Coming from a publishing family, I learned about ideas, books, and culture around the dinner table and as a result, feel like I have always been in the book and media business. During my years as an editor, first at the University of California Press and then at HarperCollins, and ultimately as an Idea Architect, I have had the pleasure and the privilege of working with gifted authors whose work has demonstrated the power that books can have in changing lives and even in changing history. I have also had the opportunity to work on a number of related media products and to help establish organizations to communicate important ideas through websites and companies.

My goal has been, and continues to be, to guide visionaries who are working to expand human possibilities and to help build a wiser, healthier, and more just world. Because I only work with people whose values I believe are important for our culture, I see myself as more than an editor, agent, or coauthor. I see myself as an intellectual collaborator and evangelist helping in whatever way necessary to bring a visionary’s insights to the world, beginning with the articulation of that vision in a form that can be heard and following through to the expression and promotion of that vision through books, related media products, companies, and social and political campaigns. The following are snapshots of a few of the projects I have helped to bring to fruition. I am sorry I could not include all of the extraordinary visionaries I have had the opportunity to work with.

Desmond Tutu:

God Has a Dream: A Vision of Hope for our Time

"Archbishop Desmond Tutu has long been a hero of mine," said Idea Architects co-founder Doug Abrams. "Like many I was inspired by his fearless struggle to end apartheid in South Africa. He had offered the world his political message in several important books, but he had yet to give us his spiritual message—the beliefs and values that allowed him to have courage in times of often daunting despair." Doug contacted Lynn Franklin, Tutu’s longtime friend and agent, and together they presented the idea to the Archbishop. Franklin says, "Doug has a unique ability to capture an author's inner purpose and to develop it for general readers. He has a vision for projects that have real inherent value and can make a difference for our society, and he is willing to go the distance to make them happen."

Tutu’s endless speaking schedule and other commitments made him wonder whether he would ever have the time to write his next book. According to Tutu, "Without my coauthor Doug Abrams’s assiduous work and extraordinary gift of self, this book would never have seen the light of day. Doug is wonderfully creative and gifted and very generous with himself." In reflecting on Doug’s approaching him to do this book, Tutu added, "Doug is also able to make himself vulnerable and has the gift of self-effacement that the great anti-apartheid leader Walter Sisulu had."

Genocide & Clinton:

Michael Sells is a scholar of Islam who had been publishing important and provocative articles describing the role of religion in the war in Bosnia. I approached him to write a book that might bring his views to a wider public. Michael and I worked closely to find a style of writing that would convey the information and the stories that would bring the plight of the Bosnians to life for readers. The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia demonstrated with rigor and passion that the war in Bosnia was not a "civil war fueled by ancient hatreds" as it was often described in the media and by policy makers, but actual genocide by the Christian Serbs and Croats against the Muslim Bosnians. Among other honors, the book received the best book award from the American Academy of Religion. The book received an even higher honor when it was reported in The Washington Post that then-President Bill Clinton had read the book and had given copies to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and other top advisors. According to the article, the book had changed Clinton’s opinion on the region and influenced his decision to stop Slobodan Milosevic and intervene in Kosovo. When the book was conceived, Milosevic was seen as the legitimate head of a nation-state exercising its territorial rights; today he is seen as a war criminal who used his military and media propaganda to destroy centuries of coexistence for personal and national goals.

Michael Sells and I had often talked about the need for a book that would discuss the historic and current civilizational conflicts between Islam and Christianity, of which the Balkans was simply one example. After the terrorist attacks of September 11th, Michael came to me and said that he knew he finally needed to write such a book. He asked me whether I would help him develop the project and find a publisher. We worked together to develop the structure, style, and proposal for the book, entitled Jihad and Crusade, for which Knopf was the winning bidder.

