Returning to Work

From the train platform at 30th Street Station, I always had this view of Cira Centre—of the offices, in particular, of Brandywine Realty Trust, a once and sometimes client. Waiting for the train on Monday evenings, I'd watch my friends across the way, huddled in meetings or hurrying back and forth, sitting alone with a pen in hand. I'd wonder what they were up to now, how their next buildings would shape the cityscape, what they would think of me if they turned and saw me—a teacher for a spell, not a consultant.

Yesterday I left academia and returned to the world of corporate work. I sat with my good friend (and co-author) Matt Emmens in the offices of Shire. Turned my thoughts toward an annual report and a news magazine. Buckled myself in for the ride. The thing about the life I live is that there are friends at every turn—people I am genuinely eager to see, stories I can thread my way into. Everywhere in this world, people are dreaming. They are putting up buildings and launching new drugs. Sometimes I stand by their side.

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Curiouser and... (Zenobia, in multiple languages)

It seems like a long time ago now that Matt Emmens, then the CEO of Shire (and now its chairman), called me into his office and asked if I'd ever seen "that book" about mice, change, and cheese. Technically I'd seen it. I hadn't, though, actually read it, but that, as it turned out, proved immaterial. Matt was wondering, he said, if I might like to embark on a small journey—on the co-authoring of a book that wouldn't be about cheese or mice or hamsters, even, but about, say, the role of the imagination in corporate America. About risk, adventure, and dreams. I gave him one of my funny looks, then scurried away for awhile. Reread Calvino and The Little Prince, a few chapters from Alice in Wonderland. Began to conjure up a place that became, in time, Zenobia—an architectural wilderness, a corporate behometh, a case study in brokenness and ruin and its ultimate (in this case magical) repair. Zenobia: The Curious Book of Business emerged as a fable, a fantasy; its illustrations were entrusted to my partner. And all of this became an odd little book, published one year ago by a house that took (shall we say) a risk. A house known as Berrett-Koehler.

Old news. History. Brought up only now because my mail box has been filled of late with the most interesting concoctions—Zenobia done over in Spanish, Italian, Korean, Chinese (the complex characters). It's a wonder to see the same book unveiled in so many different colors, with so many reconvened titles, with extraordinary new illustrations that feature clowns and one-eyed men. Moira, our heroine, mostly gets to keep her bright red shoes. But her hair changes color, and it flows, a reddish brown, and I'm thinking that she's had her bright eyes Lasiked, because how else might you explain the sudden absence of her big-framed spectacles?

I am delighted by these renditions which I cannot read and wish I could. I am desirous of a bigger brand of knowledge that would enable me to know how a story has gotten told in languages that look like wash and wonder to eyes such as mine, which have seen too little of this planet.

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Ringing the NASDAQ Bell

Today my co-author for ZENOBIA: THE CURIOUS BOOK OF BUSINESS (an Alice in Wonderlandish tour of corporate America, due out in January) is in New York, ringing the NASDAQ bell, opening a day of what we all hope will be better-than-yesterday trading (much better).

I'm not there, but I can imagine what it looks like: Matt Emmens (who is not just my friend and co-author but the CEO of Shire Pharmaceuticals) and a crowd of Shire-ites—a fist of energy on the trading floor. Dreams fulfilled (the big ones, anyway). Dreams still spinning forward.

Photos of the event here: http://www.nasdaq.com/reference/200711/market_Open_110207.stm

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