My 20+ year career has centered on doing two basic activities (1) analyzing things and (2) leading people. Over time, the two have blended in with each other. As I had more and more experience leading people, my analyst self looked for patterns and root causes in the situations I found myself facing as a leader. My inner voice started a conversation with itself: "This difficult situation I am facing with leading Joe right now reminds me of a situation I faced with leading Jane two years ago. If I apply the lessons I learned in leading Jane to this difficult situation with Joe, that would be a lot better than starting from scratch." "And if I can figure out what makes these two situations so similar, I can more easily identify similar situations like that in the future so I could apply the right lessons learned." "And if I could identify what these root causes are and look for those in other team members, I could probably anticipate problems and apply those lessons learned ahead of time." So I set about to identifying these common root causes and organizing them into a framework. I started with a simple picture that soon found its way into PowerPoint. Then the PowerPoint turned into a Word document to fit all the words around the picture describing the concept. By the time the Word document turned into ten pages or so, I figured I might actually have an outline of a book. Wow, how did that happen? Just one problem - I had no idea what a book idea looks like or how you turn it into an actual book. But luckily I had a trusted friend and colleague who did by the name of Mike. Mike had published his first book a couple of years ago and had found quite a bit of success and learned a lot of lessons along the way. I sent him the outline with an introduction along the lines of "this is probably nothing, but do you think there is a book here and, if so, want to help me?" That was three days ago, and now I just got back the reply I was hoping to hear -- "Yes and yes." So a journey begins. Hopefully both a book and I emerge on the other side.