Signs of Intelligent Life:

Linda Acredolo and Susan Goodwyn discovered that many babies spontaneously use a natural sign language to communicate their needs and could be taught additional signs that would help them to express their needs, thoughts, and feelings up to a year before they can talk. Having used Baby Signs with my twin girls, I knew its power and how it opened up a world of communication that could replace tears and tantrums. Their discovery and method had lowered the bar for human communication by a year or more. I approached Linda and Susan about their work and together with acclaimed baby photographer Penny Gentieu we developed a board book series to teach Baby Signs to children that is being published by HarperCollins. Linda and Susan then asked me to revise their classic book to make it more how-to for parents and asked me to oversee the redesign and re-launching of their website. Ultimately, they asked me to help them to start a company, Baby Signs, Inc., and to serve as Interim CEO. I was able to help them identify their vision and draft a business plan for a company that will offer a comprehensive family of research-based educational products. The products will help babies and toddlers develop their ability to communicate, to think, and to feel during the crucial first three years. Perhaps my most important responsibility was hiring key personnel including Baby Signs’ extraordinary CEO, Ron Berry, who is now continuing to build the company.

Frans De Waal is one of the world’s leading primatologists, and I was eager for him to use the depth of his research to shed light on the human primate. I asked him if he might contrast our species to its two closest cousins, the often murderous, power-hungry, and patriarchal chimpanzee, and the less-known peaceful, egalitarian, and matriarchal bonobo. Together we developed the structure and the proposal for a book that would not only reveal the bonobo’s fascinating counter image to ourselves as "killer apes" but what bonobos might tell us about our potential for compassion and altruism. Working as co-agent with Michelle Tessler of the Carlisle & Co. Literary Agency, we sold the book, Our Inner Ape: The Past and Future of Human Nature, to Riverhead books, an imprint of Penguin, after a fierce auction.

21st Century Slavery:

Kevin Bales is the world’s leading expert on "contemporary slavery," a reality that is often hard to accept. We worked together on a book entitled Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, which became a landmark book in its demonstration that the horrors of forced labor are not confined to history. It explained that there are currently over 27 million slaves—people forced by violence or the threat of violence to work with little or no hope of freedom. Kevin’s book helped him to launch a U.S.-based sister organization to Anti-Slavery International called Free the Slaves, which is working around the world to stop slavery and to bring this global problem to public attention. A documentary film based on the book called Slavery: A Global Investigation won two Emmys and a Peabody Award. Their work revealing the use of child slavery in the chocolate industry in West Africa has led to an agreement by the world's leading chocolate manufacturers to end the use of slaves in the production of chocolate.

The Top of the World:

Jamling Tenzing Norgay was the Climbing Leader of the famed 1996 IMAX Everest Expedition. The IMAX movie depicted many of the triumphs and tragedies that were shared with the failed expeditions chronicled in Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. Jamling is also the son of Tenzing Norgay, who together with Sir Edmund Hillary first reached the summit of Mount Everest in 1953. I approached Jamling to see if he would write a book about his journey to the top of Everest, which was for him as much a Buddhist pilgrimage to his father’s soul and memory as it was a feat of physical and psychological endurance. Together with the skillful help of gifted coauthor Brot Coburn, we developed a book that was part adventure and part Buddhist teachings on the nature of life and death called Touching My Father’s Soul: A Sherpa’s Journey to the Top of Everest. The book was introduced by Jon Krakauer and His Holiness the Dalai Lama and climbed The New York Times Extended Bestseller List.

Finding Our Place:

At Home on the Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place, edited by David Barnhill, included essays by Wendell Berry, bell hooks, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gary Snyder, Alice Walker, and Terry Tempest Williams. This book about living in a rooted way on the earth was a powerful and rewarding project for a New York City kid like me who knew more about asphalt than soil. That we can live with native values and with intimacy and connectedness in the city as well as the country was a powerful revelation.

Show Me the Money:

Kendall Webb believed that the power of the Internet could be used to transform philanthropy and bring many more donors to worthy charities. She asked me to serve as Editorial Director and Vice-President of Content for the start-up. Together with a team of extremely talented Internet professionals, we created a philanthropy portal, JustGive.org, which has donated over a million dollars to charity and was named by Forbes Magazine "the best philanthropy site on the web."

Literary agent Scott Waxman asked me to help Mark Allen, six-time Ironman Triathlon World Champion, and Brant Secunda, internationally known shaman and healer who helped him win his championships, to develop a book based on their workshops. Our challenge was to find a structure and a style that was not Western sports or indigenous religion but that drew on both of these worlds to authentically and popularly convey that fitness and well being are about having both a fit body and a fit soul. After a competitive auction, the book proposal we developed was bought by Riverhead, an imprint of Penguin.