Maestro—A Surprising Story About Leading by Listening, by Roger Nierenberg

The experience that conductor Roger Nierenberg brought to life at the 2010 National HBA Leadership Conference in Philadelphia with his Music Paradigm (http://www.themusicparadigm.com/) is one that those in attendance won’t soon forget. But for those who weren’t able to attend, or those who were and want something concrete to take away from the event and back to the office with them, Nierenberg’s book, Maestro, fits the bill.

This first-person narrative is the story of a business exec who is put in charge of a squabbling team of business men and women—marketing people, manufacturing people, research and development people, sales reps—who can’t seem to put aside their differences and work together to improve the company’s bottom line. The narrator must use superior leadership skills to get the best out of this team and the best results for the company.

The opening scene of Maestro—a workday meeting where each person in the room spouts his or her own point of view at the expense of the greater good—is so powerful specifically because it is so familiar to all of us. While we never find out what sort of company our narrator works for (do they make pharmaceuticals? Beauty products? Toys?), the environment is general enough that it could be familiar to any of us, and specific enough that it is indeed familiar to each of us. As leaders of teams and members of teams, we’re all guilty of being shortsighted at times, of not seeing the forest through the trees. But how do we step back and see the bigger picture of our team’s assets, and our shared goal of improving the bottom line and ROI (return on investment) for our companies?

In Maestro, the narrator’s solution comes when he hears his daughter’s music instructor talk about the new conductor for his orchestra—how the new conductor simply has a way of making the members of the orchestra all want to work together and achieve their individual best potential in order to contribute to the whole. Intrigued, the narrator speaks to his daughter’s instructor, who speaks to the conductor, and soon finds himself sitting in the middle of the violin section of the orchestra’s next rehearsal.

With each orchestra rehearsal our narrator sits in on, and each subsequent conversation he has with the conductor, he learns more and more about the conductor’s leadership skills, and what it takes to get a group as diverse and dynamic as the members of an orchestra to creative something cohesive and beautiful. The narrator takes what he learns at these rehearsals and applies it to his business life, to his team of brilliant but stubborn workers, turning the company around. In this way, Nierenberg lays out the metaphor of a conductor and his orchestra as leader and team members for the reader, and shows how to apply the same principals to the business world of today.

What makes this format interesting is its ability to deliver the metaphor—and the resulting practical leadership advice that we all need—in a flowing narrative that keeps the reader engaged, creating more than a simple “How to be a Great Leader” type book full of lists, facts, statistics, and bulleted points. Getting the message across in the form of a story makes it more memorable and more pleasing to the reader. Some of the conductor’s quotes from the story that we can carry over into our own jobs include:

“Eventually I realized that a great performance would happen only when the motivation sprang as much from them as from me.”

“If a leader wants his people to truly own their work, then he has to be willing to let go of some control.”

“You can force compliance with your directions, you can require obedience, but you can’t mandate enthusiasm, creativity, fresh thinking, or inspiration.”

Quotes like these, peppered throughout the narrative, serve as the inspiration we all need to help our business teams function more like a professional symphony orchestra. And key words that we find the conductor using throughout the story serve as take-home words that we should remember and strive to make part of our daily professional lives: coordination, collaboration, initiative, change, and motivation.

(Please visit www.jenniferringler.weebly.com for more of my book reviews and other writing samples. Contact me at Jennifer_Ringler@yahoo.com to send me a review copy of your book or to recommend other books you think I should review)

Frightened Boy, by Scott Kelly

When Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Orson Scott Card wrote about frighteningly realistic distopian societies (think Brave New World, 1984, and Ender’s Game, respectively), those worlds were somewhere in the distant future. When Scott Kelly does it with his debut novel, Frightened Boy, the danger he foretells is barely 40 years away.

Like other masters of satire, fantasy, and allegory, Kelly’s book at first appears to be an adventurous, suspenseful romp through a decaying society that comes uncomfortably close to mirroring our own. But, also like so many others who have dared to predict and warn us about the very real possibilities for our future through works of fiction, there is much more to be read between the lines for the more philosophic and more perceptive readers among us.

