It has been a lot of fun writing The Dark Side of Innovation. The final version that I sent to my publisher was obviously radically different from the first draft I wrote. During all those iterations, the book got much better and concise. It was almost as if I had first dug up a large part of a gold mine in my first draft and in subsequent iterations began to selectively pick gold from the dirt. With the gold separated, I finally began to mould it into the final piece.
I will blog more about my experience in writing the book because I love to read such experiences of other authors and have personally benefited from such blogs. Today I want to share the original Jack and Zollo story that I start the book with. If it had survived my editing I would have tightened it more but I decided to remove it within 2 subsequent drafts of writing it.
Initially the Jack and Zollo story idea emerged when I was explaining the concept of the Dark Side of Innovation to someone. It was one of those ideas that just pop in your head out of nowhere to make a point clearer. ‘Choice between losing a limb and playing Russian roulette’ was a powerful way to explain a fairly complicated idea in behavioral psychology. But then it stuck with me and I developed it to place it in middle of first chapter. Slowly I realized that it could be a great way to start the book.
As I continued to write the book I kept going back to the Jack and Zollo story in every chapter. By the time I ended the manuscript it occurred to me that the story could be finished as a coda section in the end wherein Jack would use lessons from The Dark Side of Innovation to get out of the soup he found himself in the beginning of the book.
In subsequent iterations, I got rid of most of the story and left only a couple of paragraphs to start the book. YOU CAN READ THE ENTIRE FIRST DRAFT OF THE JACK AND ZOLLO STORY BY CLIKING HERE. This fiction piece wouldn’t have been possible if I hadn’t learnt fiction writing from a very talented teacher Grey Brown at Duke University. During my doctoral thesis writing days I wandered into literature and dramatics departments at times. It was a lot of fun doing that.
If you are a doctoral student reading this I would encourage you to go into a very different department to take a course or two (or three or four ). It would really help you in many ways including some down time during those stressful days when you begin to believe that your thesis will never end. Who knows how you will use those skills in your future!
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