Living in More Than One World

A new, semi-regular feature begins on my blog today: “300 Words With…” I’ll be interviewing people I admire, especially those who exemplify the spirit of living in more than one world. Their responses will be (in the range of) 300 words. The first person is Tom Butler-Bowdon, who has written the excellent 50 Classics series of books; on self-help, success, psychology, spirituality and prosperity. In the past, I wrote about and interviewed him for USA TODAY.
1.    In what ways (day-to-day and otherwise) has your life changed in the years since your first book was published?

It was important because I could start to see myself as a proper writer, and work towards writing full time, which didn’t happen until a couple of years after. I thought my book would ‘set me up’ in terms of a career, but in fact it was just the first step. I had to write four more books before people really began to see me as an authority in the personal development area. Every day I do what I love, whereas before, although my career as a political and policy adviser was exciting, it was never fully ‘me’.  Now, there is really no limit to what is possible if I keep at it.

2.    You excel at synthesizing large amounts of information succinctly, and in a reader-friendly way. Any tips on how people can accomplish this in their own work?

Because I have had to read, absorb and write about so many books with my 50 Classics series, people always assume I am a speed reader. Actually, I don’t do this and in fact read every word carefully of the first few chapters. I believe that if you give a book this sort of respect, you will truly ‘get’ it. Once you have the essence, you can write about it comparatively easily. Trying to summarize from the first page in a machine-like way is difficult and a drudge, whereas the act of synthesis is basically exercising your natural insight and judgment.

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

I enjoy cycling, running, swimming, spending time in nature and with my daughter. Beyond these things that have the power to refresh, what gives me real insight and peace is spiritual practice. This includes meditation (I usually attend a Buddhist group each week), and purposively giving up my day to God. That may sound wacky to a non-believer, but giving control to a Higher Power gives you great clarity and direction. You are like a pen in the hand of the real writer. I also read a range of spiritual literature; everything from Christian theology, such as Rick Warren, to New Thought writers including Catherine Ponder, to Eastern traditions and the Kabbalah. I feel it doesn’t matter where you get your inspiration as long as you get it on a daily basis.

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?

The week is moving fast. It’s already Wednesday. But if you haven’t already done so, check out USA TODAY’s handy First Monday: New in business TV, DVDs, magazines, books. This runs on the first Monday of each month, and it’s a fun and informative feature to look at either in print (where it takes up the entire third page) or online, with the added value of links. I always enjoyed when I got the opportunity to write for this page when I worked at USA TODAY. It provides readers with quick and useful scans of upcoming things that should be on the radar screens of business people. It also deserves an audience beyond the business world. The August 3 page includes the book 1000 CEOs, with “brief biographies, career trajectories and pullouts of each executive’s traits, practices or words of wisdom.” The films featured are the advertising documentary Art & Copy, and Julie and Julia, based on Julie Powell’s hit book Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen. It stars Meryl Streep and Amy Adams. One of my favorite features each month is What I Read, in which an executive details what he or she is reading, and a bit about their reading habits. The spotlight here is on E. Kelly Fitzsimmons, CEO of HarQen. Her three favorite books: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Good to Great by Jim Collins and Managing the Professional Service Firm by David Maister. The “5 Questions” this month features Bill Roedy, chairman and CEO of MTV Networks International. His response to what makes his network a good ambassador for American culture abroad: “We have 150 channels in 168 countries and our audience, primarily young people, wants to be connected. Our goal is to be both a medium of cultural exchange and a unifying force by integrating global and local culture.”

