Well-Read Life™

On Memorial Day, respect for those who were silenced, and those who were not

Had there been a draft when my sons were coming of age, almost 10 years ago now, I would have become an anti-war activist. No way would I have let my Cal and Corey go to Iraq or Afghanistan without putting up a fight. But there was not a draft, and my children did not enlist. And so I became one of the silent ones.

As a silent one, I let other sons and daughters go to Iraq and Afghanistan, some of them not to return alive.

They were volunteers, after all, I told myself. They came, disproportionately, from lower-income families. The military would be a way up, an improvement in their circumstances. Unless, of course, they got themselves killed.

As a silent one, but not one who was silenced, I have been asked to “Support Our Troops.” To clap for them at football games, thank them for their service, and let them sit in first class on airplanes.

This show of appreciation stands in contrast to the loathing that was sometimes heaped on returning soldiers during the Vietnam era. Those soldiers were viewed by many as part of the problem—those who would participate in a war that many believed was morally wrong. Surely our present era of appreciation is an improvement over that era of disrespect, right?

And how do we show our support for the ones who get killed? We hold wrenching funerals, presenting their bereft ones with a folded American flag. When there are enough of them killed, and enough survivors to ache for them, we turn to our country’s history of commemorating the dead in cemeteries, in town squares, on the walls of sacred places. We build memorials.

One such memorial is in the center of Harvard Yard, and I recently spent some time there.

Where loyalty lies

I happened to enter Memorial Church when an organist was practicing. This space of soaring columns and lofty ceiling is filled with light, the pews freshly painted and the crimson cushions recently upholstered. On the wall to my right were engraved the names of those Harvard men who perished in World War II. They are listed by class year, beginning with the class of 1904. For that first year there are only two names, the second of which is Franklin Delano Roosevelt. (He died when the war was still going on, I reminded myself, while Commander in Chief.)

Then the class years continue, with the number of names increasing as the years march into the 1930s and ’40s.

As I contemplated the names so neatly carved, the beautiful music rising,  I thought of the parents of these men with engraved names who had sat where I was sitting. Of them gazing up at the name of their son, then back at their hands, up at the pulpit, down at their shoes. I imagined their ears filling with music as mine were. How did they reconcile the blackness of their loss with the beauty of the architecture and music?

The class of 1948 is the last year listed, and it has four names: Richard Webster Boyden,

Thornton Hunt Lyttle, Joseph Silverstein, Frank Suvla Vickers. These youngest of Harvard’s World War II soldiers were scheduled to return for another three years of college. What was commencement day 1948 like for these men’s parents? Were they invited? If so, did they come?

Next come the names from the professional schools. There are many for the law school and business school. For the divinity school, there are but two. One is Edgar Raymond Attebery. The other is listed like this:

                                               Adolf Sannwald (enemy casualty)

Adolf must have come from Germany to attend the divinity school and returned to serve his country. Was there a debate about whether to include him? And if so, whether to include the parenthetical note?

It turns out the matter had come up before.

Memorial Church was actually built to commemorate World War I. This I learned from a video that Harvard’s late Rev. Prof. Peter J. Comes produced. He explains that the building was dedicated on Armistice Day (what we now call Veterans’ Day) in 1932. In the nave of the church is a brass plaque engraved in Latin with the message, “Harvard has not forgotten its sons who under opposite colors also gave their lives to their countries.” There was, indeed, a controversy about whether to include the German names, but in the end, it was decided that Harvard’s first loyalty should be to its students. And so the names were commemorated, although not in the same place or style.

And the band plays on

As a father and a 60-year-old who has witnessed from afar my country’s wars, I rail against the waste of it. Yet I have also felt the brass of the bugle and the wool of the uniform.

