latest book, WHAT’S NEXT? Follow Your Passion and Find Your Dream Job. (She admits it is a “shameless” choice, but that her inspirational message is too important not to include in the list out of modesty.) #1 is Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, the followup to Made to Stick. She intentionally chose some earlier titles, including 2008’s Encore: Finding Work That Matters in the Second Half of Life, by Marc Freedman, and The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life, published a decade ago by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander. In 2001, I saw the Zanders give a highly inspirational presentation. And they are profiled in Eric Liu’s 2006 book Guiding Lights – How to Mentor and Find Life’s Purpose. Many people in transition are or will be involved in teaching, learning and mentoring, so I would add Eric’s book as the unofficial #11 on the list. Happy reading!

Sally Blount, Dean of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, recently wrote about the benefits of going on a retreat. Hers was silent, a focused time to contemplate, especially useful for major changes in life. This fit her situation well as the new dean of the school. I’ve been on somewhat similar retreats and found them valuable, but last week I attended a different type of retreat, of the Berrett-Koehler Authors Cooperative. It was my second, and both were remarkable experiences. Here are four reasons why I think it’s a great idea for knowledge workers to make time for retreats: 1. Meeting new people and renewing friendships. Although some of the attendees at the BK retreat were people I met in 2009, I also made new friends. Some were Facebook friends that I had not yet met in person. There were three communal meals a day that provided added opportunities for getting to know people better. 2.  Education. I learned a lot from the writing/marketing/publishing sessions run by my fellow BK authors, or members of the BK management team. 3. Personal renewal. There are major benefits to getting out of your routine for a few days. Many retreats, as this one did, have built-in time that can be used for contemplation, reading and being in nature. In the mornings before breakfast, if you chose, there was also time for group yoga and meditation. 4. New Activities. The BK retreat had a nonjudgmental atmosphere of acceptance. Some of this came from structured activities of trust, sharing and bonding. One night there was a campfire, and another night a talent show. Before the latter, we had a brief art therapy session. Although I went into it mentally kicking-and-screaming, I really enjoyed it and found commonalities with writing and editing. This is an intentionally short list. I’m interested in hearing about other benefits from retreats you’ve taken.

Today’s post was inspired by a suggestion from my friend and Catholic University colleague Kimberly Hoffman. The new school year has started, and both teachers and students need a framework for managing themselves in navigating the fall and spring semesters. Consider these tips in the days and months ahead: 1. Coursework can be all-consuming. Make sure you are maintaining your health by taking some time for exercise and mind-body activities such as yoga or the Alexander Technique. 2. Determine what constitutes your “total life” during the school year. Make a list of all your activities and commitments (especially work and family obligations) inside and outside of the classroom. You will then be better able to summon the proper effort for schoolwork. 3. Make communication a personal priority, both in speaking and listening. Are you clear about the commitments and expectations for each class? 4. Inside and outside of class, look for activities that encourage the highly-engaged, mentally stimulating feeling of flow, as outlined by the psychologist/author Mihaly Csiskszentmihalyi. 5. Make time for reading of books in subject matters outside of what you are studying or teaching, even if it’s just a few minutes each night before falling asleep, or while riding on the bus or train. 6. Stretch beyond your regular subjects by attending at least one public lecture or presentation by a visiting speaker on campus (or at another local school) in another discipline. 7. Look for the sense of meaning in what you are studying or teaching, and how it relates to your life, now and in the future. You can help maintain a proper attitude and sense of belief in your abilities by applying principles from positive psychology. No matter how many of these seven tips for self-management you employ, I hope you find them useful. Additional suggestions are welcome!

Scranton, Pa., where I was born and grew up in the ‘50s and ‘60s, was not particularly a cultural hotspot when I lived there. But in recent years, the situation has changed dramatically. Many people know it as the fictional setting of the hit NBC show The Office. There are now Office-themed tours, the subject of Jayne Clark’s recent USA TODAY story Scranton welcomes fans of ‘The Office’. And during last year’s presidential campaign, the city became known for the family roots of both Hillary Rodham Clinton and Joe Biden. Among the major improvements in recent years include two top minor league franchises shared with their neighboring city, The Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees, the Triple-A baseball affiliate of the New York Yankees; and hockey’s Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins, the top affiliate of the Pittsburgh Penguins. The Toyota Pavilion at Montage Mountain (near the baseball stadium) books major pop music acts during the summer. These big-time sports and music activities would have been nearly unthinkable when I lived there, and it’s nice to see the progress. The latest major development is the new Commonwealth Medical College, which has just seated its first class. It went from idea to reality in less than five years. Read the fascinating two-part series in The Scranton Times Tribune, by Sarah Hofius Hall. It shows how far the city has come in the long, painful transition from a coal-based and manufacturing economy to becoming more knowledge-based. There are also excellent, long-established local schools of higher learning including The University of Scranton, Marywood University, Penn State Worthington Scranton and Lackawanna College.  The tourist attractions such as the Steamtown National Historic Site and the natural beauty of much of the area and its surroundings, combined with its relatively short driving distance to both Philadelphia and New York City, are also making people see Scranton in a more positive and hopeful light.