Denise Brosseau - Building Well-Connected Leaders
The Well-Connected Leader as Author...
About 8 years ago, when I was running the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs (now FWE&E), I was approached by Penguin Putnam to write a book about the women entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley. At the same time, a fabulous agent approached me wanting to represent me. There should be a wonderful ending to that story, but I regret to say that I pursued the project very half-heartedly for only about 6 months before deciding not to go forward, and the book never got written.
A few weeks ago, I decided I was finally ready to write my first book. (Note the optimism of that statement – my FIRST book…which assumes I’ll like the process enough to want to write another.) I chose a topic that is near and dear to my heart – the Well-Connected Leader – and set about thinking through how to write a book that was unique and compelling and really said something different from what has been said already out there.
In the years since my first book adventure, I have had many second thoughts about why I never got that book written. I even look back on the decision to walk away from the book as one of my biggest regrets, or even – dare I say – mistakes. But at the time, I was just not ready to tackle what was going to be a very big project. It was early 2002, the dot-com crash was in full swing in Silicon Valley, and I was tired and a bit depressed watching the downfall of the market and seeing the opportunities for women taking giant leaps backwards.
I had often been quoted in the media saying that the funding for women entrepreneurs had been so plentiful for the first time in 1998-2001 only because there was so much money floating around in the Valley that the investors ran out of white, Asian and Indian male entrepreneurs to fund and still had money left over – so they began funding women. Sadly, this was directly correlated to what happened when the flood of money went dry. The women stopped getting funded immediately. I just couldn’t see spending two years writing about the dénouement of what had been a wild and wonderful ride as the Valley was awash in money and women’s businesses were flourishing.
But, perhaps even more important, I had a great dread of that first book project – because to me writing a book meant sitting alone in a room with my computer for hours on end. For an extrovert like me, that felt like torture. How was I going to keep going? How was I going to stay motivated? What in the world made me think I could ever get this done? At first, I tried using a ghost writer, but that felt too removed and inauthentic to me. It was my story, shouldn’t I tell it? But I knew I wasn’t ready to spend the next two years looking back on the previous ten years of working with amazing women entrepreneurs, knowing as I did how many of them would see their companies taken away from them by unscrupulous investors or see the market changes dry up their funding and sales. I put the project aside, let the agent and ghost-writer go, and only occasionally looked back with dismay on letting the opportunity get away.
So why is this time different? Why am I now so excited to be working on my book project that I am ready to leave a dinner party early, or cancel a movie with a friend, to get home and work on my book? I’d say its three reasons. One, the idea of the Well-Connected Leader is near and dear to my heart and I think I do have something to say. Two, the topic is forward-looking rather than backwards-looking, which is much more of a fit with my personality. I can see clearly how helping others, through a book, become Well-Connected Leaders will be a lasting legacy I can be proud of – just as I am of the work I do individually and in companies along the same lines.
But third, the most exciting discovery is that writing a book need not be isolating. I am sort of laughing at myself when I realize that one of my key messages for the book is that when you can reach out to others – when you walk the talk of the Well-Connected Leader – you can make ANYTHING you want to do more successful. And that the MORE you reach out to others – the more you stop your default behavior of trying to do everything alone, which women leaders particularly tend to do – the more you are likely to have a better and richer experience, get things done more quickly, build deeper relationships with people, learn new things, and exponentially increase your likelihood of success. If you sit alone with your idea/book/project/product/desire for a promotion or new job, etc., you are much less likely to ever see it come to fruition. You HAVE to tell people. And in fact the MORE people you tell, the MORE likely you are to make it happen. Even if it's scary. Even if you're worried that you have nowhere to hide once you share the idea with others. Even if you're worried someone will steal your idea. Even if you think someone might laugh or tell you it can't be done. You still need others, lots of others, to make anything happen.
I am thrilled to find that when I practice what I preach, my experience is everything I hoped it would be. I created a survey, sent it to 150 people I know and in 4 days I got back 37 survey results with some GREAT ideas on what should be in the book. On top of that, I got some wonderful emails of folks offering to help me make this book the best ever – people agreeing to be interviewed, others offering their home for a book brainstorming session, others connecting me to ghost writers, and still others offering ideas on people they know that I should interview or many with idesa about what should go in the book. It has been fabulously empowering.
On Thursday, I went to book club – we have been meeting for over 16 years – and had a terrific, spontaneous ‘interview’ session with the amazing women there about my book topic and got some great inspiration and ideas for moving the book forward. I also got on the phone with my terrific mentor, Sam Horn, who has successfully published at least 6 books herself and is now one of the best book coaches in the business, and got some terrific ideas on how to organize all this great information I was gathering – along with 50 other wonderful ideas on how to strengthen the message, tell my story and ask the right questions to distill everything more quickly. She is such a fount of great information; I just love speaking with her.
I am thrilled to find out that writing this book does not have to be the painful challenge that I once perceived it to be. I am busy synthesizing and brainstorming and thinking through more ideas on how to best craft a truly one-of-a-kind book. I am to planning some Innovation Games events together to brainstorm the book, and even thinking through how technology might help make this even better, but I’ll save those for the next blog post. Your input welcome! Take the survey ... or send me an email with your thoughts.
Posted by on 28th February, 2010 | Comments (1)
Tags: FWE&E, well-connected leader, author, Sam Horn, book, survey, Innovation Games There are no comments for this post Post a CommentHTML is not allowed in comments, http://... will be automatically linked.
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