I wrote a couple weeks back about the little celebration we had at the d.school of 100 Best Business Books of All Time. There is a more detailed and I think more fun description of what happened on 800CEORead blog by Kate, who organized the event. Check out the post. One of the audience asked the four of us authors for a little take away, for a little sound bite to summarize something important we believed. Jeff Pfeffer, to his credit, resisted some as -- and I know this from many conversations with him -- he thinks that giving people a short take away at the end of a class or session cane be mistake because people should build think for themselves and build their own takeaways. After a bit of resistance from Jeff, he provided one, as Randy Komisar, Chip Heath, and me. As Kate's post indicates, here they are:
Randy: Be passionate about what you do.
Chip: Know when to say no. Too often people say yes to everything.
Bob: Fight as if you are right, listen as if you are wrong.
One other comment, writing is lot like developing any other product, there is a lot of iteration and a lot of failure on the road to success. Randy reported that they rewrote Monk and the Riddle 17 times; Chip Heath reported that he and Dan rejected about 30 covers before they finally convinced their publisher to do that fantastic silver tape cover on Made to Stick, and Jeff and I also had a long battle with our publisher who insisted that "Louder than Words" was a much better title than The Knowing-Doing Gap.
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