Main characters Clark and Erika live in a big city in a post 9/11 world, where paranoia runs rampant, the government has power only through fear, Strangers are the unknown enemy, and it’s every man for himself. It’s the year 2056, and chance (or fate?) has thrown Erika Bronton into the life of Clark Horton—a meek, frightened young man who is just trying to keep his head down and remain unnoticed in order to stay alive. Erika, a “performance artist,” clings immediately to Clark and decides to worship him as her personal god for six months—having faith that he will provide for her, obeying his every wish and command. Clark’s only real wish, however, is for Erika to forget about her crazy life-art project and disappear, letting him get back to his regular, invisible life; this, of course, is the one request Erika will not grant her new savior.

What ensues is an adventure story that has Clark, the anti-hero, fighting to save his own life and the life of his faithful new subject from the Strangers, all the while struggling with his ideas about faith, fear, control, family, truth, betrayal, trust, innocence, guilt, and eventually, love. The story itself is an adventure, a suspense, a fantasy, an allegory, and possibly even a coming-of-age tale that takes the reader for an emotional ride right along with the characters. What’s even more interesting than the story of Clark and Erika’s struggle for survival, however, is all the philosophical questions their tale raises, and how similar the ideals they struggle with are to our own.

Faith is a constant theme woven throughout the pages of Frightened Boy; the faith Erika has in Clark, the faith he has in himself, the faith we all have in our government and in the people who are supposed to protect us. Is that faith supposed to be blind? Or must it be proven to be justified? Do those that have our best interests in mind always know what’s really best for us? Is questioning our Creator, our loved ones, and our government a sacrilegious breach of faith, or a wise act of self preservation? Does conceding to faith and to fate mean giving up our free will? These are questions the characters in the novel face that the reader—if he is at all aware of the real story being told in Frightened Boy—cannot escape facing as well. One of the many times that Erika is trying to explain to Clark why she has chosen to worship him as her latest act of “performance art,” she tells him: “I’m trying to prove that the act of believing in something is more important than what you believe in.”

Along with faith, a very large facet of the lives of Kelly’s characters (and of our own lives as well) is fear. There is an ongoing question in the novel of whom to trust, whom to fear, whom to believe, and whom to turn to for protection. Does paranoia keep us, as a society, in check? Are good and evil really so far apart? If the “bad guys” really believe passionately in their cause, are they still bad? Is the “greater good” really good for each of us individually? If this is the best of all possible worlds, then isn’t even the evil part of the Creator’s plan? Is our fear of the unknown what drives us away from one another and prevents us from truly connecting with anyone? Can fear be a motivating factor in our lives, and does it ever motivate us to do the wrong thing? Once again, as Kelly’s characters struggle to deal with these issues and questions, the reader is forced to answer them in the context of the story and in the context of his own life.

I could point out for you dozens of quotes and situations in Frightened Boy that make this novel transcend from an engaging work of fiction into an exploration of sociology, psychology, and anthropology, or I could do as the author does—simply ask you to read it for yourself, with an open mind, without leading you by the hand to all the questions and answers that the book may hold for you.

It also might be easy for me to explain the nature of Frightened Boy by comparing it to other works of art. There’s a scene where Frightened Boy is on a cell phone and a Voice is telling him what to do in order to escape danger that is reminiscent of one of the first scenes in the first Matrix movie, when Neo (also your average-Joe, non-hero type) must also rely on an unseen savior to get him out of trouble. Kelly himself pays homage to Orwell’s 1984 when he names the voice of society’s collective fear “Little Brother.” The fine line between reality and imagination mirrors the concerns raised in Ender’s Game. But Kelly’s novel stands out from these stories in one very significant way:

While we might not know how, or when, or why society fell apart in some futuristic, distopian tales, in Frightened Boy, the cause is real. It’s a distinctly American, post-9/11 fear that we all face every day—on the news, in the papers, on the streets of busy cities. In the novel, Clark speaks wistfully of a society without fear, “before public computers were taken out of libraries and before traffic cameras were used to look for suspicious characters… before the police could stop and ask you questions used to determine whether or not you had a ‘terrorist mindset’… it all came down to 9/11, really.”

