In 2005, he addressed the graduating class of Kenyon College. Friday's WSJ has an abridged version of the speech here.

As Todd and I prepare for the publication of our book, I have come to appreciate the skill needed to convey thoughts in the spoken format. DFW was not only a remarkable writer but, as you can see, a remarkable speaker.

The world is a lesser place.

He was my generation's comedian. Before Steve Martin and after Lenny Bruce, George Carlin was there.

Another local connection was that he was busted for disorderly conduct in Milwaukee for expressing his "Seven Words" on stage and was hauled off to the poky. Not one of our city's better days.

Just check out youtube to see why he will be missed.

We really are lucky to have lived during his lifetime. At least, I feel lucky

The article, The CEO Whisperer, demystifies this nomadic, private man who sleeps in hotels 365 days a year, rarely lectures, and has acted as a quiet consultant to dozens of top executives--most notably Jack Welch, when he ran General Electric.

Here's Jack's quote (we added the spotlight):

P.S. You might not have seen this article in your issue - it was only featured in the Enterprise edition of Newsweek, a special edition for executives and businesses.

I am currently reading The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. He tells an interesting story about what Tom Watson, the founder of IBM, attributed IBM’s success to. He is said to have answered:

IBM is what it is today for three special reasons. The first reason is that, at the very beginning, I had a very clear picture of what the company would look like when it was finally done. You might say I had a model in my mind of what it would look like when the dream—my vision—was in place.
The second reason was that once I had that picture, I then asked myself how a company which looked like that would have to act. I then created a picture of how IBM would act when it was finally done.
The third reason IBM has been so successful was that once I had a picture of how IBM would look when the dream was in place and how such a company would have to act, I then realized that, unless we began to act that way from the very beginning, we would never get there.
In other words, I realized that for IBM to become a great company it would have to act like a great company long before it ever became one.
From the very outset, IBM was fashioned after the template of my vision. And each and every day we attempted to model the company after that template. At the end of each day, we asked ourselves how well we did, discovered the disparity between where we are and where we had committed ourselves to be, and, at the start of the following day, set out to make up for the difference.
Every day at IBM was a day devoted to business development, not doing business.
We didn’t do business at IBM, we built one.

Jeffrey Gitomer is a phenomenon. He is the hardest working man in the business of motivation. I have known Jeffrey for well over a decade. In fact, the updated version of The Sales Bible still carries my name on the cover. Weird but true. Jeffrey called and asked if I would give him a plug for the hard cover of the book and I did (and that is why my quote is on the cover).

For the past two years he has been flooding the market with a series of brilliant books on laser focused issues. The Little Red Book of Selling started things, and that book was quickly followed by The Little Red Book of Sales Answers, then The Little Black Book of Connections (read my review here), and now The Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude.

The reason I decided tell you about this library is that I spent some time with the YES book and loved it. So I went back to the other books and found that there is a reason that Jeffrey is the only person, that I know of, who has every had three different books on The Wall Street Journal weekly best seller list during the same week.

Now, what makes his books so special? They are a perfect size. They fit in your hand and feel comfortable. The pages are four color. The takeaways in each book are bite-sized and just perfect to read on an airplane—that is why you have seen these books stacked on the shelves at airport bookstores. Jeffrey's writing is extremely conversational and fun to read. Plus, the books have rounded edges and those cool ribbon page markers. They also lay open without breaking the spine. What’s not to like about that?

These books are the perfect gift for the business person in your life. Honest!

China Shakes the World by James Kynge

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Chasing Daylight by Eugene O’Kelly

The Box by Marc Levinson

The Echoing Green: The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca and the Shot Heard Round the World by Joshua Prager

Uncommon Carriers by John McPhee

Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

The Wal-Mart Effect by Charles Fishman

These are all great reads and worth being called out as extraordinary books. What are your "bests of" 2006?

Thanks for listening.