As a youth, I was a trumpet player and played reveille, charge, and, on Memorial Day, taps. I still remember the pride I felt wearing my first band uniform at Lemon Grove Junior High in San Diego, California, and especially my high school uniform, an imitation of the Scottish Guard’s, at Helix High in La Mesa. We played the British Eighth and Colonel Bogey marches, we drilled, we polished our shoes to a spit-shine. All of this, of course, was an imitation of fighting units. When we marched, if non-band members had the poor judgment to mess with us by entering our ranks, we would shove them and kick them to make sure they would pay a price for daring to interfere with our machine-like precision.

When our older son Cal was four years old, Lori and I took him with us to the Copenhagen furniture fair and stopped to have some fun at Tivoli Gardens. When Cal saw the famed Tivoli Guards, who are boys, dressed in toy-soldier red and white uniforms, he was mesmerized. For the first time in his young life, Cal ran away from his parents, running faster than I’d ever seen him, to catch up with those marching, miniature soldiers.

What is it about uniforms, marching bands and marshal music, that we find so acutely appealing?

Paying tribute

I have visited the memorial built above the remains of the Arizona in Pearl Harbor and stood in silence to honor those who were silenced that December day. I have visited Gettysburg and choked up when I read the Gettysburg Address and surveyed that broad field filled with those who gave their last full measure of devotion.

With my father, my sons and my wife, I have visited the American Cemetery at Normandy, all of us walking among the endless snow-white headstones and perfectly trimmed grass. My father was shipping over to the Pacific when World War II ended. Had the timing been slightly different, none of us might have been walking Normandy that fine French day.

Of all the war memorials I’ve visited, the one that disturbs me the most is the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C. As I descend down the ramp of Maya Lin’s creation, and feel the names of men and women rising up over my knees, then my waist and then my head, and finally over my head, I feel like I am being buried with them. In the polished marble I see my ghost-like reflection, and wonder why.

I am not a pacifist. There are things worth fighting for, perhaps even things worth letting our sons and daughters fight for. But I have lived to see too many ill-conceived wars and remained silent. I am not proud of this.

In 1972 when I graduated from high school, I received my draft number, but like my father, I got lucky. Nixon resigned in disgrace and the Vietnam War ended with our hasty retreat before I could be shipped over. I wasn’t put to the test of serving, or refusing to serve, as those just slightly older than me were. And so I could remain silent, and did, speaking neither with my words nor my deeds. Yet many intrepid men and women had spoken out against the war, and that helped it end sooner.

On this Memorial Day, I pay tribute to those who have served our country in uniform, and also to those who have spoken up against doing so when they believed our leaders were wrong. We need both kinds of brave souls if our war memorials are to have the one thing we all wish they had in common: extreme old age. 

 

On this Father’s Day, remembering Churchill’s daughter

The story I remember is that Churchill didn’t want any statue of himself because he didn’t want pigeons mucking up his head. But there is a statue near Parliament in London, and I heard that the head is electrified to keep the birds off. I have no idea whether any of this is true, and it hardly matters. What does matter is that his memory stay alive, and stories can do that. 

And we will need these stories more now, as the man Winston Churchill really was slips inevitably out of living memory.

The recent celebration of the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landing showed the Greatest Generation dying off at a fast clip. One soldier who didn’t land on the beach also just died: the Lady Soames, a Dame of the British Empire and Ladies Companion of the Garter, Britain’s highest chivalric order. She was also known as Mary, Churchill’s daughter. 

She did what others could not to keep the memory of Churchill alive well into the future. A tiny part of her efforts was realized at Levenger, in the form of books written by and about Churchill, and lovingly published by our small publishing arm.

Levenger Press editor Mim Harrison recounts her meeting with this last living family member of the man who, as Kennedy said, “mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.”

                                                                                                                                     Steve

Lady Soames was busy writing her memoir that would be published, in 2012, as A Daughter’s Tale, when I met her on March 15, 2005. Levenger had published an illustrated edition of Winston Churchill’s essay, Painting as a Pastime, in 2002, and Lady Soames had graciously agreed to write the foreword to it, even though she barely knew who Levenger was.

