Endless Knots

Leading ourselves via "the lattice"

June Holley, whose insights and methods for establishing and growing networks are in a class of their own, points today to Phanish Puranam's post on the INSEAD blog, "What Bossless Firms Can Teach Us."

Puranam's round-up of companies that have eschewed traditional hierarchy and bureaucracy for more intelligent self-management points to some popular and successful examples: Valve, the Seattle software company where employees vote with their seats for projects they want to work on (no votes, no project); the California tomato processor, Morning Star, that, as Puranam writes "bases its organisation on a sort of mission statement that is negotiated peer-to-peer rather than imposed by a boss, laying out each employee’s tasks and organisational affiliations;" and, the grandparent of them all, W.L. Gore and Associates, which I mentioned here.

 

We (Jeff Stamps and I) stumbled upon W.L. Gore when we were doing research for The TeamNet Factor, our 1993 book. Given all the hoopla about self-governance and jettisoning old authoritarian structures, I'm offering this excerpt which details how Gore has done it all these years. It's simple, sensible, and worth a try, C-Suiters. Good sense can prevail when the agreements, policies, and governance are in place throughout an organization, top-to-bottom. Gore's approach reflects both good organizational design, mutual respect, and a mature approach to how people come to work.

Take a look and see if this makes sense to you, noting Bill Gore's realistic caveats, typically overlooked in the idealistic vision of "leaderless" organizations espoused by people who haven't carefully considered what it takes to make people-working-together work.

From The TeamNet Factor, Chapter 4:

Meet the Lattice: The Free Form Organization That Makes Gore-Tex

Gore-Tex is" a miracle weave in the fabric of the world’s outdoor life." It evaporates sweat while protecting its wearer from the drench of rain. Gore-Tex is a visible, distinctive partner with producers of ski gloves, tents, and clothing of all descriptions. Like Dolby sound, Gore-Tex is known for the special contribution it makes to a wide range of products.

If ever there were a company whose product mirrored its culture, it is W L. Gore & Associates. This lattice textile is made by a lattice organization, a company designed for horizontal interactions where employees are known as “associates.”

In 1982, Inc. magazine runs a cover story on the Newark, Delaware, company best known for its popular product Gore-Tex. Headlined “The Un-manager: Without Ranks and Titles,” the story describes Bill Gore’s “not your average” almost-billion- dollar company. By 1991, the company is among the “400 largest private U.S. Companies.”2

The name “W. L. Gore & Associates” captures the essence of this remarkable enterprise. The design of the company is that of a network. Its core glue is the philosophy of its husband-and-wife founders, Wilbert (“Bill”), who died in 1986, and Genevieve, who remains involved in the company. Business Week features their son Robert in 1990 in an article titled “No Bosses. And Even Leaders Can’t Give Orders.”

The 1982 Inc. story so excites us that we call its author, Lucien Rhodes, who in turn forwards us a poorly typed document with a few handwritten notes on it that Bill Gore has sent him. “The Lattice Organization—A Philosophy of Enterprise” describes the Gore “bureaucracy”:

People group around projects undertaken on the basis of commitment.

The firm’s 5,600 associates (not employees)—now in 46 plants in six countries— have sponsors (not bosses), who serve as their mentors and advocates.

Gore’s projects are boundary crossing teams. “The mathematician, engineer, accountant, machinist, chemist and so on provide a combination of capabilities of a much broader scope than the mere sum of their number. This synergism . . . impels us to join together for mutual benefit.”

STUMP SPEECH TO THE TRIBES

Bill Gore’s paper, written in 1976, was the basis for many talks that he gave over the years to the company’s associates.4 (Which brings us back to the name: everyone who works at W. L. Gore & Associates is an associate.)

It’s not your typical corporate speech. With his ponderous, sometimes mystical tone, Gore sounds more like a 19th-century transcendentalist than the late-2Oth- century entrepreneur that he is. He begins with the “Nature of Man,” the starting point, usually unstated, of every corporate culture. One part of our heritage, he says, comes from hunters and predators with the urge to attack, destroy, loot, vanquish, and overcome competitors. Fortunately, humans evolved new social capabilities that carried the species far beyond this endowment. ‘A further great evolutionary invention is the cooperation of groups made possible by friendship and love.... The tribal group ... combines aggressive capability welded together by emotional interactions.” To Gore, the essence of human nature is co-opetition.

