Accidental Genius: Revolutionize Your Thinking through Private Writing

Private writing enables businesspeople to get at their best, most creative, and most practical thinking. Mark Levy advocates writing without concern for grammar, punctuation, or style to achieve expressions of pure thought. He urges readers to write quickly on the theory that fast is honest. He also encourages writers to identify energy sources, follow digressions in thinking, investigate multiple perspectives, and translate written wisdom into real action.

Private writing enables businesspeople to get at their best, most creative, most practical thinking. Levy advocates writing without concern for grammar, punctuation, or style to achieve expressions of pure thought. He urges readers to write quickly on the theory that fast is honest.

Publishers Weekly

Like any coach worth his salt, Levy aims to train, equip and motivate readers to extend their success in business and life. But the technique he espouses is unusual: private writing. A director of special projects at book distributor Bookazine, Levy provides examples of how he has used the practice of nonjudgmental, quick, exploratory writing to supercharge his own sales and management achievements. His clear, concise directions on honing one's critical thinking, changing focus and quieting one's internal editor will encourage readers to start exploring his method immediately. Levy's advanced exercises--involving thought-sparking phrases, precise details and personal interpretations of buzzwords--should expand the ways in which practitioners can observe their own thinking process and tap into previously inaccessible creative resources. Levy also includes the instructive tale of Tom Wolfe, who was badly blocked and adrift while trying to conceptualize an article on a custom-car designer for Esquire. Wolfe's astute editor told him to stop worrying the project to death and just write him a memo that got all of his notes down. The result of that simple-sounding but perspective-changing instruction was Wolfe's famously innovative article, "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby." With an enthusiastic foreword from Tom Peters that will help draw business readers, Levy's canny guidebook could garner the kind of steady sales of such writing books as Henriette Anne Klauser's Put Your Heart on Paper. Author tour. (Oct.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

JOEL BAUER is one of the most sought-after public speakers in America, addressing some 200 audiences each year. His clients include such organizations as 3M, Canon, General Motors, IBM, Intel, Mitsubishi, Motorola, Panasonic, and Philips. The Wall Street Journal Online has referred to him as "undoubtedly the chairman of the board" of corporate tradeshow rainmaking.

MARK LEVY is the founder of Levy Innovation, a marketing strategy firm that makes people and companies compelling. He has also written or co-created four books, including Accidental Genius: Revolutionize Your Thinking Through Private Writing, which has been translated into five languages.

Author, provocateur, and business visionary Tom Peters is recognized around the globe as one of the most influential and revolutionary management gurus of the last century. The author of more than 10 best-selling books on innovative business practices, including the groundbreaking In Search of Excellence, Peters gives more than 100 major seminars each year and seves as the chairman of Tom Peters Company.