Faxes were still popular then, and Lady Soames’s neatly typed manuscript had sprung forth from the Levenger fax machine one day. She had not only written a loving tribute to her father as a painter; she had also signed the piece at the end, deliberately and boldly: Mary Soames, with an inked flourish beneath it. It meant that we could reproduce her signature in our book. That was Christmas enough for me that year.

 We followed our first Levenger Press book on Churchill with another, much larger one: the edition by Minnie Churchill  and David Coombs that showcases all of his paintings, which number over 500. Minnie, for whom Lady Soames was Aunt Mary, had been instrumental in Levenger’s being the publisher of both books, and it was she who had generously arranged that I meet Lady Soames. Aunt Mary thought I should see some of the paintings contained in Levenger’s books.

 The daughter who went to war

Her home near London’s Embassy Row had the feel of a charming cottage. As Minnie, Simon and I walked past the black wrought-iron gate that had been left open, I looked up to a second-floor window and saw a room filled with bookcases. It was where Lady Soames was writing her memoir, taking care to corroborate stories for fear of, as she put it, “colliding” facts.

Lady Soames was 82 at the time but looked much younger, and anything but frail. Some of that was her voice—low and deliberate, lacking the lisp of her father’s, but a strong and distinctive voice nonetheless.

“Come sit by the fire and have some Champagne,” she said in greeting. As we walked through the foyer, I spied a big red leather box tucked casually beneath a small table. Scuffed and ripped and faded, it might have been any family catchall box, but of course it wasn’t. It was Winston Churchill’s dispatch box that he had used during World War II, his name lettered on top in gold foil.

In the living room Lady Soames’s scoop-me-up-size dog, Trish, was trying to hide on the loveseat near a pillow that spelled out the home’s pecking order: My dog isn’t spoilt. She has me well trained.

Never mind that Trish’s mistress had enlisted in the British army as soon as women were allowed to, at age 19, and had shot down enemy bombs during the war. It was Mary, the youngest of Winston and Clementine Churchill’s children, who accompanied her father to North Africa for his meeting with FDR, and to Quebec when he helped to plan Operation Overlord—what became known to the world as D-Day.

Papa’s paintings

Not surprisingly, the walls of Lady Soames’s home were a canvas for many of the oils her father had painted. “Papa painted snow so well, even though he hated it,” she remarked, stressing the second syllable of Papa.  

Churchill didn’t begin to paint until he was 40, and he approached it with something akin to ebullience, describing it in Painting as a Pastime as a “joy ride in a paint-box,” for which “audacity is the only ticket.”

But there was a certain humility as well. Churchill seldom signed his paintings and when he submitted them to juried shows, he kept his identity secret. His paintings showed well.

There were more of her father’s paintings upstairs, and so Lady Soames took us up into her bedroom, where among the oils was the first one her father had given her. It hung above her bed, as if her father were watching over her.

 (Later, Minnie told me how rare it was that anyone saw what I just had. “There are family members who’ve never seen Aunt Mary’s bedroom,” she said.)

Up we went again, to the third story of Lady Soames’s house, to see more of her father’s artwork. Then it was off to an Italian restaurant, a neighborhood place where they knew Lady Soames well.

The War Rooms

I was too excited about the evening to recall what I ate, or even if I did, but I do remember the conversation about how good the Queen looked when she had come to the opening of the new wing adjacent to the Churchill War Rooms just a week or so prior. Churchill was Prime Minister when a young Elizabeth assumed the throne in 1952.

“Have you seen the new museum?” Lady Soames asked me. I told her I hadn’t yet but hoped to during my stay in London.

The opening had focused some of the media attention on Lady Soames. She described it with a wry wit that made it clear she was her father’s daughter. “I’m old, you know,” she said with a mischievous smile, “practically extinct, like the dodo bird.” Reporters were figuring this might be their last chance to interview Churchill’s last surviving child. It wasn’t, fortunately, but they were wise to seize the opportunity. Even though, as Lady Soames said to much laughter, not all the interviews were “worth getting your hair done for.”