What sets Kelly’s novel apart from so many others is that the catalyst for the start of the decaying society he describes is a very real part of our history and of our collective memory bank, and in fact has already begun. The truth is, we are all Frightened Boy.

Kelly does a tremendous job with his debut novel on two levels: First, he tells a fun, vivid, suspenseful, emotionally engaging fiction story that a broad audience can easily enjoy for what it is. Second, he raises important questions about our society, our morals, our faith, our beliefs, our relationships, and our philosophy that get us thinking about these issues as they relate to us individually and as a whole—without trying to answer them for us or spoon-feed us his own political, spiritual, or philosophical views. As Frightened Boy becomes more aware of what makes himself and his society tick, the reader also embraces a new awareness.

Print copies of Frightened Boy will be available soon. For now, the book is available in various electronic formats, and is featured on websites such as WattPad.com, BookRix.com, and WeBook.com. It can be downloaded free of charge from www.scottkellywritesbooks.com.

(Please visit www.jenniferringler.weebly.com for more of my book reviews and other writing samples. Contact me at Jennifer_Ringler@yahoo.com to send me a review copy of your book or to recommend other books you think I should review).

Zig-Zagging: Loving Madly, Losing Badly... How Ziggy Saved My Life, by Tom Wilson

Ziggy cartoonist Tom Wilson celebrated the comic’s 40th anniversary in June 2010. He stopped by the The Licensing Book office to chat about his memoir, about bringing an old newspaper comic character into the modern age of communication, and, of course, about licensing.

One of the few remaining toys I have from my childhood is a plush Ziggy in red plaid pajamas and a silly matching hat. My husband had a dog named Ziggy when he was growing up. My mother used to cut out Ziggy comic strips she liked and put them on the refrigerator. We all know Ziggy—after all, the little guy has been around for 40 years. But it seems that, while everyone has a Ziggy story of their own, no one really knows Ziggy’s story.

In 2009, Ziggy cartoonist Tom Wilson Jr. set out to change that with the publication of his memoir, Zig-Zagging: Loving Madly, Losing Badly… How Ziggy Saved My Life.

The book recounts Wilson’s journey with Ziggy, from taking over the character when his father—the original Ziggy cartoonist and senior Tom Wilson—retired in 1987, to losing his wife to a seven-year battle with breast cancer. While Wilson faces the loss of his wife, the challenge of raising his two boys alone, and the task of filling his father’s shoes, he continues to draw daily Ziggy comics to keep his fans smiling. And Ziggy’s simple way of chugging along with a smile no matter what life hands him ends up being the motivation for Wilson to push through his own tough times.

“Ziggy continually shows up for work every day, shows up for life every day… he’s the only character who’s really winning for losing, because after 40 years of life throwing something at him each day, he keeps coming back,” says Wilson.
Although Ziggy comes off as a simple guy, and though Wilson himself describes Ziggy as “a child trapped in an adult’s body,” he may also be a savvy businessman. I read the memoir to learn about the personal side of the story behind Ziggy, and then spoke to Wilson face-to-face to get the business side of the story.

While most characters start out small and then branch out into licensing, Ziggy did things a little differently. He started as a greeting card character for American Greetings, and, by being at the right place at the right time, ended up as a syndicated comic strip through Andrews McMeel Universal.

The story goes like this: while Tom Wilson Sr. was drawing Ziggy for greeting cards at American Greetings more than 40 years ago, he created a small, humorous, card-like book for a branch of American Greetings then called Sunbeam Library. The book was called When You’re Not Around, and featured the then-barely-known Ziggy having a streak of bad luck, ending with the words, “When you’re not around, nothing goes right.” The little book ended up selling half a million copies its first year. Among those half a million buyers was a woman by the name of Kathy Andrews, who sent the book to her husband Jim Andrews to say “I miss you” while he was traveling with his business partner John McMeel. At the time, Jim Andrews and John McMeel ran a tiny new business called Universal Press Syndicate. Andrews took one look at the book and decided that the little man inside it deserved his own syndicated comic strip. As a result, Ziggy first appeared in newspapers in June of 1971.

