The Logistics of Love

I’m not at ICRS this week because I just got back from our oldest son’s wedding in Colorado. At 9,200 feet, it was definitely a high point for our family this year. Stephen is the last of our four children to get married. He and Kristen are a great couple and very much in love. But after having been father of the groom three times and father of the bride once, I have come to the conclusion that weddings are not about romance. They are about logistics.

Transportation to meals, events, housing and the airport for dozens of family and friends. Schedules to make sure the right people are in the right locations at the right times for rehearsals, pictures, fittings, hair appointments and, oh yes, the wedding. Arranging for invitations, music, flowers, tuxes, returning tuxes, programs, locations for rehearsal suppers, receptions and, oh yes, the wedding.

Robert Fulghum once wrote, “Weddings are high state occasions run by amateurs under pressure.” He got that right.
While you don’t want the logistics to crush out the romance, however, good logistics can create the environment that allows the romance to bloom.

There’s a lot of romance about publishing–dreams of literary fame and bestseller status, elegant meals full of sophisticated conversation and interviews on PBS. Even without these dreams being fulfilled, there is an aura that surrounds publishing that is found in few other endeavors. But bad logistics can crush the romance right out of any publishing venture.

If you can’t be on time with the right copyediting, with the right publicity for the right people, with the right ads, with printing and shipping the book to the right places in the right quantities, then the luster of publishing can shine as brightly as a black hole.

By all means, celebrate the love. But every so often, celebrate the logistics too.

20,000 Staples. How Do You Measure, Measure a Career?

Today I used my 20,000th staple here at IVP. It’s taken thirty-five years to reach this milestone. But I have achieved in my career what few others ever dreamed–or ever thought worth keeping track of!

How do I even know this? When I first came as a lowly assistant editor, I was issued a phone, a bunch of blue pencils, a stapler and a box of 5000 staples. After eight years or so, the box of staples was empty. So I went to the supply cabinet and grabbed another. Four empty boxes later, the record was reached. (And that doesn’t even count the times I’ve used someone else’s stapler or the automatic stapler in the photocopy machine!)

I’m not sure how many different offices I’ve occupied (five, I think) in those years, how many commas I’ve deleted, how many airplane flights I’ve taken, how many emails I’ve sent (though I save them all, so I could add them up if you really want to know), how many times someone has interrupted me with a question, how many stories I’ve listened to in the hallway, how many cups of coffee I’ve consumed, how many meetings I’ve been to, how many lame jokes I’ve laughed at or how many phone calls I’ve made. (I’m not a nerd after all!) But for some reason the staples stuck.

As I’ve mentioned here before, large quantities of J course through my veins, which no doubt explains a lot. But why staples? I have no idea. I do know, however, that they’ve connected pages of memos, letters, reports, forms and faxes representing the birth of ideas and the death of dreams, the routine of standard procedures and the one-of-a-kind reply, the affirmation of a job well done and the diplomatic response to a complaint, the mass dissemination of information and the individual offer of an answer. In this way staples are a metaphor for what editors and publishers do–connecting people and ideas and actions.

All that gets closer than do staples to answering the lead question of how you measure a career. One ancient writer struggled with the same sorts of issues and did a tad better than I have here. He said that rather than counting staples, we should instead number our days. When we do, the first thing we notice is that they are limited, finite. Whether a few or a lot, we only get so many.

What, then, do we do with those days? Will we be wise or foolish with them? In my mind, we have each been given gifts or a gift, some ability in what we do or say, or how we think or see things, that is true to ourselves and that usually stands out to others. It may be the ability to drive a truck safely over hundreds of thousands of miles. It may be the ability to bring healing to the hearts or bodies of people. It may be making numbers into disciplined soldiers. It may be anticipating the needs of others even before they themselves are aware of them.

We begin to measure a career by identifying these gifts. But then we go further. We don’t just ask “What am I good at?” but “What gives me pleasure, joy or satisfaction when I do it?” Then we can ask if we have been faithful to the gift we have been given and to the Giver of the gift.

How do you measure a career? Perhaps that’s how you do it.

Not a Fire Drill

A couple of weeks ago the fire alarm went off in the office. Last year when we were doing some construction, the alarm went off frequently because of electrical work being done. But we were always given warning a day ahead of time. So this time when the alarm went off I tried to remember, Did someone alert us to this? After half a minute with the alarm still blaring, I went out in the hallway to see what was going on, as did others. Then way down the hall I saw someone gesturing wildly to get out of the building. So I said to those around me, “Let’s get out.” Some started for the front door–over a hundred feet away. I redirected them to the emergency exit fifteen feet away and went with them.
Continue reading “Not a Fire Drill”

To Pack Rat or Not to Pack Rat

I was looking through my files the other day to remind myself what I had written to a correspondent three years ago. I needed to write again on the same topic, but I obviously wanted to do so in light of the full exchange. I found the copy of my letter just where it should have been, in the corporate files. What I didn’t find was my correspondent’s response. round!
Continue reading “To Pack Rat or Not to Pack Rat”

Minimizing the Annual Review Fear Factor

It’s annual review time here. We operate on a July 1 to June 30 fiscal year, so this is the time each employee gets a performance review for the year. There’s always a certain amount of trepidation in anticipation of such a review–both for the employee and the supervisor. One of the best ways, I think, to minimize this on both sides is to make sure there are no surprises.

An employee should not hear about a problem or area of poor performance for the first time at an annual review. Supervisors doing their job should be giving continual feedback to employees throughout the year either at regularly scheduled meetings or on an as needed basis. As I’ve said here before, keep short accounts with folks. Don’t let something simmer and stew. Be timely. Problems that fester don’t go away. They just get worse. As Max De Pree says, a leader’s job is to define reality and say thank you. Clearly communicating problems is one way reality is defined. You don’t do any favors by being vague.

Another manager here also had a helpful suggestion when dealing with problems. He calls it making the charitable assumption. Give people the benefit of the doubt. Start by asking questions, not by making accusations. See what their perspective is first. People want to be judged by their intentions. After hearing their side, then it is appropriate that they hear your side.

Reality and charity–two good things to keep in mind together throughout the year so that the annual review is as constructive as possible for both parties.

Our Own Worst Electronic Enemies

When it comes to the digital future of publishing, we as publishers can be our own worst enemies.

Everyone seems to agree that electronic books will be a significant part of the world ahead. The only disagreement is how fast this new publishing environment will emerge and in what form. One of the major barriers to any form of digital publishing, however, are the permissions policies of publishers themselves.
Continue reading “Our Own Worst Electronic Enemies”

The Beautiful World of Publicity

Free is a very good price. That is one of the key advantages of publicity, as everyone in publishing knows.

Why does this work? Because, as our friend Tom Woll says in Publishing for Profit, book publishers “are information and content providers . . . [who] have the very material that these media outlets need for their own survival” (p. 207).
Continue reading “The Beautiful World of Publicity”