The next morning, early, I got a call from Minnie. If I could be at the Churchill War Rooms for ten o’clock that morning, the director would give me a private tour. I assured Minnie that she didn’t have to make such a special arrangement for me. She laughed and said, “Oh yes I do. Aunt Mary said so.”

 The dream

Before we left Lady Soames’s house for the restaurant, she asked me about the book that Levenger was about to publish, The Dream. A brief essay that Churchill wrote in 1947, shortly after the Allied victory that Churchill had been so instrumental in, the story recounts a dream Churchill had of his long-dead father, Randolph Churchill, returning to see him.  

Winston had spent the early part of his life seeking but never winning his father’s approval. Randolph died in 1895 when Winston was 20, well before he would make his indelible mark on history.

Lady Soames told me she had once asked her father, when he was in his late eighties, what he regretted, if anything. “I thought it would be not receiving the VC,” she said, referring to the Victoria Cross medal for valor. But that wasn’t it at all. 

What her father regretted most was that his own father had not lived long enough to see him make something of himself.

Unlike his father, Winston Churchill was a loving and doting parent to his children. His daughter Mary made her own mark on history, honoring her father in death as she adored him in life. The way only a devoted daughter can.

Mim

P.S. Another statue of Churchill stands in Paris, and on a trip there last month, I saw schoolchildren run over to it with their sheets of paper and pencils, on assignment, writing at his feet.

Steve

 

 

Lincoln at Gettysburg: 150 years later, what did he say…really?

These are the times when I delight in being a book publisher. In our small cadre of
books are some mighty topics, one being Lincoln’s five versions of the
Gettysburg Address that he wrote by hand. I had no idea of the remarkable
stories they contain until we began to put together our book, Long Remembered: Lincoln and His Five Versions of the Gettysburg Address. 

 This November 19^th marks the 150^th anniversary of Lincoln’s delivery of his address at Gettysburg. The President was instructed by one of the event planners to come to Gettysburg and deliver “a few appropriate remarks,” and that was what he did. How is it, then, that such a succinct speech—about 272 words—has held such mystery for so long?

 And why does no one know for sure exactly what Lincoln said?

Shorthand and telegraph lines

One likely reason is because of how he said it. Those of us who saw the film Lincoln know that our sixteenth president had a reedy, high-pitched voice. Lincoln was hardly given to a stentorian delivery that would thunder across the field at Gettysburg. It would be difficult for reporters to catch every word, especially since they would have been caught off guard by the brevity of the remarks.

Another reason, according to Doug Wilson, the Lincoln historian who wrote the lead narrative  for Long Remembered, was that most reporters at the time took notes but not shorthand. What often resulted were approximations of what was said.

Doug gives this example of how the Chicago Tribune relayed the opening of Lincoln’s address:

 Four score and seven years ago, our fathers established upon this continent a Government subscribed in liberty and dedicated to the fundamental principle that all mankind are created equal by a good God, and now we are engaged in a great contest.

Enter Joseph I. Gilbert of the Associated Press, the hero that most of us have never heard of, to mostly save the day. As Doug relays, Gilbert was allowed to transcribe the text from the manuscript that Lincoln read from. These were the words that raced across telegraph lines throughout the North.

And that, more than once, encountered ERROR IN TRANSMISSION as they did.

Fortunately, it’s been possible to compare the A.P. text with the transcription by a reporter who was well-versed in shorthand. Scholars have been able to, as Doug writes, “arrive at a very close approximation of the words Lincoln uttered from the platform.”

Mystery vs. myth

What remains even more of a mystery is just what manuscript Lincoln read from. It’s a question that Doug and the other scholars in Long Remembered still puzzle over, and a story well worth reading.

But even if that mystery is solved, we still can’t be certain that Lincoln uttered every word that he wrote. After all, the technology of audio recording was decades away. The best oratory undergoes
eleventh-hour revisions as the remarks are being delivered. John F. Kennedy never made a mark on the pages he read from for his inaugural address, but he made repeated edits (included to his iconic “ask not” sentence) as he delivered it.