Besides being capable of friendship and love, he says, people are also dreamers. He asks what would happen if people doubled their brain capacity. “If the norm in our society is the utilization of say 10% of our inherent human capabilities, what would be the result if we were able to restructure . . . this to double to 20%?”

People participate in groups because together they can accomplish more than alone, he says. Gore believes accomplishment peaks with about 150 people in the same group. After that, results decline, and it’s time to form another group, a principle that the company puts into practice. Gore breaks plants apart when they exceed 150 to 200 people. This is, roughly, a tribal size, the upper-limit size of groups that people lived in after the invention of language but before the development of agriculture and cities.

When groups pass out of the realm in which everyone knows everyone else, Gore believes “we" quickly translates into “they.” This tiny language signal announces the beginning of turf wars, the identification of enemies, and win-lose maneuvers that eventually bring down even great companies.

THE LATTICE BEHIND THE FACADE

There’s another downside to groups of more than 150 to 200, Gore says. “Beyond some such level, it becomes necessary to impose rules, regulations, procedures and the like that dictate how the cooperation shall be done. Special teams evolve within the lattice structure usually led by someone particularly competent in the discipline or activity of the team. One individual may participate on several such teams and have a leadership role in them. These multi-participant people serve an important liaison function and are often involved ina number of different teams,” Gore says.

To avoid bureaucracy and to reach for that doubling of human capabilities, the company uses the lattice, which has these characteristics:

• No fixed or assigned authority;
• Sponsors, not bosses;
• Natural leadership defined by followership;
• Person-to-person communication;
• Objectives set by those who must make them happen; and
• Tasks and functions organized through commitments.

Leadership “evolves” at the company, according to Daniel D. Johnson, who eventually followed in his former co-worker’s footsteps, leaving Du Pont to join Gore. “You look behind you, and you’ve got people following you.”

In Gore’s view, “Every [successful] organization has a lattice organization that underlies the facade of authoritarian hierarchy. It is through these lattice organizations that things get done. Most of us delight in ‘going around’ the formal procedures and doing things the straightforward and easy way. The legendary subversion of official military procedures by the ‘non-coins’ is an example of this. All astute military leaders utilize this sub rosa lattice.”

For all his unusual ideas, Gore is not a romantic. He doesn’t propose replacing every aspect of hierarchy with lattices because of what he calls obvious difficulties:

• “Stability and long-term constancy require a firm hand at the helm;
• “Decisions must be made. Complete consensus is never achieved;
• “There seems to be some upper limit for which the lattice is effective; and
• “It’s unrealistic for people to set their own salaries."

VOW TO AVOID BUREAUCRACY

“The rest of Corporate America is only beginning to think about how to motivate employees now that there’s a shrinking hierarchy to slot people into,” Joseph Weber says in the 1990 Business Week article. “But Gore, a quirky, family-held plastics company, has never had much of one: It has been experimenting with an almost free-form management structure for 32 years.... Gore isn’t some little countercultural outfit, mind you. By turning a flexible form of DuPont’s Teflon into Gore-Tex, used in fabrics and assorted medical, electronic, and industrial products, the company has grown into a nearly $700 million a year outfit, whose return on assets and equity puts it in the top 5%, whose sales quintupled in 8 years.”

As irony would have it, of course, Gore started his own company because “as a DuPont chemist, he couldn’t get his innovation—Teflon coating for electrical wires—marketed by the big company. When he left, he vowed to avoid stifling bureaucracies, so he tossed out the traditional chain of command for a ‘lattice’ system. In it, any staffer may take an idea or complaint to any other: A machine operator can talk directly with plant leaders.”

In his lattice organization paper, Gore gives DuPont credit for inspiring his “ahead of the time” ideas. “The concept of the lattice originated from my consideration of the operation of ‘Task Forces’ created during the 1950s to carry out research and development within the Du Pont Company. The original ideas have been refined and extended over the past 18 years. The record supports the belief that a lattice organization releases and promotes the creativity of human beings.”

