Chris Dalton's Personal Development Blog

Today I handed over the manuscript of my book to the publisher. It now begins its journey through the digestive system of one of the country’s largest business publishing companies, so it’s going to be very exciting to see what happens next.

As with all creative projects, this moment is a bit disconcerting.  For six months I’ve been living with this ‘thing’. Whenever I look at it, I can always see something else that needs adding, subtracting, tweaking, correcting or editing. No sentence ever really feels finished, or ‘finishable’.

But, it won’t get published that way. I trust that what there is meets the purpose, and if not anything close to Hemingway or O’Brian for style, at it will at least be readable.

I had gone over word count. Arthur Quiller-Couch gave writers the advice “murder your darlings”, and I hunted for one or two of my own darlings to eliminate from the text. This is invariably a healthy thing to do.

One of the things I chose was the extract below. By the end of a book, one is susceptible to making grand statements, and this was the grandest on a list of “key lessons” for managers. I rather like it, and I know what I want to say. Probably for that reason alone, it has to go (at least for now).

If you read it and find it eminently sensible and as plain as the nose on your face, then I’m sad to say that the rest of the book may look terribly pedestrian.

If, on the other hand, you read it and find that it self indulgent and oblique, then I’m pleased to say that it’s nothing like the rest of the book. Honest.

“Management is the punctuation of a continuous and complex flow of events

This is not an easy idea to get your head around, but I have found that by the time experienced managers are completing their final capstone project or dissertation in their MBA, this thought suddenly begins to make sense.

We are part of one ecology. Imagine for a moment this whole, inter-connected world happening continuously around you – whether or not you like, and whether or not you know it. At every scale and in every way our living world is getting on with it. Of all those events, we experience only a very tiny fraction – through our senses. We try to study and make sense of this world by looking for patterns. We have created all sorts of ways of categorising, naming, expressing and explaining this complex world. We divide time by days, hours and minutes. We impose beginnings, middles and ends. We divide management into subjects. In every case, our sense making is just a sort of punctuation of the continuous flow of events. The choice of how we do this is always ours.

So the division of business and management into subjects, functions, silos or categories may be necessary, but is arbitrary. There may be better or worse ways of doing it. Our goal as managers should be to find the better ways, but not be trapped by our punctuation.”