January 3, 2011

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Happy New Year!

Ten years ago this year, I launched my bespoke editing and writing business.

The impetus was fairly commonplace: Getting laid off as an executive editor when the late-great Industry Standard flamed out as rapidly as the dot-com boom we covered. (Remember when people read about the Internet economy in print magazines the size of phone books? Never mind.)

Another boom and bust later, I am still here, busier than ever.

An Abbreviated Reading List

With this letter, which I call the Reading List, I usually list the books, articles, and reports that passed through my Berkeley workshop, in the hope is that they cross-pollinate ideas among the highly creative people in my network. Plus, a little nudge often spurs a few people to explore ways we can collaborate on projects both big and small over the coming year.

This anniversary year is a little different—more like a top-10 countdown to another era—but more on that in a moment.

2010 was particularly rich: Rewriting and editing hundreds of thousands of words from leading experts for the 12 new online courses of the Jack Welch MBA; collaborating with the authors of The Corporate Lattice (Harvard Business Review Press); ghostwriting almost a dozen articles and columns about emerging technology and talent-development strategies for Deloitte’s John Hagel and John Seely Brown in such publications as the Financial Times, Fortune.com, Forbes.com, and the Economist’s Ideas Economy site; editing a unique strategic plan for the Wikimedia Foundation, collaboratively written by hundreds of people, Wikipedia-style; ghostwriting a report about successful nonprofit growth strategies for the Bridgespan Group and editing reports about school reform and climate change for FSG; and working with authors as a developmental editor to help shape such books as The Networked Nonprofit (Jossey-Bass), The American Way to Change (Jossey-Bass), and Liespotting (St. Martin’s Press).

You can stay up to date on the Reading List throughout the year at www.mickeybutts.com, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

The Best of the Best

OK, now for the main event: My top-10 favorite quotes from or about the articles, books, and other content I wrote, ghostwrote, or edited over the last 10 years, for those with an interest in trend-spotting, in reverse-chronological order.

2010

Since early 2010, I have worked on a part-time retainer as chief content editor for the Jack Welch Management Institute, developing high-quality original content and helping assign and shape the lectures, readings, curriculum, multimedia assets, and online experience for the Jack Welch MBA. I’ve had the good fortune to work with leading writers like Jack and Suzy Welch, Steve Kerr, Trish Clifford, Ron Ashkenas, and the Motley Fools, on such topics as leadership, people management, strategy, business communications, ethics, change management, economics, finance, marketing, entrepreneurship, and operations management. I can’t share the proprietary content we’ve developed, beyond the links above, but I can share this great endorsement of my work to help develop it:

"Only 10 business editors in the country can do what Mickey Butts does with the written word."—Suzy Welch, coauthor, with Jack Welch, of the international bestseller Winning, and former editor-in-chief of Harvard Business Review

(On that note, you might be able to help with a current project I’m working on: Please be in touch if you have firsthand insights to share about selecting a learning management system and general best practices in online management education.)

Jack Welch Management Institute

2009

For much of the year, I collaborated with Deloitte’s Cathy Benko and Molly Anderson, the authors of The Corporate Lattice. This finding, among many, rang particularly true for me as a sometimes free agent trying to find the right balance for my work and my family:

“Gender roles are combining as women become a greater part of the workforce and as more men want the same things as women. Of families with kids, 70 percent have a working mother, and that changes men’s roles at home and affects what they need at work. … Significantly, men now report much more work-life conflict than women. … Women and men want to contribute, but they need much more flexibility from their companies in return. Across the genders, the corporate ladder model is splintering.”

The Corporate Lattice: Achieving High Performance in the Changing World of Work, Cathy Benko and Molly Anderson (Harvard Business Review Press)

2008

In the lead-up to the historic 2008 election, I edited Ben Rigby’s book Mobilizing Generation 2.0, an early primer about how to use the then-emerging Web 2.0 technologies for nonprofit and political campaigns (this quote applies to everyone who has grappled with the role of social technologies):

“Social networks have become places where young people spend a considerable part of their lives. In these places, they explore and form their identities, socialize, and, as [danah] boyd says, ‘write themselves into being.’ Social networks are today’s bowling alleys, roller rinks, and drive-ins. They welcome jocks and nerds, the politically engaged and the apathetic, the outcasts and the in-crowd.”

Mobilizing Generation 2.0: A Practical Guide to Using Web 2.0 Technologies to Recruit, Organize and Engage Youth, Ben Rigby (Jossey-Bass)

2007

By this time, I had been writing about wine for a few years, having operated a well-received, now-defunct online wine newsletter/blog titled Route du Vin and written about wine blogs in Food & Wine and high-alcohol wines for San Francisco magazine:

“As the morning fog begins to burn off, winemaker Tracey Brandt punches her forklift under a large plastic container filled with syrah grapes, hauled in the day before from the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada. ... The area surrounding the winery isn’t made up of the acres of cool, misty vineyards or gently rolling hills you might expect to find. Instead, A Donkey and Goat Winery, which specializes in sustainable winemaking, is situated in a flat expanse of weathered red-brick warehouses and sleek modern lofts in Berkeley, California. Among its neighbors are a Chinese herbal-medicine company, an organic-sauerkraut producer, a children’s clothing maker, and a manufacturer of custom-molded rubber products. Welcome to urban winemaking, a burgeoning national movement of young, citified entrepreneurs who have been bitten by the wine bug but are choosing to make wine where they live.”

