800-CEO-READ Blog

Start with Stories

One of the sources for our de.icio.us links is the New York Times Book Review. They have a convenient email that arrives weekly with the titles they are highlighting. NYTBR doesn't really cover business, but there will be a book from time to time.

This week what caught my attention was the advertisement from Levenger. I am a bit of a sucker for cool notebooks and the ad featured their Circa line. Clicking through, I arrived on their landing page and found Ten Faces of Innovation prominently featured with the copy, "Write a book the IDEO way, using Levenger Circa notebooks." (the notebooks are leaping into my shopping cart at this point).

The most interesting part for our readers here is Tom's story of how he writes books. He uses a method taught him from another Tom--Tom Peters:

Several years ago, my friend Tom Peters taught me how to write a book. He said, “Forget what you learned in school�— all that stuff about starting with an outline and then filling in the text. Just start with your very best stories. Capture each one as you think of it, so you dont forget. Write each one on a separate card and when you get a good solid stack of them—about as many as you can hold between your thumb and forefinger—then you’ve got the raw ingredients for what might someday be an interesting book.

So the stories come first, and the chapter outlines will emerge later, in a pattern-recognition process that involves spreading your story cards out across the entire living room floor.

I started capturing ideas on 3x5 cards, and although that method seems to work remarkably well for Tom Peters (at least seven international bestsellers so far), I personally found the size a bit small for this stage of the ideation process. I was dashing off quick notes, clipping quotes out of magazines, drawing diagrams to represent the ideas visually, and found myself eager to “color outside the lines� of the 3x5 format. I next experimented with large custom-made (and very labor-intensive) cards I cut from 8-1/2x 11 card stock, but they got unwieldy.

The rest is the story of how Circa products helped with Ten Faces.

We have been working on a project recently and found the notecard (in our case post-it notes) approach really worked. You still have to do the writing, but mobility of ideas really helped.