Here's the inside story: Peter Senge wrote his own book.

From Across the Board Magazine

In 1989, Peter Senge hired me as a "consulting editor," after he had already completed a draft of the book that would become his bestseller The Fifth Discipline. I made suggestions, helped reframe the outline, contributed a few segments, suggested the title, and reworked the draft. Then he rewrote, on his own computer and keyboard, everything I had contributed. Peter still refers to me as his "writing coach," although I don't remember coaching him much; indeed, I think of that time as my most in-depth exposure to watching a skilled thinker think.

Ever since then, I've made part of my living as a ghostwriter, and I still get credited, from time to time, as the "real author" of the Fifth Discipline. The more I protest that it didn't happen that way, the fewer people seem to believe me. And in the end, how would anybody know, but Peter, myself, and his family (who saw him at work)? In an age when just about every business book is ghostwritten to some extent, the unintended consequence has been to blur the credit for original thought.

Ideally, a ghostwriter is a backroom artisan, crafting and recrafting words. It's an immensely liberating way to learn to write, because the ghost will never be judged (by the public, at least) for the book; only the author will. The ghost is free to experiment, knowing that the author can always cut back anything from the final draft. By translating someone else's talk into written prose, the ghost can take on someone else's persona, and learn to be that person for a while -- a rare privilege indeed. I've been fortunate, in that I've never had to complete a book for an author I don't respect.

And yet, at the same time, ghostwriting also represents an emotionally debilitating way of life. A writer's greatest equity is his or her reputation and backlist, and time spent ghostwriting is siphoned away from building that equity. Therefore, I find myself falling behind my contemporaries who don't ghostwrite. Worse still, when I work as a ghost, I become ghostlike. I always try to stop myself from interjecting my own way of thinking. Instead, I "channel" the authors, writing down the ideas I think they would have, if only they had the time and patience to devote to their thoughts that I do. Most of them, being business consultants and managers, don't have training of philosophers, or the hours to spend in philosophical speculation. Instead, in the manner of speechmakers (which most of them are), they do their philosophizing on airplanes, in the "green room" backstage before a keynote delivery, and at 3 a.m. (when they might wake up and call me).

No wonder the state of management thought is so paltry. I've been reflecting lately about whether the craft of ghostwriting has integrity, and I have (tentatively) come to believe that it does. Most books are collaborative acts to some extent -- as any great editor might testify. At its best, ghostwriting -- like oral history writing -- gives voice to people who deserve to be heard. My greatest tour de forces of ghostwriting have been the Fifth Discipline Fieldbook and its successor, currently in process for Doubleday. Each of these books has more than 70 contributors. About four-fifths of those contributors wrote drafts that were conceived in a tape recorded interview, and born in my word processing program. I rode herd over those pieces, ruthlessly editing them for style and length. Yet I never feel the desire to take credit for them; they do not represent my thoughts. More recently, I used many of the techniques of ghostwriting to co-develop an oral history practice called learning histories; these are, in effect, stories ghostwritten by an entire corporation, trying to describe the significance of some critical effort in its recent past, and learn from that description.

I would prefer, of course, an economy that allowed me to write without depending on ghostwriting for much of my income. And I'd prefer a better, more original range of authors to write for. Unfortunately, when ghostwriting becomes institutionalized in a field like management, even the ghostwriting gets cheaper and cheaper. It becomes easier for lousy philosophers to finish their books without having to hone their ideas in the cauldron of relentless give-and-take with the blank screen, the blank page, or even the ghost-writer's blank tape. Having hired someone to write for them, they can download the task of rewriting on that person as well. And as the standards for writing management books keep dropping, it becomes harder and harder to excel at the craft of creating them.

But why then do management audiences go on buying these books? Why don't they choose books whose authors did not hire "consulting editors" at all? Because management readers are not looking for literary quality, or even philosophy. They seek tactical nuggets and for selling points. They want arguments that will help them make a better case for the things they want to do anyway. (The first huge audience for Reengineering the Corporation was information technology professionals, who had been arguing for years that they should program the entire company's processes to match the way they programmed the company's computers.) A true philosopher shakes up the reader; life is never the same therafter. Only a few rare management books accomplish that aim.

I will probably never stop ghostwriting entirely; aside from the money, there is no more satisfying way to take in someone else's knowledge. But I find myself increasingly impatient with management ghostwriting. I want a field where I can learn something different. As I write this, the New York Times reports that Monica Lewinsky still doesn't have a ghostwriter. My reflex instinct is to write and ask for the job. If she hasn't picked one yet, then her book will probably be the most coveted ghosting job of the next few years, if only because she has the one thing that ghostwriters want most: Access to the hidden mysteries. ©

-- Art Kleiner, art@well.com,