What first drew me to Sam Allis’ major Boston Globe profile of architect William Rawn, Starting slow, finishing fast, was the emphasis on Rawn’s  listening skills. Rawn says architects aren’t trained in this skill, yet he spends considerable time at it, especially at the beginning of a project. William Rawn Associates was named the top architectural firm in the country by Architect magazine in its May 2009 edition. Beyond the idea of success-through-listening, the profile is a fascinating portrait of a professional at the top of his game. He is 66 and took a non-traditional path into the profession. Rawn says that architects reach their peak in their 50s, 60s, or even older.  He graduated from Yale and Harvard Law School, and then practiced law in Washington for a couple of years. He spent four years he spent as assistant to the president and then assistant chancellor for physical planning at the University of Massachusetts Boston. The UMass experiences honed his listening skills and convinced him to become an architect, enrolling at the MIT School of Architecture + Planning. He started as a solo, growing to a 32 person firm that does high profile work for universities, arts centers, libraries and religious institutions. The photo portfolios on the company’s site and the photo gallery that accompanies the article are stunning. Although I didn’t know at the time that he was the architect, I was highly impressed by a visit last year to one of Rawn’s buildings, the Glavin Family Chapel at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., before I gave a presentation elsewhere on campus. It’s a nondenominational space that I wandered into and had to myself for half an hour. The combination of wood and 30 foot high floor-to-ceiling windows opening onto the adjacent wooded area makes for a powerful spiritual experience. I made a mental note at the time that I’d like to return to speak there in the future. That’s an affirmation of a building’s power that I think Rawn would like to hear.

Planning for the Rest of Your Life, a concise essay in the Chicago Tribune by Jim Sollisch, an executive with a Cleveland-based advertising and public relations agency, provides food for thought as we enter the holiday weekend. He reflects on the question “So what do you want to be when you grow up?” He finds that it is relevant not only for his 23-year old son with a BA in Political Science who is working odd jobs as he determines a career path; and his daughter who is about to begin college; but for himself, at 51. He points out that despite a presumably high-powered job, he tells new college graduates looking for internships that he still struggles with how to define himself. He explains that he got both a BA and MA in English, followed by teaching and writing two novels. That life was traded for work in advertising, while still writing short essays for various publications. He has an intriguing warning for young people: you can get stuck in life not just by financial and family obligations, but by success. You can get so efficient at what you do that you make fewer false starts, which “are the fuel of art. They lead to dead-ends and to cliffs that force you to jump. Which requires you to imagine how to land.” His personal and professional strategy that brought career success keeps him from getting up early to write another novel, in his estimation. His message to all of us, at almost any age, is that exploration and what you do and learn when you get lost are important in life. And asking yourself what you want to do when you grow up is really a lifelong question.

Although it was written for a journalism-related readership, I think any knowledge worker can gain valuable insights from a guest column I wrote this week for the website 21st News, Lessons Learned from Peter Drucker: A Guide For the Future. It’s partly a personal look at how I have been living and applying some of the principles in my forthcoming book, Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life, before and after my layoff last December from USA TODAY. But it is mainly a short guide to how people can apply some of the principles in their own lives, based around five areas: teaching, continuous learning, mentoring, volunteering and reflecting. I pointed out Drucker’s stellar journalism credentials: besides his many books, he contributed for many years to such publications as The Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic Monthly, Forbes, Harvard Business Review and many others. He embodied high-minded achievement, delivered with integrity. He was the kind of role model that knowledge workers can emulate if they are working or not working, looking for a new job or thinking of changing professions. 21st News describes itself as  “a comprehensive Web site about the future of journalism and the news business.” The guest column was for Grant’s Angle, the blog by the site’s founder and editor, Grant Perry. Judging from his bio, he is a great example of being multidimensional and living in more than one world. I’m grateful for the opportunity he provided me to contribute to his site.

If you like lists as much as I do, you’ll be kept busy for a long time perusing the 100 Most Creative People in Business on FastCompany.com. It’s an intriguing mix of executives, designers, writers, directors, academics, artists, musicians and more. Although a number of names were familiar to me, many were not. The thumbnail descriptions are to-the-point and informative. Beyond a quick education about people who are doing cool, useful things at a high level, it provides many role models who demonstrate what’s possible by stretching our knowledge, imagination and abilities. When you see the list, you’ll recognize names, companies, products and services that have enriched your life in one way or the other. Obviously such a list is quite subjective, and bound to be confounding to some people. But it provides tremendous food for thought and makes for compulsive clicking and reading. A sampling of people and their rank: #1 Jonathan Ive, #4 Reed Hastings, #13 Stella McCartney, #22 Damien Hirst, #35 Peter Senge, #40 Neil Gaiman, #49 Tyra Banks, #68 Zaha Hadid, #83 Brian Eno…you get the picture.  A neat value-added feature is a page of links for top ten creative people by industry, e.g., Movies and Television (#3, JJ Abrams), Sports (#5, Shaun White), Health Care (#1 Melinda Gates), Architecture (#4, Rem Koolhaas), the Web Business (#5 Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter), Music Business, (#2, Tim Westergren of Pandora) and so on. Fast Company knows it can’t please everyone. Their suggestion is to “Enjoy. Quibble. Complain.”