Better that we embrace these mysteries of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, though, than succumb to its myths. One of the most pernicious is that Lincoln crafted this masterpiece of near-sacred text with a few hasty scribbles, on an envelope, in the train that took him to Gettysburg.

Anyone who has ever toiled over a piece of writing knows better. Lincoln’s words may have been few, but they were written deliberately. Those sentences that fill one wall of the Lincoln Memorial were written not for the moment, and not for the day, but for the ages, by a man who cared deeply about words. Just listen as the actor Sam Waterston recites them:  

And now to you...

If you’ve visited the Lincoln Memorial or Gettysburg, how did you feel when you encountered Lincoln’s “few appropriate remarks”? I’d love to hear. Just click on the Comments below with your submission. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

Capitalism Even My Mother Could Love

At age 32, when I announced on a phone call to my mother that I was starting a business, the line seemed to go dead. My mother, whom I love deeply, is not someone you would call business-friendly. As a retired California social worker and occasional head of her local Democratic Party, she distrusts big business.

She isn’t alone.

Business in America, according to the book I’m about to review, has an approval rating of around 19 percent, two points above Congress.

My father, on the other hand, a retired CPA and mall developer, admires business. When I was still in high school I remember him telling me, “Profit is one of the most beautiful words in the English language.” He regularly complained about anti-business prejudice in the media and academia. As I was setting off to graduate school in sociology, he told me to enjoy myself, “but don’t believe everything your professors tell you.”

My parents divorced when I was six.

My mother had hoped I would become a doctor or teacher, as was customary on her side of the family. My father had already abandoned hope that his journalist/consultant/analyst son would ever become an entrepreneur, and so was delightfully surprised when I made the same phone call to him. He called me his “late-blooming son.”

As a product of both my parents, I set out in business somewhat conflicted. Serving customers felt natural and good, but to survive in business, would I have to be ruthless? With degrees in biology and sociology, my education was devoid of business courses of any kind. Did I miss out on learning how to be hard-nosed?

'Give capitalism a chance'

In the early months of Levenger, working out of our townhouse in Boston, Lori and I had plenty of days with no sales, and one day I shall always remember, with just one sizable return—that is, a negative-sales day.

Was it too late to become a doctor, I wondered?

Yet in our fledgling business I did feel I had finally found my calling. (I discovered this with the help of another book called Minding the Store by Stanley Marcus, who taught me that being a merchant could be a noble thing.)

After a dicey first two years of taking no salaries, success came dramatically to our company. During those early years of success, I would hear business executives speak at charity events about the importance of “giving back” to their communities. I chafed at this. It implied that business was taking and that we business people, like criminals, had a debt to repay.

Yet I watched our own business employ people, help them grow in their careers, make our suppliers happy, keep our accountants busy, and give our customers something that, judging by the many heartfelt letters we received, they had been yearning for.

How could this be a bad thing?

One day a promising young customer service rep at Levenger who was about to graduate from college came to see me. She told me she was quitting Levenger to work for a nonprofit, because she wanted to do good in the world. I said I was sorry to lose her but understood that people must follow their hearts. I suggested that it was also possible to do good in the world while working for a company. I even gave her some examples. But she wasn’t buying it.

As we parted, I said with a smile that I hoped she would “give capitalism a chance.” She laughed, as did I, but she left the company anyway.

From profits to purpose

If the new book Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business succeeds in changing the world the way the authors hope, my remark about “giving capitalism a chance” will no longer be a joke. Because future young people graduating from college will just assume capitalism can do good in the world. They won’t think they have to join a nonprofit to follow their hearts.

They will understand that a “for-profit” company can just as easily be described as a “for-purpose” company, and that profits are one way, and sometimes the best way, to sustain noble work.

At present, though, that future seems far off. 

That’s why John Mackey, the co-CEO of Whole Foods Market, and Raj Sisodia, a professor of marketing at Bentley University, wrote this new testament of business. They named it after the movement they helped found, Conscious Capitalism.

