What do you do when you want to have a book launch, and the followers that you have are sprawled seemingly randomly across the globe? Why, turn it into a webinar and do it on the internet!
Which is, essentially, what happened last Thursday. Peter gave me a hand as host and interrogator, and I did my best to introduce the book that has occupied the better part of the last year and a bit of my life (and several years before, in the form of my doctoral thesis).
As the book had its genesis in my doctoral thesis, the primary objective was to take interesting ideas that no one would otherwise read and translate them into human readable form. Hopefully, I have done that. In the time between finalizing the page proofs and the actual publication of the book I had a few months to step away from it, and I am actually really pleased with how it came out. It’s a book that I’m proud to have my name on.
One of my primary motivations in writing the book was to share the incredibly stories of the people that I interviewed as part of my research, and to help to make sense and meaning of the varying perspectives they provided. In getting project initiation decisions made, there is no one right way. There are several (more or less) productive ways, and there are several more unproductive (or downright counterproductive) ways to get decisions made. What I’ve done in the book (and the webinar) is to introduce those, and what they mean. For individuals trying to shape and guide the initiation of projects, what is particularly important is understanding the environment we are in, the range of options we have at our disposal, and most importantly our willingness and perceived ability to use them.
The discussion was great. I sincerely appreciate Peter’s efforts to moderate the questions and create a really enjoyable level of interaction. Normally, we do our Q&A session at the end, and we went out on a limb and engaged with the audience throughout. In my view, it made it interesting, engaging and fun. As well, I owe a sincere debt of thanks to the audience, who came up with such awesome questions. There was a lot of interest, and interesting perspectives, provided during the session.
Reading through the full transcript of the webinar questions, there were far more questions asked than we had time to answer. And many of those deserve a more thoughtful response than there is necessarily time to provide during a one-hour presentation. To address both of those points, I will be writing a series of posts here to address some of the points they raised. Look for them over the next week or two.
Thank you again to all of you who joined in the webinar, and those who have provided feedback after listening to it online. Your comments and feedback have been wonderful.