Task forces at DuPont and lattices at Gore are just two expressions of the worldwide, simultaneous, uncoordinated “experiment” with boundary crossing teamnets in the past few decades. 

 

 

"The Future of Books"

In gathering info for a report on the future of media, I came across "The Future of Books" by James Warner in McSweeney's Internet Tendency. This pretty much explains where we're headed in the next 70 years. I won't wreck it for you. Here's where it starts:

2020: All Books Will Be Cross-Platform and Interactive.

Future “books” will be bundled with soundtracks, musical leitmotifs, 3-D graphics, and streaming video. They’ll be enhanced with social bookmarking, online dating, and alerts from geo-networking apps whenever someone in your locality purchases the same book as you— anything so you don’t have to actually read the thing. Authors will do their own marketing, the reader will be responsible for distribution, the wisdom of crowds will take care of the editing, and the invisible hand of the market will perform the actual writing (if any). Writers will respond either by going viral or by going feral.

Limoges Pride and Prejudice Book Box from The Cottage Shop

 

"Collective Sensemaking:" Author Nancy Dixon looking for participants

My colleague, Nancy Dixon, author, knowledge expert, and insightful thinker, is writing a new book about "Collective Sensemaking," which happens, she posits, as part of the perpetual motion of teams -- sometimes together, sometimes apart -- and is looking for teams to interview. I asked her to send a few paragraphs re: what she's looking for. Sounds like an interesting book!

"If an organization wants to be agile, which requires employees to quickly change what they are doing, they will have to make employees a part of creating the change rather than trying to “sell” it, or implementing lengthy change management processes, to try to convince employees to change.  Making employees a part of creating the change has the great advantage of accessing their collective intelligence, thus increasing the likelihood that the change is both in the right direction and implementable.  Collective Sensemaking is the conversational process of employees thinking together about where they are and where they need to go. Depending on the size of the unit that needs to change, Collective Sensemaking conversations can take place in a team, department, or whole organization.  There is skill in creating the structure of Collective Sensemaking conversations, it is clearly not a series of presentations, typical of most quarterly or annual meetings.

A number of virtual teams, distributed project teams, as well as whole organizations, have found advantage in oscillating between distributed work and coming together for Collective Sensemaking.  I am writing a book about this pattern of oscillation and about how to make Collective Sensemaking work. I currently have cases written about three  organizations that use this pattern, a consulting company, software project team, and a government agency.  I am looking for positive examples from other industries.  The process I use to develop the cases is to interview 5-12  employees over Skype or Google Hangout, write the case based on the processes they describe and connect those processes to Collective Sensemaking concepts and research that helps to explain why it works.   I  return the case to the interviewees to review and correct. I give the organization and individuals the option of using real or fictitious names in the case. The benefit to the organization is a deeper understanding of their processes and the opportunity to review the cases from other organization which can provide them new ideas to support their own work.

If your organizations does this kind of oscillation, even if you don’t call it Collective Sensemaking, :) I’d be very interested in have an exploratory call with you. You can reach me at [email protected]"

 

Roland's July Newsletter (with a "Note from a Reader," i.e. me)

A few months ago, Peter Sarno, Roland Merullo's publisher for Lunch with Buddha, among other titles at PFP Publishing (here's the story of how Roland came to publish with Peter -- and check out the PFP site, some great authors including another Endless Knots favorite, Askold Melnyczuk), wrote asking if I'd contribute a "Note from a Reader" for an upcoming newsletter. It's in the July newsletter (scroll down to the picture of me looking like I'm on TV, which I was when this photo was taken), just out, and available here. It doth begineth:

I recently received an email from a friend.

 

It wasn't the first I've received on the subject of Roland's books because I have recommended his work before - many times before. I've bought his books for friends...and been a bit of a volunteer one-woman marketing agency for his work. "I am so indebted to you," Sarah's email began. "I have been reading Roland Merullo's books and savoring them. I really enjoyed his memoir, moving and so honest with wonderful reflections. I like the way he writes and his choice of content...He is both honest and reflective."

