Burning desires.



I think books are great things. But they don't hold all the answers, do they? Individually, taken alone I mean. Of course not, why should they? Their best characteristic, the ultimate payoff I think, are the seemingly invisible connections between things that books allow us, and sometimes force us, to draw and see.

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein connected the dots of a presidency gone awry that no-one else detected. James Gleick, standing on the shoulders of many before him gave, in his Chaos, a view into why not making sense makes sense. The Tipping Point, the Death and Life of Great Cities, Anna Karenina, Franklin and Winston, The Wealth of Nations, Good to Great, de Toqueville's Democracy in America, Harry Potter, even Harlequin Romances all weave and detail things out in their own fascinating ways. Great stuff, some far reaching and truly mind bending.

But one thing that persists for me when I read is the seemingly latent similarities and coincidences; the patterns of action and behavior, lessons learned, forgotten, relearned that appear over and over. Perhaps what I mean is the simple yet elevating sameness in the messages of wise people sharing their wisdom and their sweat.

You don't write a book without feeling you have something to say. You don't recognize you have something to say unless it pounds in your mind as being relevant, or urgent, or different. And again, you don't say something out loud, in print, to millions unless the urge to share and inform outweighs your worry for being shown a fool or a lightweight or a bore. For this, I am awed by the mere fact that a book gets written.

But books require similar risk and investment and willingness to suspend anxieties from a reader, don't they? Books are like bricks. You can collect them and stack them merely to say you have them, and perhaps, to infer you've read them all (God knows, I haven't read all mine.) Or, you can build something with them, a worldview, say. Or a fire. Yes, that's it. A fire. You can rub them together in your head, and build a fire. I much prefer fire over worldview. It feels more real, more in touch with the senses. A worldview seems more inert and abstract, more the way we might disinterestedly watch a child's ant colony--Us, and them; we observing, they doing. They committed to exploring and building, trying and failing and trying again, and us, taking notes, with no skin in the game.

That's the funny thing about books, especially the kind of business books that I see reviewed and read myself. They, like Anna Karenina or Harry Potter, are really how-to manuals in the art and technique of creating and understanding, using and abusing, passions and commitments and dreams. They presume an investment, an ambition. Yet we regard them as things apart from those senses and states of being.

We skin them of their humanity, harvest them for utility and in the process, they lose both. We're hungry for results, frustrated by failed prescriptions and processes and, yet, we return to same fount over and over, repeating the same skinning and separating, expecting perhaps that "this time, somebody's captured the magic in bullet form" that we can prune even further.

Wow. Again, I find my self using words that betray a sense of life and growth, of organic things, of being in the thing... Humanity, harvest, hungry, frustrated, magic, prune.

Maybe I'm being melodramatic, but it seems the more knowledge that gets shared, and is available, the more it takes on a commodity's presence, the sense that one idea's pretty much the same as another, and therefore none really deserves a special place on our own bonfire. Like I said, melodramatic, but this feels true to me. Perhaps bricks are not the only analogy for books, because they too seem inert, whereas maybe logs, fuel for a fire, still retain their organic nature, their evidence of themselves as the product of growth.

Fire. Growth. It brings to mind something I scribbled not long ago, an email, almost as a joke, to a friend who was frustrated--with business, with business books, with recalcitrant people, with everything:

....4. "Work, eat, sleep" is a self-imposed life sentence. Some leaders may think that little of their lives and their futures, but millions of employees and consumers are just dying to hear one say "Enough! I want more out of this for me, too! (No, not more money.)
5. Pick any two of the better, hot business books--Semler, Jack Welch, Collins, Sun Tzu--doesn't matter. But make sure one is diametrically opposed to what you "think" you already believe. Don't read them. Climb into them. Live them, like you're going to be shot if you don't live them. Tell your people you are doing this. Then, after doing exactly this for 6 months per book, ask yourself: Which did I feel like I would have written right out of school and not yet jaded to the working world? Keep that one. Buy copies of it for your people. Own it. Then take those assembled people into the parking lot and ceremonially burn the other book you did not choose. Bring a keg. Throw a party. Celebrate your freedom.

You'll be amazed at how good this feels and, how can I say this? Simple.

And that's it, isn't it? Feeling good, about what you are doing. Re-injecting the humanity and energy into rote and reductionism. Admitting, sharing the universal, communal reality that what we all want is a choice in things, preferably a better, more authentic road less traveled. One that fits. I've come to believe that that simple act of exposure, the willingness of a man or woman to really embrace an idea, to allow themselves to say "I'm looking for fire here"--that is the essence of growth and leadership, of one's self and of others.

The best books say this, over and over. Good to Great is The Fifth Discipline is The Lunar Men. They say the same things in different words. We nod at the answers when we read them. But not because we've had an epiphany, but because we recognize a pattern, a thread, a sensibility already parked in our heart and our head. We recognize, we aren't discovering.

We already had it. It was right under our nose. It wasn't "new."

Silly, isn't it?

Go on. Go "burn" a book.

update: Cleaned up for slapdash.Sorry. Posted this on my way out the door late for a morning meeting.