Well-Read Life™

From Japan to America, Family to Family to Family...

The disasters that decimated Japan are almost unfathomable. Yet the unimaginable becomes real when we discover the connections that many of us have to Japanese families.

At Levenger it is because of the finely crafted objects that come to us from Japan that we feel such a strong connection.

Japan is famous for its astonishingly sharp ceramic knives. All it took was one touch of that ceramic to make our Single Sheet Cutter, which we import from Japan and have sold these many years.

The Japanese have a rich tradition in calligraphy and a special love for fountain pens.   They make some of the world’s finest pens, including Sailor, which is known for its remarkably flexible gold nibs. Their venerable craftsmen make very fine points, cherished for Japanese Kanji, their language pictograms, and then make ultra-broad nibs—the ones they call the music nibs, and that delight note-card writers like me.

 The same company that makes popular disposable Pilot pens also makes the retractable nib fountain pens known as the Namiki Vanishing Points.

We were able to make contact with the Namiki/Pilot factory shortly after the earthquake and tsunami. All their employees were safe, and there was no damage to their factory. They were dealing with occasional power blackouts, a minor inconvenience in the face of such an enormous catastrophe.

We also know that the small family tannery that produces the hides for our popular Carezza leathers is a safe distance from the devastated Sendai. These hides travel from the tannery to another family business in China, where some of the world’s most skilled leather workers transform them into bags and wallets so soft to the touch, and yet so durable and long-lasting. These leather goods then travel across the ocean to a third family business, Levenger, where they arrive at our loading docks in Memphis.

  Somehow the global economy becomes much more personal when you know some of the families that make these businesses what they are.

Our family—the Levenger family—was lucky, in that all of the people in Japan we know and are honored to work with are safe. We hope the same is true for any family, friends, or colleagues that you know there as well.

We are all more connected than we know.

The CEO says thanks

It’s been a year, hasn’t it?

To all of you who have been part of the Levenger community this year, I thank you. From the start, we’ve been a company that knows the value and rewards of conversing with our customers. Who better to tell us whether we’re doing a good job?

As much as Levenger is about designing useful tools for the thoughtful life, we try to reach out to the well-read-life community in other ways as well. Through the Levenger Foundation, we’re able to support literacy on the local level and love of reading on the national level.

The Literacy Coalition of Palm Beach County, where Levenger is headquartered, works in remarkable ways to help the underserved in our community unlock the power and opportunities that come with being able to read. The National Book Foundation, in addition to sponsoring the National Book Awards, sponsors a nationwide Innovations in Reading program that helps to inculcate a love of reading among the young. I’m proud to serve as a volunteer for the former and on the board of the latter.

If 2009 was good for anything, it was to remind us of what is truly important and what can never be lost, taken away, canceled, downgraded, or eliminated. Our ability to read ignites our capacity to think and stirs our desire to do—to do the good, important work that each one of you does for your community and your family and yourself.

Here’s to more of such good work in 2010—to a life well-lived through reading. Here’s to you.

With gratitude,

Steve

P.S. As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments.)

Man and Book Change the World:The (Continuing) Story of Greg Mortenson

When Three Cups of Tea author Greg Mortenson addressed the thousand people attending the 20th annual Love of Literacy Luncheon in West Palm Beach last Friday, he had some bad news, some good news and (to me at least) some surprising news about literacy in Afghanistan. 

The bad news: The Taliban has bombed hundreds of schools, targeting especially those attended by girls.

The good news: In the year 2000, only about 800,000 children between the ages of 5 and 15 were in school in Afghanistan, and almost all of them were boys. Eight years later, in 2008, the figure was 7.2 million children in school, and 2 million of them were girls.

Why is the number of girls in school so important? Because, explained Mortenson, drawing on an African proverb, when you educate a boy, you educate an individual; when you educate a girl, you educate a community. The girls not only stay around to educate siblings and eventually their own children, but they often educate their mothers.

And it is a mother, says Mortenson,  who must grant permission for a son to go on Jihad.

The surprising news: Mortenson said in the schools his organization has helped build, they have retained an Afghanistan tradition where elders do story time two or three times a week. Apparently 90% of Afghan children listen to their elders pass on the traditions of their culture. This compares with only 10% of American children who do so.

Are we missing something here?