 

I agree.

 

As many who follow what Roland's been up to know, he turned down a six-figure advance with a major publisher to bring out Lunch with Buddha with PFP/AJAR Contemporaries. He's on to other projects now, as he always is, prolific and tireless.

 

Lindy Hess changed our lives and those of so many others

It was 3 AM and I woke, cold, which, given the heat of the past weeks, seemed impossible. None of my tricks for getting back to sleep were working so I engaged in the one activity that we now know is the worst, reading on a screen where, as usual, I went straight to the obits. There Katie Hafner's extremely sad one about Lindy Hess, who ran the Columbia Publishing Course.

Photo by Lilian Kemp swiped from NYT obit and how Lindy looked when we met her (thanks)

We met Lindy in 1981 on the very day Reagan was being sworn in as president and the hostages were released in Iran. About nine months earlier, Jeff Stamps and I had sold Networking, our first joint book to Methuen, the British publisher, which was starting up an American list (for the publishing historians, Fred Jordan, for many years of Grove Press, was the publisher of this effort). The sale was thanks to Ron Bernstein, our agent at the time. But not long after we'd signed the contract, Ron called to say that Methuen's parent company in the UK had decided to cancel its plans to publish an American list. He was reassuring that he could sell the book again, which he did in very short order at a bit more than twice the original advance to...

Lindy Hess at Doubleday. It was a good break for people bringing out their first book with a major publisher. Lindy knew what she was doing. At 31, she was such a pro that the venerated old house had given her control of an imprint (Doubleday Dolphin). Because she appeared to be so knowledgeable and clearly was very talented and because we'd done the deal on the phone without meeting face-to-face, I thought she'd be much older than I. Instead, when we went to the swanky building on, was it Park Avenue, we were greeted by a woman three years younger with shoulder-length hair held back by a, was it velvet, headband that she removed and reinserted every few minutes. We talked in her office for a while about what was ahead in the process, mentioned that "Jackie Onassis" was now an editor at Doubleday, described her as "very nice" and "hard-working," and shortly thereafter asked if I needed to use the ladies room.

We went together and, as we stood in front of the mirror fidgeting with our hair after peeing -- isn't that part of the ritual: pee, wash your hands, fuss with your hair? -- she said I looked "elegant." I was wearing a long-sleeved ivory silk blouse with a self-tie that I'd borrowed from my friend-neighbor Emily, a dark-blue, knee-length wool skirt with two unusual pleats and one pocket that was stitched not quite right (I'd gotten it at a designer-discount shop) causing me to fuss with *it* constantly, and the most expensive pair of tall boots I'd ever bought, then about five years old. It felt like quite a compliment standing with "my editor" in Manhattan.

Things went well. Lindy liked the book and, when we made a most unusual proposal, she was game, a story I told here about four years ago. We were, how do you say, computer-savvy early on and thus had the ability to write, edit, and create the files for typesetting the book electronically. Doubleday had never done this but Lindy's response was enthusiastic. She inquired around to make sure it would work; she got a positive response; and she gave us a second contract for the typesetting, which, by today's standards, was a GIANT KLUDGE. We wrote the book on a Wang 2200, whose files were then converted by Typesetting Service in Providence, RI, that had a Digital PDP-11 and which could then output and paste-up pages in the format and design that Doubleday specified. It was the first time Doubleday had ever done a book this way and it worked. (The only thing that went wrong was that the FedEx truck delivering the final paste-ups had an accident on the West Side Drive in NY!)

Shortly after the book was published (my memory is that it was only weeks), Lindy left Doubleday and, if I've got this right, moved to Boston, and not long thereafter married her husband Bill Appleton. I was happy for her and sad that our acquisition editor had orphaned our book. A very nice guy took over -- Gerry Helferich -- who later went on to work at Wiley (a later publisher of Jeff's and my books) and who now writes his own books.

We saw Lindy a few times after she moved to Boston, us visting her house, she visting ours, but as time went on, we lost touch. Then about five years ago, David Miller of Garamond Agency, a new agent whom we worked with for a while, told us he was going to teach at the Columbia Publishing Course, which led to a discussion of the program and, alas, that's where Lindy had ended up, spending 25 years making that program and many of its graduates extremely successful.

