Writing is crystallized voice. When I was first trying to teach myself to write, I took the need to capture voice seriously. Every night, before going to sleep, I wrote my recollection of a conversation I had had that day, trying to draw out the feelings that it had left me with, and gradually — as I picked up sophistication — trying to evoke those feelings in some reader somewhere else.

Nobody ever read those journal entries; they were scaffolding, a frame on which I built my literary skills. But lately, I've been drawn to try the experiment again, this time with an audience.

After ten years of making part of my living as a business book ghostwriter, I've become one of the more prominent "ghosts" in the business. Books like The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook and The Dance of Change have been part of that.*

*Some of the pieces in both books were "ghosted," in the sense that contributors were interviewed, I (or another correspondent) wrote a first draft based on the interview, and then the contributors painstakingly went over their material. The contributors of these pieces retain authorship; they are, in fact, the authors, in my opinion. We learned, years ago, that this is a more effective way to get the in-depth, informal writing that the Fieldbook form requires.

Anyone who does this kind of editorial work for too long — channelling someone else's voice and ideas in print — grows hungry to see what they can do with their own thoughts and perceptions. The writing you will find in Ghost Stories is thus done strictly for for myself and you, without any intermediaries involved — not a publisher, not a magazine, and not a ghosting situation. If I succeed, these will be compelling little stories, reflecting the themes that seem to come up for me: The moral dilemmas of business, the desire for utopia, the culture of change, the attitudes of "heretics" who go against the grain. I'll try to make these pieces newsworthy and compelling, to make them not just an exercise for myself, but an evocation of the milieu of management, business, and culture that I travel in.

In Nina Kruschwitz, the manager of this website, I'll even have an editor. (She'll hold me, for instance, to my promise to keep them short.) I hope you enjoy the pieces you read here. And of course, I'm interested in your comments! Send email.