Today, nearly 40 years later, Ziggy is anything but barely-known. He’s had thousands of licensed products, from toys to calendars to T-shirts. He even had his own 35-foot parade balloon in August of 2009 for the Pro Football Hall of Fame Timken Grand Parade. Ziggy especially has a history of partnering with non-profit organizations and charities to help out pets, patients, and people of all kinds. Ziggy has teamed with the American Red Cross, the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, World Food Day, National Bike Day in New York, Lance Armstrong’s LIVESTRONG foundation, and Earth Day Network, among others.
Why so much charitable work? “You have an obligation when you reach millions of people to contribute something positive to the world,” says Wilson. “He’s a natural for working with non-profits and organizations because his personality isn’t so strong that it takes away from whatever the goal is—he only enhances it. Ziggy’s always happy to lend a hand, even in a small way.”

For a character who has branched out into licensing as extensively as Ziggy has, many brands would have licensing agents, outsourcing, corporations, and a whole slew of other efforts in place to handle the deal-making. However, Wilson himself is president of Ziggy and Friends, Inc., which handles all the licensing for the brand. Why not hire an agency to manage the money-and-merchandise side of things? “We’ve sort of learned along with Ziggy over all those years,” says Wilson. “It’s a very personal property to us; it’s a family business.”

On top of drawing daily Ziggy comics, running Ziggy and Friends, Inc., and raising two boys on his own, you might ask what else Wilson’s got going on. Or, you might be thinking, “Isn’t that enough to handle?” The answer, apparently, is no; Wilson has also founded his own creative marketing agency, Character Matters.

According to the Character Matters website (http://www.charactermatter.net/), “Character Matters delivers original customized characters, mascots, and icon personalities to support and enhance your business' brand, service, or product marketing strategy.” Basically, the company delves into the character of your business, then personifies that to create an actual character to represent your business. “The idea has always been the beginning and the end for me,” says Wilson, “The real fun is getting to know the passion behind the character of the business and then working from there to develop something that really speaks honestly about that character.”

Character Matters has worked in one aspect or another with several big-name companies, including Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Hallmark, Pizza Hut, Pepsi, American Greetings, DreamWorks, and Sony. In addition to character development, the company also offers services in areas such as marketing, product development, intellectual property development, animation, licensing, promotions, and more.

Wilson’s memoir and our in-person interview gave me a good idea about Ziggy’s past—a more deeply layered history than I (and I think any of his fans) had any idea could be going on behind the few minutes a day Ziggy’s audience spends with him. But what about Ziggy’s future?

The key to sticking around for so long, says Wilson, is having a character that can adapt, and one that can communicate directly and personally with the audience. Because Ziggy was created originally as a greeting card character, “he is a communicator on some of the most special levels, and people remember that,” says Wilson. “He’s shared everybody’s most personal times… people remember when the baby was born, a marriage, a first date… and the fact that Ziggy was a part of that, I think, is why we’re still doing licensing after so many years.”

Wilson is working to make sure Ziggy continues to share special moments with his fans in new ways, in a world of Twitter and mobile Apps instead of Sunday comics. Ziggy is embracing change and new technology on many levels; in his comic strip, quips about tweeting, organic foods, cell phones, and economic recessions often turn up. In licensing, mobile apps are in the works, Ziggy’s daily comics can be seen online, and there’s even a possible big-screen movie in the works (the details of which are still hush-hush).

Bringing Ziggy into the future without losing touch with his past is a constant balancing act for Wilson. “My job is to make sure, while he can adapt, he doesn’t change too much from the things that originally made him who he is… I’m constantly on board not to lose touch with that, no matter how much I might change personally.”

My interview with Wilson ends on a reflective note, looking toward a technology-riddled future from Ziggy’s point of view. “It seems like the only real way to learn is to get thrown in—and you sink or swim, or fly, or fall—but gradually, we adapt. But we’re always communicating, and good characters—great licensable characters—are always, foremost, going to be able to communicate something important to us. That’s what I love about this little guy—he’s managed to do that over all these years, and he’s still out there, shoveling through, whatever life has in store for him."