Once you've been published, you can never be unpublished. There have been other people who have come along in the years since Lindy published Networking, people whose work has made a very big difference in Jeff's and my writing careers but Lindy was the first book publisher and I'd give anything at this moment to see her take that headband out and put it back in.

 

 

 

HBR's 10 Must Reads on Teams: We're There!

How great to discover while looking for something else we'd written that "Can Absence Make a Team Grow Stronger?", the HBR article that we wrote with Ann Majchrzak and Arvind Molhatra, has been chosen as one of HBR's 10 Must Reads on Teams. Or in their words in the compilation:

This collection was previously published as "Harvard Business Review on Building Better Teams." We've moved it to HBR's 10 Must Reads series because the ideas are critical to the success of every manager and aspiring leader, meeting our high standards for must-read status.

We're in good company with Jon Katzenbach, among other great thinkers.

Thanks, HBR, Ann, Arvind, and our editor on that one, Ben Gerson!

Merullo's "Lunch" launch, tonight, Newtonville Books, 7 PM

Photo by Amanda Stearns Merullo

Roland Merullo's launch party for Lunch with Buddha takes place tonight at Newtonville Books, 10 Langley Road, Newton Centre. Lots of parking, two blocks from the Newton Centre T, easy to walk to from virtually any of the Newtons.

And just in case you need more background on Roland, this from the press release:

Roland Merullo is an awarding-winning author of 14 books including 10 works of fiction.  Breakfast with Buddha, a nominee for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, is now in its 14th printing.  The Talk- Funny Girl was a 2012 ALEX Award Winner and named a "Must Read for 2012" by the Massachusetts Library Association and the Massachusetts Center for the Book; Revere Beach Boulevard was named one of the "Top 100 Essential Books of New England" by The Boston Globe, A Little Love Story was named one of "Ten Wonderful Romance Novels" by Good Housekeeping and Revere Beach Elegy won the Massachusetts Book Award for non fiction.
 
His books have been translated into German, Spanish, Portuguese, Korean and Croatian.

And here's the book summary for purposes of tantalizing you. For the record, the material around losing a spouse is remarkably well portrayed:

On the surface, Lunch with Buddha is a story about family. Otto Ringling and his sister Cecelia could not be more different. He's just turned 50, an editor of food books at a prestigious New York publishing house, a man with a nice home in the suburbs, children he adores, and a sense of himself as being a mainstream, upper-middle-class American. Cecelia is the last thing from mainstream. For two decades she's made a living reading palms and performing past-life regressions. She believes firmly in our ability to communicate with those who have passed on.
 
It will turn out, though, that they have more in common than just their North Dakota roots.
 
In Lunch with Buddha, when Otto faces what might be the greatest of life's difficulties, it is Cecelia who knows how to help him. As she did years earlier in this book's predecessor, Breakfast with Buddha, she arranges for her brother to travel with Volya Rinpoche, a famous spiritual teacher - who now also happens to be her husband.
 
After early chapters in which the family gathers for an important event, the novel portrays a road trip made by Otto and Rinpoche, in a rattling pickup, from Seattle to the family farm in North Dakota. Along the way the brothers-in-law have a series of experiences - some hilarious, some poignant - all aimed at bringing Otto a deeper peace of mind. They visit American landmarks; they have a variety of meals, both excellent and awful; they meet a cast of minor characters, each of whom enables Rinpoche to impart some new spiritual lesson. Their conversations range from questions about life and death to talk of history, marijuana, child-rearing, sexuality, Native Americans, and outdoor swimming.
 
In the end, with the help of their miraculous daughter, Shelsa, and the prodding of Otto's own almost-adult children, Rinpoche and Cecelia push this decent, middle-of-the-road American into a more profound understanding of the purpose of his life. His sense of the line between possible and impossible is altered, and the story's ending points him toward a very different way of being in this world.

