Living in More Than One World

Tom Butler-Bowdon, author of the 50 Classics series, has a new book, Never Too Late to be Great: The Power of Thinking Long, that should provide considerable inspiration to many people who need it the most. Among those who should find it especially interesting and helpful are late bloomers, career changers, people in transition and even procrastinators. The premise is that significant success, even and especially in middle age and beyond, is possible if you think strategically in long enough time frames, while working hard and doing what is necessary to make it happen (e.g. additional learning, networking, and gaining experience in a field any way possible). And try not to be too impatient.
He is a master synthesizer of information who tells a story succinctly and effectively. A key message is that success is rarely preordained. Although the stories of Howard Schultz of Starbucks and Ray Kroc of McDonald’s have been told often, they still seem fresh here, especially when told from this vantage point. Hard work, diligence, a fierce entrepreneurial spirit, ingenuity and vision for the future propelled people like Schultz and Kroc to success, not anything in their background. And I found particularly interesting the roots of Amnesty International and its founder Peter Benenson; and the Lonely Planet publishing empire, founded by Tony and Maureen Wheeler. Ditto the long climbs of such literary figures as the novelists Lionel Shriver and Vikram Seth.
Butler-Bowdon wrote the book when he was 43, and many of the examples are of people who did not find their greatest successes until they were 40 or older, some much older. He explains some of the main ideas from the book in a recent Huffington Post, Life Isn’t Short: What it Means For Your Success. I interviewed him in 2010 for my blog, and in 2008 I wrote about and interviewed him for USA TODAY. While his message is important for middle age people, I think that younger readers will also find inspiration in these examples. When you have potentially many years stretching ahead of you, thinking long from the start can give you a tremendous advantage, and even peace of mind.

Leave it to The Economist, and specifically the Schumpeter management column, to find the intersection between Leonard Cohen and entrepreneurship. The February 25th Enterprising Oldies explores, in a neat package, why all of us (no matter where we are chronologically in adulthood) may have to explore entrepreneurship and other forms of self-employment at some point in our working lives.
As we think about how to diversify our portfolio of work experiences, it’s worth digging deeper into how we can apply some of the life lessons of the 77 year old Cohen, a singer/songwriter/poet/novelist who was inducted into the Rock&Roll Hall of Fame in 2008. He’s written such oft-recorded classics as “Suzanne” and “Bird on a Wire,” and the more recent “Hallelujah.”
As pointed out in The Economist and a recent New York Times interview, part of Cohen’s recent renaissance has come about because he had to resume touring and recording to help make up for millions of dollars lost in dealings with a former financial adviser. But no matter what the impetus was, the fact is that he has a new album, Old Ideas, and has toured the world recently at far beyond traditional retirement age. What can we learn from his example?
1.    Diversified creative output. He has a tremendous body of work, going back more than 40 years, to draw on. It’s entirely possible that his poetry books are not major money-spinners, but he also has his albums, songwriting royalties (perhaps a considerable sum, given all the cover versions of his songs) and concert fees.
2.    A  powerful personal brand. Mention the name and people instantly associate it with him and his work.
3.    A global outlook. He has a worldwide following, with his books and music available worldwide, and fans everywhere, well beyond his native Canada.
4.    Remaining relevant. People are eager to listen to the new output of this 77 year old man, and he’s adding new fans all the time.
5.    An impressive body of work. One reason millions of dollars are at stake from Cohen’s career is that he has written and recorded so many important songs over more than 40 years.
Even if the work you do is not creative in nature, chances are you still may have to/want to work beyond 65. It’s never too soon, or too late to be thinking about amassing a high-quality body of work, diversifying your output, building your brand, thinking globally and remaining relevant.
As ties to traditional jobs and employment arrangements continue to evolve and become more tenuous, we will increasingly find ourselves in what could be called The Leonard Cohen Economy.

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 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.

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.

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.

Warren Bennis, whom I wrote about last year, is one of the world’s top authorities on leadership. He’s also a great example of someone who remains relevant, in-demand and active in his mid-80s. I think a worthy goal for knowledge workers to aim for is what Bennis has accomplished: deep into what many would term as advanced years, people still want to know what he thinks, and many will pay for the privilege. His book with Burt Nanus, Leaders: Strategies for Taking Charge, has sold more than a half  million copies, and has a front cover endorsement from Peter Drucker. (Last year, I saw Bennis give a thought-provoking presentation at one of the Drucker Centennial events in Los Angeles.) Now, at 85, Bennis has his first website. And at the same time, he’s published his account of a fulfilling, meaningful life, Still Surprised, A Memoir of a Life in Leadership (written with Patricia Ward Biederman, with whom he has collaborated previously). The website has lots of interesting material. He has published 30 books and countless articles, and there has been lots of positive coverage of the new book. You can also get a good sense of Bennis as a person from the photo page of the website. And if you want a short, tough, clear-eyed view of the responsibilities of the leader of today, read Diane Brady’s September 23rd Q&A in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Speed Dial: Warren Bennis. The art of brevity is celebrated in this quote: “Sound bites are important. A leader has to talk to people’s hearts. Sound bites give specificity, but they have to be relevant and meaningful and resonant.”

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!

Kathy M. Kristof’s Personal Finance column in the May 17 Los Angeles Times, Charlie Munger’s got a billion words of wisdom, is well worth reading, beyond whatever you take away about investing. Munger is vice-chairman of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc., Buffett’s right-hand man and, as Kristof puts it, “one of the world’s savviest investors.” Munger, who is 85 and a Harvard Law graduate, is also chairman of Wesco Financial, and an example of a person who trains his powerful intellect on a variety of areas. He, like Buffett, remains vital and relevant long past traditional retirement years. I first heard of Munger in 2002, when interviewing the late Jim Michaels, the legendary former editor of Forbes, for my forthcoming book, Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life. Michaels was Drucker’s longtime friend and also his editor when Drucker wrote for Forbes. He drew my attention to the intellectual similarities between Munger and Drucker, and told me of a lengthy lunch the three had together and the brilliant conversation between the pair, whom Michaels said were meeting for the first time. I think many of us would have liked to have been at the table that day!

Cindy Leise’s neat human interest story Toni Morrison’s first-grade teacher recalls past century, in Ohio’s The Chronicle-Telegram, is the kind of article at which local newspapers excel. Leise interviews 98-year old Esther Hunt, who taught the Pulitzer Prize-winning Morrison in 1937, in Lorain, Ohio.  The peg for the story was Morrison’s local appearance at Oberlin College’s Convocation Series, which unfortunately Hunt could not attend because of a family event in another state. According to the article, she taught in Lorain City Schools for 45 years, until her retirement in 1974. Morrison’s latest novel is A Mercy, which was published last year.
While newspapers remain under threat partly due to the upheavals caused by the online world, it is also true that readers beyond Lorain County Ohio would never have had the opportunity to read this charming story had it not been made available free online by The Chronicle-Telegram.