June 25, 2024 – John Abrams

It’s early morning on June 21st. One year after I signed a contract with Berrett-Koehler Publishing (BK), I hit send and my draft manuscript of Founder to Future went to Steve Piersanti and Jeevan Sivasubramaniam at BK. They have forwarded it to three readers they have hired who will have 30 days to review the manuscript and comment.

At the same time, I sent the manuscript to five other people:

• Carolyn Edsell-Vetter, Program Director at Cooperative Fund of the Northeast and Board Chair of the Cooperative Development Institute

• Alex Moss, founder and President of Praxis Consulting Group

• Deirdre Bohan, who replaced me in 2023 as CEO and President of South Mountain Company

• Jamie Wolf, recently retired founder of Wolfworks and one of my co-founders and co-facilitators at Building Energy Bottom Lines

• Ari Weinzweig, author, and co-owner/founding partner at the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses

These five—all friends and colleagues—have generously agreed to read and review the manuscript. In addition to reading and reviewing, Ari will write the book’s foreword. A prolific writer, he produces Ari’s Top 5, one of the few weekly newsletters I never miss. You can subscribe here.

After 70 interviews and countless communications with people to vet the accuracy of my writing about them and their organizations, the complete draft manuscript is, for a bit, out of my hands.

Along with the incredibly generous people I have spoken to and met with, the adventure of this undertaking has, until now, mainly been shared with Steve, the book’s editor, who is the founder and former CEO of BK, Clark Hanjian, a Buddhist chaplain, thinker, and tremendously skilled editor who has helped me from the beginning, and Kim Angell, my life and business partner.  It is not an overstatement to say that without these three, this manuscript would not exist.

After the eight readers have read and responded, I will have three months to work with Steve to revise the manuscript. Design and production of the book will proceed. On April 28, 2025, I will have copies in my hands to distribute, and on June 3, 2025, it will go on sale. The completion of the draft manuscript signifies the halfway mark to me—both in terms of time from start to publication and effort remaining.

Since the signing of the BK contract, I have had an obligation to submit this manuscript by June 20, 2024.

It’s a day late.

In May, I realized that I had so much to do that there wasn’t a chance in hell I’d make that deadline. The everyday distractions of life and work were getting too much of my attention; I was too undisciplined to resist.

I emptied my calendar, scheduled nothing new, and hibernated for five days in Warren, Vermont and four days in the shadow of Mt. Washington in New Hampshire. During those two periods (which bracketed a two-day New Hampshire conference that I had committed to long before), I basically saw no one, except for a few dinners with friends and casual encounters as I procured food and drink and hiked. I ate, I walked in the mountains and along a river, I wrote, and I slept. I realized that never before, in my life, had I spent that much time alone.

It worked. On the last day of that solo journey, as I was closing in on the first draft of the last words of the last chapter, having not yielded to the distractions that I am usually powerless to avoid, I was astonished to have arrived at that state of semi-completion.

The day before, as I hiked along the splendid Ammonoosuc River, with its extraordinary rock formations and swift flow, a bobcat flashed across the trail not ten feet in front of me and vanished into the underbrush. I stood still and listened. There was no sign of its presence, not a sound. It was as if it had been an apparition.

My book journey seems like that. It started when I submitted my first proposal to Steve at BK, after an introduction from my friend Marjorie Kelly. Steve’s reaction was something like, “This proposal needs a ton of work before it’s ready for our editorial committee and publication committee.”

The time since then has flashed by like that bobcat.

As I approached my South Mountain retirement in 2022 and thought about what was next, I knew one part was to write this book. But I didn’t know if I could do it or if I was just fooling myself. I was 73 and maybe (who knows?) slightly less brain-agile, tireless, and vigorous than I was at 59 when I finished Companies We Keep. I wasn’t all that sure I could muster the energy to write this book in the way I hoped to. My partner Kim thought I was being ridiculous. She had faith, she knew I could, and she helped to propel me forward.

Turns out she was right, and hey, one day late isn’t all that bad.