Steve Piersanti: President and Publisher of Berrett-Koehler Publishers

Want a peek behind the scenes at a book publishing company that's out to make the world a better place, one book at a time? Well here's a podcast for you.

If you find yourself drawn to books about ways to improve your life, your work, and the world at large, chances are you have some books published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers on your bookshelf. Berrett-Koehler is an independent publishing company whose books promote positive change on an individual, organizational, and societal level.

I paid a visit to Steve Piersanti, Berrett-Koehler's founder, President and Publisher, on a recent trip to San Francisco. While I was there, I had a chance to get a glimpse of an "author day," when the author of a soon-to-be-launched book comes in to the office for a day of connecting with all those involved, from book design to marketing.

I was really impressed with both the company's philosophy of business and the way Piersanti's values have been such a strong beacon in his career path.

Listen to this podcast and learn:

• How Piersanti turned lemons into lemonade after standing up for his values and getting fired in the process.
• How Berrett-Koehler has built success on a collaborative, stakeholder approach to doing business.
• Why Piersanti thinks a solid understanding of your values is a key to success.
• Piersanti's advice for non-fiction authors.

Details:

Click here to listen or save the mp3:
Curt Rosengren's M.A.P. Maker Podcast: Steve Piersanti

Length: 21:30

Enjoy!

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Click below (if you're on the main page) or scroll down (if you're on this post's page) for the transcript of this podcast.

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Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst ^TM

 

Hello, and welcome to Curt Rosengren’s M.A.P. Maker Podcast. I’m Curt Rosengren, and my focus is helping people create careers that energize and inspire them. It’s all about answering the question, how do you put your passion to work to make a difference that inspires you, in a way that lets you thrive.

In this series, you will find insights and inspiration from thought leaders and trailblazers – people who are crafting a life of Meaning, Abundance, and Passion.

Today’s podcast features Steve Piersanti, Founder, President and Publisher of Berrett-Koehler Publishing, a San Francisco-based company whose books promote positive change on an individual, organizational, and societal level.

Piersanti’s first job out of college was as an ad copy writer with Jossey-Bass Publishers. He stayed for thirteen years, eventually serving as the company’s president. From there, he went on to found Berrett-Koehler.

His publishing career started quite by accident while he was still in college. After hearing a discussion in an honors program about the lack of student scholarship, he decided to launch a student scholarly journal.

He soon discovered that, with a monthly publishing schedule, he had bitten off more than he could chew. Between the magazine, his classes, and his job, something had to give.

So we worked all summer getting the first issue out in September, and by the time we hit that we realized the next issue was due to press, and it ended up being a full time job, just trying to run this monthly scholarly journal, or magazine. And I ended up having to drop all my classes, because I just couldn’t keep up with my classwork and run this magazine. I was also working, trying to support myself, so I just couldn’t do everything.

Dropped all my classes and was busy publishing this, an issue a month, and then I was shocked when five or six months after I dropped all my classes I lost my scholarship. I had a full ride scholarship, and I was a dropout. I had violated the terms of this contract, and I was thinking, wait a second, this doesn’t seem quite right. But I realized that I was having more fun, and learning more than anything I was doing in any of my classes, and so that’s what I really ought to go into was publishing. I did manage to get some credit for this experience, and took some independent study classes and graduated even though I lost my scholarship.

But I decided I should be going into publishing and then I started looking around for publishing jobs, ended up taking one at Jossey-Bass Publishers in San Francisco – this was 1977. I started out as an entry level advertising copywriter, and ended up becoming a marketing director, and then an editor and an editorial director, and finally moved into general management and ended up being president of Jossey-Bass, left there in 1991, and founded Berrett-Koehler in 1992.

At the heart of building Berrett-Koehler was a determination to take a different, more collaborative approach than the one typically seen in the publishing industry.

Well, Jossey-Bass was acquired in 1989 by Robert Maxwell who was a media baron, chief rival to Rupert Murdoch at the time. He at the same time acquired McMillan Publishing Company and he made Jossey-Bass a division of McMillan. So we were now reporting to a New York company, my boss was in New York City, and I quickly found out – I was the CEO of Jossey-Bass at this time. I quickly found out that the only thing that mattered was what the corporate office in New York City said.

They were Johny-come-lately’s, they had only been involved with the company for a few months, and they had added zero value to the company. There was nothing that they did or had done that created any value in terms of our success as a publ – we were already a highly successful publishing company. Very profitable, very high reputation, quality work. And we had authors that had been with us from the beginning. We had employees who had been with us from the beginning. We had suppliers we had been working with from the beginning.

Nothing else mattered. Only the directive from the corporate office. Something was wrong with that picture. At that point I realized that the model for a publishing company in particular, or corporations in general, something wasn’t right.

