Dateline: US Airways commuter jet from LaGuardia to Indy, 25 October 2005
Nine days later I am home. Can't wait to listen to three kids all talking simultaneously for four hours straight, catching me up on everything that's happened in their lives since I left home.
Can't wait to see the new house that's much further along, or the new four crowns on Vonne Mei's teeth.
Can't wait to get the lot of them to sleep and then lock our bedroom door.
In the end, the dream of reappearing on the NYT bestseller list was a bit of a chimera, despite all the best efforts to build the base in the blog all these months. Steve Oppenheim, PR-man extraordinaire, put it in perspective when he said he'd never seen a more crowded October in all his 14 years in the business.
The Mao book. There's a spot. Jerry Lewis gets one because he's Jerry Lewis. So does Doris Kearns Goodwin. So does Joe Montana, even if he just speaks into a mike. So does Mike Wallace even if he's ghost-written. Then there's Al Franken telling jokes and pretending to be a politician (actually he does a pretty decent job, but that three-hour radio show every day to hawk his book and comedy album seems unfair to their B-list blogger, he typed, plucking another sour grape).
I mean, Jerry Lewis gets Letterman. All he has to do is show an old Dean-slip and he wins!
I thought I had no competition because they're weren't any grand strategy books out there right now except for Kaplan's love-letter to Special Operations Command, but I was kidding myself. There was never any chance of the miracle-of-Brian-Lamb. I should be grateful he kept "Book Notes" going as long as he did, otherwise I wouldn't have the NYT BSL moniker now.
So I bury the snippiness. I put away the Ambien. I get . . . you know . .. more comfortable in my . . . you know . . . milieu that is Indiana.
And I go back to selling room by room, just like before.
I sold the 92nd Street Y Sunday night. The scheduler made me promise right on the spot, as I walked off the stage, that I would return and speak again as soon as possible, definitely when the paperback comes out. The book handlers there said they'd never sold so many volumes at a talk there before. I signed them for a while. It was a powerful feeling made all the cooler by having Neil Nyren from Putnam there, plus Steve O., plus Mark Warren and his lady Jessica, and especially my oldest brother Jerome and his spouse Susan. A real highlight of the tour.
Even better was the brief I laid on Royal Dutch/Shell execs the next day. The response I got to the PNM brief in June was enough to get this rapid-fire repeat performance with another crew of execs in mid-career training, but frankly, the interaction was a bit tense at that one. PNM was like "Kill Bill, Vol. 1," too much kill and not enough Bill. BFA is more like "Vol. 2," less kill and more Bill, as in less war and more peace, or less realism and more idealism, or less a past worth fixing and more a future worth creating.
I walked out of the RD/S event thinking this brief is going to sell to a much wider audience--much wider.
And no, being a scenario-based strategic planner, it did not escape me how cool it was to be such a celebrated briefer on the future of the world to the granddaddy of corporate strategic planners.
So I focus on the good and discount the bad, and I get ready for my appearance in Second Life today. See you there.
Here's the caught-up catch:
■ Seems a solid pick on the Fed chairman
■ New Core sets the New Rules on guns?
■ Calcutta or Kolkata: it's connecting baby!
■ Rumsfeld calling the kettle black in China
■ Four more data points on locating China in history
■ Don't piss off the Canadians!
■ The brain drain does not cause poverty in the Gap, and the only cure is connectedness
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