Pub date for "Lunch with Buddha"

This is from Roland Merullo's Facebook status, simply too good to just "share" on FB. Book #15+ from, in my view, the best living American writer. I know that's high praise but ... read a half-dozen or so of his books and then decide whether his subjects are as human, compelling, and challenging as life itself -- and whether his mastery of writing is as superb as anyone's-- and did I mention his humor?

Bostonians: Thursday night, as in day after tomorrow, Newtonville Books, 7 PM, for official launch of Lunch with Buddha, in the high 3000s on Amazon at the moment. All the writers reading here know what this means. Go, Buddha!

Now for those of you with normal vision, the words from the man himself:

Status Update

By Roland Merullo

A famous writer friend of mine once said, on the publication date of his book, "you half-expect a parade in front of the house with sirens and a marching band". Today is Lunch with Buddha's oficial pub date and I can't say I'm watching out the window for the big parade. Still, even after fifteen or so of these, it's a nice feeling. My thanks to Peter Sarno and his crew for the massive amount of work they've done, for the investors and Kickstarter contributors, for all the readers our there who make it possible for me to keep going, and for the kind ones who've written encouraging notes. It's a good day. I'm grateful to be able to do this. . . even without the parade.

 

 

"Lunch with Buddha" – Here goes!

It's happening. The e-dition of Roland Merullo's newest, Lunch with Buddha, is out and the launch for the print edition is coming right up, next Thursday, Nov 15, 7 PM, at my hometown bookstore, Newtonville Books. This sequel to Breakfast with Buddha, the laugh-out-loud send-up-with-a-serious-undertone about spiritual practice, has its own think-about-it strain, a grieving husband. Even after reading so many of Roland's books, I'm still not sure how he does it: his clever way of doing analogies without constantly using the words "like" and "as if," his ability to hit the emotional notes with precisely the right pressure, his humor-without-insult. The story of how the book has been published is its own brave tale of friendship, dedication, and good business hunches. Here, the press release.

Roland Merullo’s funny roadtrip novel, Breakfast with Buddha (2007), is in its 13th printing, has sold over 130,000 copies, been optioned for film and translated into Korean and Croatian, and was nominated for the prestigious Dublin IMPAC Literary Prize — a success by any measure. However, for the sequel, Lunch with Buddha, Merullo turned down a six-figure advance and chose a very small publishing house owned by a good friend, instead of going with one of the larger houses that have published his novels to wide acclaim since 1991.

Merullo, 59, and publisher Peter Sarno, 58, grew up within a mile and a half of each other in the working-class city of Revere, Massachusetts. They played, at the same time, in different divisions of the city Little League. Their fathers knew each other well. Peter’s mother and Roland’s aunt were best friends, and their acquaintances overlapped in scores of places, but the two men didn’t meet until 2006 when each had moved far from Revere and each other.

During that period, Sarno had returned to graduate school at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. As part of a course requirement for George Garrett Award winning author and AGNI magazine founder, Askold Melnyczuk, Sarno conducted a craft interview with Merullo based on one of the assigned texts: Revere Beach Elegy, winner of the 2000 Massachusetts Book Award for non fiction. Sarno would later go on to teach literature and writing classes at UMASS. Before the 2011 Spring semester began, he discovered that Elegy, (which had now become one of his own course staples), was no longer available. He contacted Merullo, asking if he could find a way to get it back into print. From that conversation, PFP Publications was born. Sarno proceeded to publish not only five books from Merullo’s backlist, but titles by such notable authors as the aforementioned Melnyczuk, Elizabeth Searle, Craig Nova, Sterling Watson and others.
On November 13th, PFP’s imprint, AJAR Contemporaries, will publish Lunch with Buddha.

The two former Revere kids are doing everything themselves — raising money through an inventive IPO program (more than a dozen investors will each receive a one-time 10% return on their money once the book sells its 10,000th copy) and the on-line crowdfunder Kickstarter, hiring a designer and copyeditor (both of whom are nationally known and happen to live within a few miles of each other and the author on Merullo’s country road), finding printers, putting together a book tour, attending conferences, meeting with booksellers and reaching out to reviewers as well as long time supporters of Merullo’s work.