The highlight of my time Monday at the 100th annual conference of the Special Libraries Association/SLA, in Washington, D.C.  – besides meeting many interesting new people and reconnecting with friends and former students – was the 14th Special Libraries Symposium. I produce this event every year for the course I teach at the Catholic University School of Library and Information Science, The Special Library/Information Center. I bring together a group of librarians, who are generous with their time in giving back to the profession, to meet with my students to talk about their career journeys and the state-of-the-art in their work. Yesterday we had a large, talented and highly experienced group that shared their knowledge, experience and advice. Some of the common themes are applicable beyond the world of librarianship to the wider world of knowledge work: continuous learning (with formal classes, new degrees or otherwise), continually upgrading your technology skills and experience, marketing your services, being entrepreneurial, trying different areas of the profession before you find the one that’s right for you, being visible in your organization and developing your managerial and leadership talents, whether or not manager is your title. A number of the librarians had more than one graduate degree, including one with an MBA. Many came to the profession as a second career. Some are working, or have worked, for software vendors. All proved to be wonderful role models to the students and to other librarians and knowledge workers. Thanks to all who participated in this memorable event!

In an earlier post, I wrote about Ry Cooder and Nick Lowe’s upcoming European tour, and about the standard of musical excellence maintained over many years by both musicians, as well as their ability to work outside of their comfort zones. I had interviewed and written extensively about Lowe in my music writing days, though I never interviewed or met Cooder. Now comes word from Cooder’s record label, Nonesuch, that he has a collection of fiction, Los Angeles Stories, that will be made available only on the tour. This follows a novella that came with his recent album I, Flathead. Cooder is an embodiment of living in more than one world; as a musician working in many genres, record producer (including the eight million-selling Cuban music album Buena Vista Social Club and the subsequent documentary), soundtrack composer, musicologist and now author. The Nonesuch page links to Ry, Flathead; an extensive, unabridged interview of Cooder by Tony Scherman, in stopsmilingonline.com, the wide-ranging website of Stop Smiling magazine. It’s a fascinating conversation about Cooder’s life and work; especially how Buena Vista Social Club changed his life. One area I found particularly interesting was the crucial role of research in his work as a writer and musician. And be sure to read his comments at the end of the interview about the importance of learning and continually advancing your abilities.

Ira Jackson, the dean of Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management at the Claremont Graduate University, has written The View From Drucker: Drucker Apps, in the May 23 Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, about an innovative regular feature on the Drucker Institute website. Twice a month, since January 29 of this year, the Institute takes a topic and includes information on various facets from Peter Drucker, in the form of excerpts from relevant passages of his books, material from the voluminous online Drucker Archives and videos or audio files featuring Drucker or outside experts. There is also the full text related to the topic from The Drucker Difference columns on BusinessWeek.com by Rick Wartzman, the director of the Drucker Institute. You can subscribe, or access Drucker Apps from the website. “Each bi-weekly App,” Jackson writes, “is designed to be timely and play off something in the recent news.”  He describes the May 9 feature on volunteering, which has eight different features, including a short Drucker video, and the text of a speech Drucker gave to the Economic Club of Washington in 1991. The Drucker Apps for May 23 is about finding and keeping jobs. The ten features — one section is intriguingly headed “Help Wanted” (if you help yourself first)” – include the full text of a 1957 speech Drucker gave to the Eleventh International Management Congress in Paris, “The Problems of Maintaining Continuous and Full Employment.” There is also a video and book excerpt from William Cohen, president of the Institute of Leader Arts, and a former PhD student of Peter Drucker.  A final note: there is a Q&A with Rick Wartzman about The Drucker Institute and The Drucker Societies in my forthcoming book, Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life.