(Please visit www.jenniferringler.weebly.com for more of my book reviews and other writing samples. Contact me at Jennifer_Ringler@yahoo.com to send me a review copy of your book or to recommend other books you think I should review).

Without You, A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent, by Anthony Rapp

"Anthony Rapp captures the passion and grit unique to the theatre world as he recounts his life-changing experience in the original cast of the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical Rent."

This description, taken from the flap copy of the book, does not do it justice and does not let the reader know what kind of emotional ride he is in for.

Rapp gives fans and readers a glimpse behind the scenes of the evolution of a Broadway musical and his professional journey with the show. We begin, through his words, to understand the relationship among the cast, and the relationship that Rapp and the others shared with writer Jonathan Larson. The cast truly becomes a family, a group whose whole is indeed greater than the sum of its parts. This is evident when Rapp describes the feeling he gets hearing all of their voices and individual talents blending together perfectly to sing the songs from Rent: "And we sang, our bodies pulsing to the rhythm of the song, our voices hushed and rich. The progression of the song felt perfect... our voices growing in passion and volume, the melodies and harmonies taking us to new notes and new heights of emotion."

These deep connections with loved ones and new heights of emotion are evident in Rapp's personal life as well as his acting career. While Rapp is "making it big" in the Big Apple, his mother is back home in Illinois, slowly dying of cancer. Rapp struggles with the demands of his newfound fame, juggling work and family to make repeated trips home. It seems he feels a certain disconnect from his mother and the rest of his family, due in large part to Rapp’s un-addressed sexuality.

Rapp shares with the reader his first homosexual experiences as a teenager and his mother’s unwillingness to accept it as more than a passing phase. Even as an adult, when Rapp begins acting in many small-bit performances in which he plays a homosexual character, his mother tells him she doesn’t understand why he can’t choose to play a “normal person” for once.

Again and again throughout the book, Rapp discovers parallels between Mark, his character in Rent, and his own life. Mark hides from his problems and grief by detaching and documenting life on film rather than immersing himself in it; Rapp does the same by pretending to be someone else in an endless string of plays and acting jobs. Each has trouble speaking up for himself and relating to the people he loves most dearly.

When Rapp’s mother loses her battle with cancer and passes away, and when Jonathan Larson, writer of Rent, passes away as well, grief and loss become another parallel that Rapp and his character Mark must share. As the characters in Rent deal with the loss of their friend Angel in the play, the cast members deal with the loss of Larson, who dies suddenly, at age 35, of an aortic aneurysm on dress rehearsal night—the day before the play is to begin its off-Broadway run.

The most moving scene in the book by far is when Rapp and the other cast members cancel the show’s opening night performance and instead perform privately for all of Larson’s family members and friends, who had come together for this night in celebration but ended up gathered in mourning instead. Here, Rapp uses the grief he feels over his mother’s illness, the loss of Larson, and the grief that is a part of the play itself and blends it all together onstage to carry Rapp and his fellow cast members through the performance.

Rapp describes singing “Seasons of Love,” a song about joy and loss performed at a funeral in the play, for Larson’s parents and loved ones that night: “As we sang ‘Seasons,’ its lyrics resonating through me in a thousand new ways, I began to cry, and my throat began to close up, and then I could hear others in the cast crying as they sang, which made my tears run even faster and hotter. But somehow we all managed to keep singing, we all managed to open our throats back up, and let our hearts up and out through our voices, and we sang about love and joy and remembrance. Gwen Stewart miraculously led us through the final chorus, her voice wailing up to heaven for Jonathan.”

Rapp’s two lives—onstage and off—conflict, overlap, and intertwine with one another until finally they cannot be separated, and Rapp must learn to reconcile the two to become one whole person. Both stories recount a tale of love, loss, grief, conflict, fear, hope, success, uncertainty, and joy. While readers who have seen Rent may be more drawn to the story as fans for the inside look it offers, it is ultimately a story of learning to make sense of life and to find happiness in the world, which all of us can relate to.

(Please visit www.jenniferringler.weebly.com for more of my book reviews and other writing samples. Contact me at Jennifer_Ringler@yahoo.com to send me a review copy of your book, or to recommend other books you think I should review).