Tomorrow night, the Green Monster at Boston's sacred Fenway Park welcomes The Police, perhaps the only rock band in history to sing Arthur Koestler's thinking ("Synchronicity," their 1983 album). Koestler is how I learned about The Police, actually. In 1978, Jeff Stamps was just finishing Holonomy, his dissertation, when Koestler, the great systems theorist, invited him to his cottage in the English countryside. Jeff had drawn heavily on Koestler's work on holons, work that still undergirds much of our work. From then on, I noticed anything connected with Koestler...thus Sting.
Fast forward to 1995. Apple Computer (not Records) was taking its first steps toward creating a "global" software development organization. Doesn't sound like much today but it was one of the early experiments (during a non-Steve Jobs period) to create a seamless software organization across many countries and cultures. Steve Teicher, an Apple VP at the time, hired us to help.
Our book, The Age of the Network, had just come out. Books take a long time to write, which means countless hours listening to your own voice in your head. Thus, every writer has a method to prevent madness. For this book, Jeff and I used the same one: "Fields of Gold," Sting's luscious linger on nature and love. Over and over. Literally thousands of times. So many times that when we wrote the Acknowledgments, he got one: "Sting provided Fields of Gold, the background music."
Meanwhile, the Apple group had convened in Tokyo, where The Park Hyatt had just opened, thus deals available. So did we find ourselves in a hotel with Al Gore, then US vice president, Bill Gates, a dozen six-foot-tall, one-hundred-pound models, and ...
Steve Teicher, Pam Martin (project manager for the global group), Jeff and I were at breakfast in the hotel's main dining room (not the place where you have to make reservations). Just the plain old dining room. When all of a sudden, Pam grabbed my arm and screeched in a high whisper, "JESSICA! THAT'S STING OVER THERE!"
Indeed. Sting, two tables over, with three friends, the night after he'd performed in Tokyo.
And I had our book.
So I got up, thinking about how the sleeves of my sweater were too long, and how intrusive it was for me to be doing this, and how completely absurd I felt, when I found myself standing next to Sting, apologizing for intruding, explaining the background music, whereupon he took the book. "So I'm responsible for this," he said, and read the subtitle: "'Organizing Principles for the 21st Century.' I need this book. I was very disorganized in the 20th Century."
And thus began my career as Sting's tour manager, a brief but rewarding period.
(Did anyone believe that?) No, I turned it into fiction, or maybe, more accurately, faction, a story called "Sting and I."