It takes a family…

American parents know how important it is to read to their children, and they often do so up to the time their children begin to read for themselves. But educators here say parents often stop too soon. Further, one of the downsides of the very mobile American society is that grandparents are often far from their grandchildren. Both miss out on story time using books or just the elders’ memories.

But continuing to read to children who can already read has continuing benefits.

When I reported on Mortenson before, I emphasized that his East Asia Institute ensures the community’s involvement in its school by insisting that the local communities provide free land, unskilled construction labor and ongoing support. This partnership model is similar to the successful Room-to-Read efforts and the model proven to work in this country by Andrew Carnegie a hundred years ago.

Mortenson takes heart in a recent survey that says 40% of American college students want to make a difference in the world—a figure higher now than in recent years. “The only way we can solve poverty is to touch, taste, smell and be with poverty ourselves,” he says. But there are so very many ways to make a difference—by being teachers, going into medicine, or working in many businesses.

A toast to the Tea

Mortenson had just come from a meeting at the Pentagon with General Petraeus. The general told him he had learned much from Three Cups of Tea and has made it mandatory reading for U.S. soldiers going to Afghanistan. This time it’s not only a military surge we’re engaging in, but a surge for education and infrastructure as well.

Three Cups of Tea has been on the New York Times bestseller list for 100 weeks or so. Read it and  you’ll see why. In one stroke, it shows how a person, and a book, can change our world.

How about you, dear reader—what book would you say has changed our world? Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you’ll connect to Comments).

My Take on Taking on Twitter

Every time I venture to the Bay Area, I get whiplashed by technology.

The effect was magnified last week by attending David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” summit in San Francisco. It attracted more than its share of geeks with ambitions of using David’s marvelous techniques to get even more things done in their technology-leveraged lives. 

Twitter was the talk of the town. My fellow panelists used it as the latest example of digital dementia, threatening to suck any remaining time we might have left into typing haiku-like messages of 140 characters or less, all to answer the seemingly innocuous question, “What are you doing right now?”

Even David Allen was tweeting. A monitor in the hall rolled all the tweets onto the screen, the little bubbles of information converging and bringing us news of what we were doing right then.

James Fallows, the Atlantic Monthly journalist, author, and a most tech-savvy guy, announced he would not be Twittering. With Fallows in the lead, I was going to resist the peer pressure to tweet.

But then other friends prevailed upon me to try it out.

One is globetrotting forecaster Paul Saffo, one of the plenary panelists along with Fallows and Guy Kawasaki. It would be hard to find a fellow more in love with pens, paper and functional leather goods than Paul Saffo. His journals are works of art (as you can see). Yet Paul is on Twitter.

 

“Twitter is digital haiku,” he says. “It forces logorrheic scribblers to be brief. The result is often unintentionally elegant, but even when it isn't, at least I don't have to wade through an email run-on.”

Leo Laporte, who happens to be one of America’s leading tech reviewers (aka The Tech Guy), told me Twitter might be the next killer app. A few CEOs are using it quite effectively to make closer connections with their customers.

“Ten years ago, Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls and David Weinberger in their book, The Cluetrain Manifesto, made the then-surprising assertion that ‘markets are conversations,’” Leo says.  “They theorized that the new, Internet-empowered consumer would demand that companies become open, transparent and accessible: speak with a human voice. Twitter is one of several social media tools a business can use to open a conversation with its customers, to ‘speak with a human voice.’"

A third friend recommending Twitter is bestselling novelist Joe Finder. Joe wasn’t at the conference but on a flight to Barcelona—Twittering all the way.  Here’s how this prolific novelist explains his tumble into Twitter:

“My editor and my assistant both tried to stop me, but it was too late. I’m a gadget guy, and I love new technology. Two weeks into this, I’d already developed a following (everybody develops their own following; it’s not like I’ve gone all Hollywood), and my followers post all kinds of fascinating stuff. I think we’re witnessing the birth of an entirely new type of communication—halfway in between private and public.”

So I signed up on Twitter.com with this hope: that engaging in this new technology will allow me to develop relationships with more of you. 

If you’re already on Twitter, look me up here, SteveLeveen (no space between the first and last name). Levenger also has its own Twitter, which I invite you to follow as well.

With your help, we’ll learn how best to use this technology to help our customers.

If you’re not on Twitter and want to take the leap, it’s easy and free. Try it out and let me know what you think—with a tweet. Or let me hear from you here. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you’ll connect to Comments.)