When you think back over his career and how he has always never followed the pack. How he has always been the dog leading the pack. The Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home really documented this.

This album reminds me of what it would be like to be sitting on the porch and grandpa Bob was playing music to his grand kids on the front porch right after dinner on a warm summer night. The music is deceivingly simple, amazingly melodic, and just fun to hear.

Now I understand that this blog is about business books and business. Think about the fact that Bob Dylan has been doing the exact same job for forty five years and does something this different and good. Do we still have that creative burst in us after forty five years? I hope so. Drucker did, Deming did, Buffett does, Bennis does, Peters does.

When we created a marketing piece this year I was asked to display the ISBN of my favorite all-time book. Now this is the best book of all time! Dickens, Hemingway, Hiaasen. Who would get the call? I did spend serious thinking about this because the marketing piece was going to authors and publishers so the book had to be pretty cool or I would look goofy. My choice was another baseball book. Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella. A portion of the book was made into Field of Dreams. Baseball books can capture a smell, a feeling, a mood extremely well and both Shoeless Joe and Echoing Green do that.

What has brought this rambling on? Over the weekend I finally finished another baseball book. The book is called The Echoing Green by Joshua Prager –sad to say the book is being published in September of this year but you can pre order it here.

The book is the story of the “shot heard around the world.� For you youngsters or non baseball fans, that is the home run that decided the National League Pennant in 1951. It was the final inning of a three game playoff to decide who would go to the World Series. It is also the story of two baseball players Ralph Branca and Bobby Thomson. The hitter and the pitcher of the shot. But as in most great baseball books, this is a book about an era, about a team and about a world that seems more in control. An aside, I actually got to see Bobby Thomson play for the Milwaukee Braves before a young player came up and moved him. That player was Henry Aaron. Yeah, I’m that old.

The book came from a Wall Street Journal article in 2001 where the author reveals that the Giants were stealing the catcher’s signs to the pitcher in the Polo Grounds with a telescope and they had been doing that for a chunk of the year of 1951.
Why am I writing about this on a business book blog? I have no idea but it is kind of like “why does a dog licks its butt, because it can� because I can, I guess is the answer.

Seriously this is a great read that you will remember for a long time.

I think this might be the 15th Book Expo America which used to be called American Booksellers Association convention. The convention switches cities each year. In my decrepitude I forget how many shows I have been to but I do know the last time I was in D.C. for a convention Tiananmen Square happened.

Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail will be big. Carly’s new book Tough Choices could be good but she is amazing—Kate, Todd and I spent some face time with her thanks to her publisher—also Bill Taylor of Fast Company fame along with Polly LaBarre have written a book we are excited about called Mavericks at Work.

Washington DC’s Metro is great. Clean, easy to navigate and the stops seem to be perfectly placed—at least for the stops we needed. No cabs for the whole convention.

Lots of celebrates—Leonard Cohen, I missed him-much to my sadness, Jim Belushi, I saw all over the convention floor. Saw Newt Gingrich, Tim Russert, Sen. Bill Frist and heard that VP Chaney showed up at a party and Rumsfeld showed up also. Some people saw Tracy Ullman.

It was a great show for the books that I LIKE to read with galleys of a new Michael Connelly, George Pelecanos, Nelson Demille and a collection of Dylan interviews from Rolling Stone showing up.

Next year back in the Big Apple.

"On May 24, 2005, Eugene O'Kelly stepped into his doctor's office with a full calendar and a lifetime of plans on his mind. Six days later he would resign as CEO of KPMG. His lifetime of plans dwindled to 100 days. leaving him just enough time to say goodbye. Chasing Daylight is O'Kelly's honest, touching and ultimately inspirational memoir completed in the three-and-a-half months between his diagnosis with brain cancer and his death in September 2005."

Folks, I gotta tell you, this is a book that needs to be read by all of us who think that we have a chance to slow down later. I can't remember being moved by a book like I am being moved by this book. More later...