Its credo begins with this sentence:

We believe that business is good because it creates value, it is ethical because it is based on voluntary exchange, it is noble because it can elevate our existence, and it is heroic because it lifts people out of poverty and creates prosperity.

Part of the problem, explain the authors, is an image problem.  Corporate malfeasance, real and fictional, gets lots of play in the news and movies, while the goodness of business does not.

But most of the problem is more invidious.

The noble purpose of business has been hijacked. And this hijacking is not the work of cynical professors and journalists, but of business people themselves who willingly share the myopic belief that business is, first, foremost and finally, about profits.

The economist Milton Friedman, in his widely cited 1970s essay on social responsibility, claimed that profit was the only social responsibility businesses had. Too many people have interpreted his advice too narrowly, to everyone’s detriment. Mackey and Sisodia convincingly demonstrate that it simply isn’t true. Businesses that focus first on purpose, and then expand their view widely to benefit all stakeholders—rather than just narrowly serving shareholders—are better businesses, and better by all financial measures.

Unfortunately, write the authors, capitalism “developed in a stunted way, missing the more human half of its identity.”

The 70% solution

One of the most serious consequences of this dwarfed manifestation of business is that the average engagement of workers in the United States hovers around 30 percent. Some 7 out of 10 workers just aren’t that into their jobs. Think of the opportunities for everyone if those ratios were reversed.

It is the job of business leaders to help engage that lost 70 percent, and to help employees realize that in their hands—and hearts—lies the basis for the positive transformation of societies and communities.

The authors of Conscious Capitalism ask us to imagine a business “built on love and care rather than stress and fear,” a business where staff members are able to “craft a purposeful life while earning a living,” and where employees can experience “the joy of service, of enriching the lives of others.”

Even if you aren’t a doctor or a teacher.

Conscious Capitalism: from good to great

It’s a different way of thinking about business. Instead of viewing situations as tradeoffs (high wages leads to lower profits), the authors advise that we think in terms of mutual wins: living wages lead to happier staff members, which creates happier customers, which generates higher sales, which results in satisfied shareholders.

Conscious Capitalism is a good book. It’s well-researched, well-written and has already received favorable reviews in major publications. But what is exciting is its potential to become a great book—the kind that triggers a fundamental and pervasive change in attitudes.

Could Conscious Capitalism do for business what Silent Spring did for the environment?

The widespread view of capitalism as some sort of necessary evil is a kind of DDT to human potential. Breaking into an enlightened conception of capitalism could liberate human potential, leading to new levels of innovation and personal fulfillment.

But as powerful as Conscious Capitalism can be, it is not an elixir for business success. The most enlightened capitalists must also go through the hard work of developing an effective corporate strategy—that long and difficult process of examining options and selecting the very few to pursue. Then comes execution, a topic that rightfully has filled volumes of business books and launched the careers of untold numbers of business consultants.

Just as essential, in order for Conscious Capitalism to be sustained, it must be embraced by the current generation of young people starting businesses today. Only if they take it up—which they will do in their own ways—does the movement have a chance to change the world.

There are promising signs.

Tearing down the Ivy Curtain

More colleges are focusing not only on entrepreneurism, but on social entrepreneurism. Students will do their own mashups to create businesses that feel like nonprofits, and nonprofits that are run like businesses.

I’m hopeful that students will tear down the Ivy Curtain that for my generation separated the so-called impractical liberal arts from majors like business and accounting. I’m hopeful that we’ll see more business students with their heads in the clouds, and art-history majors who like accounting.

My own sons, college classes of 2010 and 2013, are reading Conscious Capitalism, so we can discuss it as a family. Already they’ve let me know it seems rather obvious to them.

And maybe that’s our best hope—that young people setting off in business today will just assume capitalism can do good in the world. “Like, duh, Dad.”

I hope so. And I hope when they call my mother to tell them about their businesses, the conversation will be anything but silent.

Now to you, dear reader: Does Conscious Capitalism make sense to you? I’d love to hear. Just click on the Comments link below with your submission. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you’ll connect to Comments.)

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).