A Master of the Wired World?

I just got my author's copies of a new book from Financial Times Management (London), MASTERS OF THE WIRED WORLD: Cyberspace Speaks Out.

What's remarkable is that this collection of manifestos about the new age a'dawning contains proclamations by Tony Blair, Al Gore, Charles Handy, Nicholas Negroponte, Arthur C. Clarke, Alvin Toffler ... and me.

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Thar She Blows

Let me begin by telling you what I was thinking about the night my head caved in. I'm a 48 year old freelance writer, a hack writer with a hacking winter cough. It's been with me for two weeks, and every time I cough it rattles my timbers.

I work at home, in our remodeled attic, seldom more than an intercom call from my wife Rachel and Jon and Daniele, our kids. I am a business writer, and I write articles and books with business themes, about teams and change and such. Since I don’t know much about the business of business, I focus on the human side of it -- what the workplace feels like (awful) and what managers go through to run an organization (hell).

I'm always scheming some new idea. In truth I am less a book writer than a book schemer, having written over a hundred book proposals in my time. I have never written a best-seller, so most of my ideas go nowhere. My current scheme may be the worst yet: I am convincing myself to write a business book incorporating the lessons of Moby Dick.

OK, laugh. Everyone does. But I am certain, tonight at least, it will be a great book, perhaps the greatest book ever, for a hack book anyway. I liked the story of the white whale as a child, and I read the actual book for the first time on a recent vacation. Since I have just discovered it, I am assuming no one else is familiar with it. If you squint and turn your head sideways, and ignore all the cosmic literary stuff, there are numerous lessons in the book about teamwork and leadership. My plan is that the hip half of my readership will snort at the foolishness of the idea but lap it up because it's funny; and the other half will take it at face value and think, "How true." Either way, I get both halves, and who knows, there may be thousands of each kind, and some lucky author will be able to buy lots of groceries.

Andrea, my astute agent, assures me that my idea is without value. “Mike,” she advises me, “people hate Moby Dick. I hate Moby Dick. There is probably no more hated book than Moby Dick.”

I accept that attitude. I can even work it into the model, I tell myself. I intend to open the book with a declaration of anti-intellectualism: “Hey, when you were in school, did you, like me, read the Cliff's Notes version Moby Dick instead of the Melville version?”

See, I'll make a negative into a positive, converting dislike into like. I know I can do it because I have already talked myself into it. When you’re me, you get very good at making positives out of negatives.

It is just past midnight, January 22, 1999. I am typing like crazy, interrupted only by coughing. I am surrounded by Kleenex and empty Diet Coke cans, and the blather is flying thick and furious, about how the sailors in the row boats formed cohesive cross collaborative units to keep the whale from killing them, and how the visionary leader -- OK, the insane visionary leader -- skillfully defined a mission and motivated the enterprise to achieve it.

I am on a roll. I feel great because I have a model that excites me, and that I have already written in my imagination. This would go here, and I would put that there. It'll work. Writing is so great.

The idea is to keep working for another hour. But I'm all keyed up and need to stretch out to settle down. I get up from my desk to do some quick calisthenics to limber myself up for another dozen paragraphs. A fit of coughing comes over me, and I hack till I am red in the face, and my head feels hot from the commotion.

So I lie down on the exercise mat, do a half dozen sit-ups and some stretching routines. It feels good to stretch my neck and shoulders in the sun salute, even when my pose is interrupted by more coughing.

But when I stand up, I begin to feel something in my head. It feels like someone has started up a lawnmower inside my skull. It begins as an insistent throb in a single spot, then it spreads rapidly, like the paint eruption on the Sherwin-Williams logo "We cover the earth"). Wave after wave of pain ripples up from the base of my neck, radiating over the top of my head.

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