"Wine and the City," Mickey Butts, Portfolio.com, October 10, 2007

2006

For much of the year, I collaborated with Heather McLeod Grant and Leslie Crutchfield, the authors of Forces for Good, which The Economist named one of the best business books of 2007:

“The secret to success lies in how great organizations mobilize every sector of society—government, business, nonprofits, and the public—to be a force for good. In other words, greatness has more to do with how nonprofits work outside the boundaries of their organizations than how they manage their own internal operations. Textbook strategies like relentless fundraising, well-connected boards, and effective management are necessary, of course, but they are hardly sufficient. The high-impact nonprofits we studied are satisfied with building a ‘good enough’ organization and then spending their time and energy focused externally on catalyzing large-scale systemic change. Great organizations work with and through others to create more impact than they could ever achieve alone.”

Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits, Leslie R. Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant (Jossey-Bass)

2005

I began working with the leaders and consultants of Global Business Network, scenario planners based in San Francisco that are part of Monitor, and through them have been introduced to a host of great ideas:

“Nearly two weeks after Hurricane Katrina ripped through the Gulf Coast, we remain haunted by the images of hungry, homeless, and ill Americans in scenes of abandonment and helplessness. The word that still comes to mind is ‘unbelievable.’ Yet, both the magnitude of the damage caused by the catastrophe and the extent to which it came as a surprise are entirely predictable. The real failure is that we still have not learned first to think the unthinkable and then believe it.”

"U.S. Must Learn to Think the Unthinkable," Eamonn Kelly, San Francisco Chronicle, September 11, 2005

2004

In 2004-2005, I worked on retainer as a ghostwriter and editor for the McKinsey Global Institute, the economics think tank of McKinsey, helping their leaders and consultants develop almost a dozen articles that appeared in such publications as Harvard Business Review, McKinsey Quarterly, and The International Economy:

“Organizations’ narrow focus on offshoring is obscuring the bigger picture—that this trend is just the latest in the evolution toward a truly global economy. More than 100 years ago, the prospect of reaching huge pools of new customers in foreign markets lured large trading companies out of their home territories. In the 1980s, manufacturers based in North America, Europe, and Japan built plants and hired workers in low-wage countries, then exported the finished goods back home. In the 1990s, companies in a handful of industries, such as consumer electronics, pushed globalization even further by relocating their component production and final assembly to countries with the strongest cost advantages. Now, globalization is beginning to transform the service industries.”

“Beyond Offshoring: Assess Your Company's Global Potential,” Diana Farrell, Harvard Business Review, December 2004

2003

I spent a few months immersing myself in the Pecora hearings of the Great Depression for a class on economic history while I was studying on the Knight-Bagehot/Wiegers fellowships, which offer business journalists the chance to get an MBA at Columbia Business School:

“Between 1932 and 1934, a spectacular Senate banking investigation captured the nation’s attention. Known as the Pecora hearings after Ferdinand Pecora—a fiery, Sicilian-born assistant district attorney from New York with a fraud-busting past—the probe picked up steam as it called witness after witness over more than two years. It eventually led to sweeping regulation of the country’s nearly unfettered financial system. … In the process, [Pecora] revealed a depth of corruption on Wall Street not seen since the rule of the 19th century Robber Barons. The extent of fraud would not be seen again until the crash of the 1990s bull market, to which the shocking revelations of the Pecora hearings bear a strong resemblance.”

“A Perfect Institution: The Pecora Hearings of 1932-1934 and the Unraveling of American Business,” Mickey Butts, Working Paper, May 5, 2003

2002

Discussing the then-novel, soon-to-be-oversaturated publishing topic of behavioral economics, I wrote:

“We are not the completely rational beings that traditional economics tells us we are. Believing that we—the economy at large, and the stock market in particular—are supremely rational puts too much faith in our abilities to make the right choices.”

“Stupid Spending,” Mickey Butts, Salon.com, March 11, 2002

2001

Writing a review of the just-published Good to Great, in an article that was slated for the last, never-published issue of The Industry Standard, I correctly predicted its gigantic success, but for reasons other than its occasional business acumen:

“There’s a spiritual message inside the book’s many koanlike riddles. … You need self-effacing Level 5 leaders … you have to confront the brutal facts but never lose faith; you have to transcend the Curse of Competence; you must relentlessly push the flywheel to achieve a breakthrough; you must rinse your cottage cheese. Say what? You have to read the book, of course, to follow most of this. And if you’re looking for a motivation for achieving greatness, you won’t find it from the Zen master: “The question of Why Greatness? is almost a nonsense question,” Collins intones, like Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now.”

“Jack Welch, Move Over,” Mickey Butts, The Nation, November 26, 2001

The Next 10 Years

What does all this wordsmithing add up to? Who knows, besides a compulsion to write and edit by any means necessary.

Still, it’s clear that businesspeople today will always need help communicating with their audience, regardless of whether it’s online or in print, through mainstream journalism outlets, over experimental wavelengths, or now in the burgeoning field of online education.

I encourage you to contact me if there's a way I can help you, or someone you know, with books, articles, case studies, op-eds, reports, curricula, and other editorial, online, and business-and-strategic-planning projects. Information about everything mentioned and more is available at my Web site, which also features client testimonials and a summary of what I offer clients.

With warm wishes for a peaceful and prosperous New Year,

Mickey Butts