Learning to Write, Writing to Learn

Abstract

Books play a central role in the quality of my professional life. Good books enrich my teaching, stimulate my creativity, provoke my imagination. Reading good books drives my ambition to write good books. On a plane coming home from Europe in 1997, I read Value Migration by Adrian Slywotzky (1996). It is a terrific book, documenting and explaining capital migration in companies and markets and among industries. Deeply immersed in the field research for my own book project, I challenged myself to write a book as thorough, captivating, and persuasive as Slywotzky's. What a gift from this author. Books like Value Migration are valuable not only for readers but also for writers. They raise the bar. I grew up in a house full of books. My mother especially was always reading, and I have never lived in a house whose shelves were not filled with books. As a boy, I read all the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys detective books. I was fascinated by how these teenagers, not much older than I, used clues to unravel mysteries and then risked life and limb to bring evildoers to justice. Although I cannot honestly say that these teenage novels inspired me to be a researcher, they did instill a love of reading in me.