Worst case, we’ll be reading and writing short little sentences. To paraphrase Lincoln, “A short tweet can’t be all bad.”

(His original quotation: “A short speech can’t be all bad.”)

Join me at the ‘Getting Things Done’ Summit(and we'll get organized together)

I've been a fan of David Allen and his Getting Things Done methodology for many years now, so it was with pleasure that I agreed to be a panelist at his first GTD summit this March in San Francisco.

His new book, Making it All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and the Business of Life, came out just recently and I'm enjoying reading it. 

David and his team offer practical solutions for navigating the overload of information most of us suffer from. He is smart, experienced, sincere—and his method is genuinely helpful, as has been borne out by his growing list of marquee clients in the U.S. and internationally. 

So if you're able to attend the GTD Summit, March 11 to 13 in San Francisco, I'm sure you'd get a lot out of it—and it would be my pleasure to meet you there. 

Click here to register.

And click on the Comments link below if you’d like to post a note. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you’ll connect to Comments).

Going to the Library on the Day Obama Became President

For the inauguration ceremony, our staff at Levenger headquarters here in Delray Beach, Florida, gathered in a conference room. The live coverage was projected onto a screen we normally use for business presentations. Lori and Janet, our executive assistant, brought in two trays of cookies with dozens of little American flags, and were met with lighthearted laughter and applause. People snapped up the flags to wave or just hold. We sat or stood, mostly in silence, watching the ceremony and listening to Obama’s inaugural address. As in so many other conference rooms and family rooms across the country, our staff clapped and sighed and wiped their eyes. Someone handed me a tissue.

I felt proud of our country for its peaceful transition of power, and proud of the powerful symbolism that Obama represents for America and the world.

After work, I went to my regular weekly tutoring session at the Village Academy, not far from our headquarters. The Academy is a public school whose mission is to support its surrounding community of mainly lower-income families. The Academy offers classes for both youngsters and their parents, many of whom have recently immigrated to America with their children.

In the evening, while their children attend after-school programs, those parents who can spare the hours from their jobs come in to work on their English in free classes and one-on-one tutoring. On this night, a group of nine parents—all recent immigrants—traveled by bus the few miles to Delray’s downtown public library for a tour. They were escorted by staff members of the Palm Beach Literacy Coalition and Americorps.

The new immigrants, men and women, were from four countries: five from Haiti, two from Nicaragua, one from Mexico and one from El Salvador. They sat on a beautiful long wooden bench with stainless steel appointments, in the lofty lobby with bamboo trees, slate walls and a waterfall nearby, while Norma Kane, the library’s community relations assistant, gave a bit of history.

She explained that the library began in 1913 and was established by the Ladies Auxiliary on the second floor of the old town hall. She didn’t mention that for its first decades, blacks would not have been welcome. Nor was this the only library that had such a policy; it was prevalent in parts of our country as recently as the 1960s.

As one former mayor of Delray told me, any blacks who ventured at night from West Atlantic Avenue to East Atlantic Avenue (the demarcation street between black and white Delray) would have been escorted back by city police. The new library, which was built in 2004, now presides majestically at 100 West Atlantic Avenue in, as Norma says, “the center of things.” 

Norma explained to her guests that all the books, audiobooks, DVDs and CDs were free to check out, and that all they needed to do to get their own library card was to show some sort of photo ID—or even a bill with their name and address. The library is proudly unconcerned with anyone’s antecedents or status—east or west address.

After Norma’s talk, library volunteers divided the visitors into two smaller groups to tour the library. They went to the quiet study rooms, saw the dozens of free Internet terminals (all busy, as usual), greeted the reference librarians, saw the foreign-language sections and explored the children’s library, where they could bring their children for story hours.

Afterwards, the new immigrants lined up to receive their library cards before boarding the bus to return to their children.

The following morning, as I sat at the kitchen table and read the transcription of President Obama’s Inaugural Address in my newspaper, I took my pen and underlined this sentence:

The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our Gross Domestic Product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart—not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.

Because of our country’s belief in a common good, our lovely Delray Beach Library is able to extend the opportunities that literacy brings to every willing heart.

It has been a good week. I am proud of this small community and this big country called America. 

How about you, dear reader? I’d like to hear your thoughts about our new chapter. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you’ll connect to Comments).