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Feedback as Collaboration Providing valuable feedback and insight can prove to be as difficult as writing the narrative itself. Two of the most cherished gifts I (Colin) received in my career are pens, given to me by people whose narratives I had read and commented on. (I would typically give a printout of the narrative with my handwritten notes on it to the presenters after the meeting.) Both people told me that my comments had played a key role in making their businesses successful. I say this not to boast but to provide evidence that when the reader takes the narrative process just as seriously as the writer does, the comments can have real, significant, and long-lasting impact. You are not just commenting on a document, you’re helping to shape an idea, and thereby becoming a key team member for that business.
Working Backwards
Colin Bryar and Bill Carr
Nancy Edison also sensed, or discovered by chance, the real direction of her son’s interests; for one day she brought forth an elementary book of physical science, R. G. Parker’s School of Natural Philosophy, which described and illustrated various scientific experiments that could be performed at home. Now his mother found that the boy had truly caught fire. This was “the first book in science I read when a boy, nine years old, the first I could understand,” he later said. Here, learning became a “game” that he loved. He read and tested out every experiment in Parker; then his mother obtained for him an old Dictionary of Science, and he went to work on that. He was now ten and formed a boyish passion for chemistry, gathering together whole collections of chemicals in bottles or jars, which he ranged on shelves in his room. All his pocket money went for chemicals purchased at the pharmacist’s and for scraps of metal and wire. Thus his mother had accomplished that which all truly great teachers do for their pupils: she brought him to the stage of learning things for himself, learning that which most amused and interested him, and she encouraged him to go on in that path. It was the very best thing she could have done for this singular boy. “My mother was the making of me,” he said afterward. “She understood me; she let me follow my bent.”29
Although you will not find it in his book, Barry told me that our effort to explain to Wright that Gray had told him the truth was one of only two occasions during the many months he spent with Wright that anyone dared disagree with or try to correct the Speaker when he erred. (Barry told me that Wright also raged and screamed at the other poor fool.) Barry’s book shows that Wright’s staff, after the departure of Raupe, was composed entirely of yes-men. His inability to admit error, and the exclusion of anyone who dared point out his errors, caused his mistakes to persist and grow.
The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One
William K. Black
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