“We’re determined,” the author says, “not merely to do everything the big publishers do, but to do it better and faster and at a lower cost. Peter and I have been working from breakfast until midnight every day for months now. Our skills complement each other well: Peter’s a detail person, and I’m out in space half the time. He knows the world of computers inside and out, and I can barely send an email. He and his small staff are as devoted to this novel as I am, and after 22 years of putting out books with the publishing giants, I find that immensely refreshing.”

Lunch with Buddha has some refreshing twists, too. There’s an interview (conducted by the noted author Matthew Quick of The Silver Linings Playbook fame) and a reader’s guide between the covers, as well has several hand-edited pages from Merullo’s working drafts, a recommended reading list, and a list of web sites where photos linked to the text can be seen. In addition to the usual hardcover and paperback editions (published simultaneously), AJAR will put out an eBook that will include embedded photos, taken by Merullo’s professional-photographer wife Amanda, from the Seattle-to-North Dakota road trip on which the story is based, and a signed, numbered, limited-edition hardcover with a slightly different design.

“I’ve actually gained a lot more respect for the larger and established publishers during this process,” Sarno says. “It’s not easy reaching an individual author’s fan base, his or her supporters. Or establishing and discovering a new reader-ship in this digital and online world. You’d think it would be. But folks are bombarded with so much info these days that it can be difficult to capture their attention. We’ve employed as many of the new social media tools as we can, and the eBook format has so much potential. Yet, we’ve also gone back to what some would consider the ‘old fashioned’ ways of snail mail, returned telephone calls and cups of coffee with independent bookstore owners, librarians and booksellers as a means of connecting with Roland’s readers.”

The business partners have already contacted many of the book groups that chose Breakfast with Buddha, put together an extensive book tour, including stops in eastern Massachusetts, Maine, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and New York State, and in the works are radio and print interviews, as well as catalogue and on-line advertising via publishing organizations, Book Buzz, Goodreads, and other reader-centric sites.

“I wrote this novel in such a way that those who’ve never read Breakfast will be perfectly at ease, and those who have read it will continue their American road trip and spiritual search with the eccentric monk, Volya Rinpoche, and the other characters they came to know, “ Merullo says. “This is my 15th publication, and I have to say I’ve never worked as hard or enjoyed anything nearly as much.”

Print books are already available for pre order from Amazon, Barnes and Noble and several independent bookstores. eBook versions will be available in Kindle, Nook, Apple iBook and Kobo formats. Merullo plans to create an audio version in the Boston accent he and Sarno have never lost. Join them for the celebratory launch reading at Newtonville Books in Newton, MA, on November 15th, or elsewhere along the road in November, December, and January (For a list of appearances, visit LunchWithBuddha.com, or RolandMerullo.com, or the Facebook pages of Roland Merullo or Lunch with Buddha.)

Roland Merullo and Peter Sarno thank you in advance for any review attention or off-page coverage you can give to this new adventure, Lunch with Buddha.

Stop the presses! I agree with Jeff Jacoby!

It happened. Rarer than a celestial line-up. Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby, whose columns typically leave me, variously, shaking my head wondering how small-thinking a good writer can be or, worse, wondering how such poorly reasoned pieces can make it past the editors (where are you, Tom Winship?), has perfect pitch today. In "A Book Lover's Lament," admittedly a soft-ball, Jacoby puts aside his silly retro politics and gives us a beautiful love letter to books. Here are a few lines that I particularly like:

• "I love perusing book reviews and leafing through publishers’ catalogs and nosing around in bookstores. And as my wife discovered when she met me, my idea of interior decoration is books on bookshelves, preferably floor-to-ceiling and wall-to-wall."
• "With disposable income, however, the world changed. I realized that the pleasure of reading books was amazingly enhanced by the pleasure of owning books. I liked seeing around me books I had already read; I found it gratifying that my encounter with a book continued even after I’d finished reading it."
• "Ah, if only I could read books as fast as I acquire them! Even half as fast would be a blessing. Even a quarter as fast."
• "I’ll never catch up on my must-read list. How can I, when they keep publishing books I’m so impatient to read?"

Well done, Mr. Jacoby. Keep reading, please. And thanks.