What do you notice about these recent books on collaboration?
They are all written by single authors. Is it too difficult to write a book collaboratively?
By the way, the first and third books are excellent. Evan Rosen promises to talk about culture but spend most of his time talking about technology.
Shawn, author of Putting Stories to Work, is one of the world's leading business storytelling consultants. He helps executive teams find and tell the story of their strategy. When he is not working on strategy communication, Shawn is helping leaders find and tell business stories to engage, to influence and to inspire. Shawn works with Global 1000 companies including Shell, IBM, SAP, Bayer, Microsoft & Danone. Connect with Shawn on:
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Nice observation 🙂
Maybe (and just maybe) books are a medium not suited for collaboration, they match the ‘expert’ with the passive consumer market that we know and love (or at least think we do). Here’s a fun four minute video…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiP79vYs
and there’s more from him at TED…
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/63
Perhaps collaborative media like blogs, wikis and even youtube let people get on with it, collaborating, conversing about what they’re passionate about, their inspiration, and not worrying about the meta stuff that fills the dead trees and last century distribution channels?
(Is it ironic that Gutenberg was a revolutionary technology, challenging the authority of the authors, now facing another revolutionary technology – both social, but possibly corrupted from means into ends?)
Hmm, a lot depends on your framing doesn’t it? Offering one’s perspective in a well-written book for others to consider and employ could be seen as very collaborative act: here’s what I know/think, what do you think?
Writing collaboratively is different to many collaborative things.
I have written three books (text books on programming) and we work well together with complementary skills and matching sense of humours. One incident that sticks in my mind was we were talking about a chapter I had originally authored, or at least I believe I had written it, but it turned out I had acquired this belief through many edits and discussion, and my co-author had indeed written the initial draft.
I have two colleagues both of whom are good team players, but by the time they had finished a collaborative book both had lost patience with the other.
I’m sure each of these authors collaborated with a myriad of people to create their books. I just found it ironic that their work was a collaboration of authors. Mind you I take Johnnie’s point that it does all depend on the framing.
The collaborative writing process can be misunderstood. Just last week we were told that our collaboration paper was accepted in an a-listed publication in Australia but that wanted us to drop Nancy’s name. We told them that we didn’t want to publish at all without all three names. They came back, and I’m not kidding, asking us to identify Nancy’s bits so they could be deleted and then they could take her name off. We told them to get stuffed. They agreed to publish with all three names.
Now you are probably wondering why they wanted to drop Nancy’s name? So are we but my guess has to do with aesthetics. At the bottom of the article the attribution reads: Shawn Callahan and Mark Schenk are co-directors of Anecdote. With Nancy’s name it would have to be: Shawn Callahan and Mark Schenk are co-directors of Anecdote. Nancy White is the Director of Full Circle Associates. And this would be too long. Crazy stuff.
What amazes me is the thought that authors collaborating can be asked to unscramble the egg. It’s like Shirley was saying, you loose track of who wrote what and in the end it is a product of all the authors.
As I’m just on the (hopefully) finishing edge of very collaboratively co-writing a book with John Smith and Etienne Wenger, I feel fully able to comment on the experience.
First, it takes a lot more work to write WITH others. And I’m not talking about pasting chapters together, each written by an individual. Truly co-writing and co-editing is both an amazing act of commitment to each other, learning and love.
The first year, when we thought it was “just an update to a report” collaboration was difficult for me. I did not know how to negotiate meaning. I was impatient. I alternately felt guilty or impatient with my collaborators. I was a lousy co-writer.
In the second year (yes, second year) we learned to listen to each other. We dealt with things we did not speak about in year one, like being heard, or feeling less for some reason or another. I learned to understand my strengths and weaknesses as a writer and a thinker, and to appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of my cowriters.
In the third year (yes, the THIRD year) I was enlivened by the learning. I was applying what we were writing/making sense of so there was an electricity. But slow electricity.
The fourth year (this year) IMPATIENCE to finish. Tired. Worried that our slow place was great for our learning and personal application in our practices, but too slow for usefulness in the world. I became impatient with the finishing process. Yet I’m so glad we revised and revised. It got better.
Am I happy with the final book? Well, I’ll confess, I have to wait until the world tells us if they find it useful. But I’m 100% happy we took the time, the practice, and the patience to write together. I’d equate this with a PhD course of study. It is irreplaceable.
And it is ENTIRELY DIFFERENT than writing on my own.