So in starting Berrett-Koehler, the objective was to create a company where all of the stakeholders who contributed value to the company all had more of a role, an involvement in the running of the company, in the decisions about the company, in the ownership of the company. In all aspects of the company. So that’s what we’ve tried to do with Berrett-Koehler, where our ownership is spread out among all of our different stakeholder groups – employees, authors, service providers, suppliers, sales partners, colleagues in publishing – and where there’s high involvement, for example of authors in decisions about their books.

For example, the author day that you’ve just come to is an example of that. This whole day – what you’ve seen is just a lunch, but actually the whole day is devoted to launching the book. And so it starts out with editorial meetings, then designer production meetings, then lunch where the author speaks to the entire staff, and then sales and marketing meetings, and then more editorial meetings. And the objective is to make it a more collaborative process, and more of a balance of power an involvement among all the parties. So that was the concept of founding Berrett-Koehler, and it’s worked out very well.

He sees numerous benefits to that collaborative approach.

Well, it’s a better experience for authors in the sense that they – many authors, if you talk to authors, probably nine out of ten of them have big issues with their publishers, or they’re very unhappy with their publisher. That’s much less the case with Berrett-Koehler.

The authors will tell you that they’re treated like nuisances. One best-selling author told me that he was treated by his publisher as though he were a criminal. And it’s not that publishers are bad people, or they’re incompetent, or anything like that. It’s just that the structures that are set up, that are so just publisher-centric, instead of giving authors more involvement, more of a role, more of a say, really drives it that way. Plus the sheer volume of work, the sheer amount that you’re trying to keep on top of.

So in our case, where we put so much emphasis on creating structures and attitudes and mechanisms for having a more author-friendly publishing company, it pays off in terms of the authors’ feeling better about the relationship, and it pays off in terms of their being a lot more communication, which leads to good marketing follow-up happening. It leads to better quality, we believe, in the publications. It leads to more involvement by the community of the publisher and the authors all working together to get the books out in the marketplace.

The company’s collaborative philosophy came first, and the company’s editorial focus developed naturally after that.

Well, of course, the original focus was the stakeholder model, or the stewardship model, that the company needed to be operated in the interest of all the stakeholder groups. And the role of the management was to be stewards, accountable to and acting in the interest of all the stakeholder groups. We found very early on that the kinds of books that we were most attracting and that we were most attracted to were books that had a similar sort of mindset. And so the orientation of the company came first, and then the publishing orientation followed quickly thereafter.

We believe that, in order to create a world that works for all, change is needed at all levels. At the individual level, at the organizational level, and at the societal level. And so we publish in each of those areas. We publish books on personal growth, and individual development, and careers, and work that are individual, which we call BK Life. We publish books on organizational change, and management, and leadership, and socially responsible business, which are called BK Business. And we publish books on societal change, global and national change, which are called BK Currents. And so those are the three main focuses of our publishing agenda. All of them are informed by this creating a world that works for all.

So even the books on the individual development, the question there is not just how you can make the most money, or have the most fun. It’s always, how can you live a life that’s in keeping with your values and beliefs? How can you live a life that is going to be good for the world, and that’s going to support integrity in your life and doing things that are good for the world?

Same with organizations. The focus is not just on how you can clobber the competition, or rack up bigger and bigger profits. It’s always, how can the organization at the same time be a global citizen, practice ethics and responsibility in your business, and be good for your employees and your customers. It’s always this broad issue of every level, looking out for the interests of the individual and the organization and society.

He sees multiple levels of positive impact coming from Berrett-Koehler’s work.

One level of impact is simply publishing good books that have provocative ideas in them, that have path-breaking ideas, that have new ideas, and getting them out in the world, and those books having an impact on hundreds, or thousands, or tens of thousands of organizations, individuals, managers, entrepreneurs, activists and so on. The books themselves are a major part of the impact.

Second, simply by our trying to do things differently, all the people that we interact with, that we touch in some way, whether it’s authors, or service providers, or suppliers, or customers, we have some impact simply by doing things differently with them. Setting up a different model.

And the third thing is we hope that our company is a model or an inspiration for others that may hear this podcast, or may read about us in magazine articles like the Motto article, and may choose to adopt some of the things that we’re doing. We don’t view our distinctive practices as proprietary. We would love it if all of our competitors started copying what we’re doing. We don’t have any fear that that will actually happen, because most, they’re just too different, or don’t have the culture to do it, or something. But we would love it if part of our impact was that hundreds of other companies started copying us.

For Piersanti, sticking to his deeply held values has been a central theme woven throughout his career. He points back to an early experience as one that started shaping that path. A few months into his first job out of college, the company he worked with moved offices. His boss decreed that everyone needed to come in on a Sunday to get their offices in order so there would be no downtime on Monday. Being forced to work on the weekend is never welcome news, but for Piersanti it presented a deeper dilemma.

Now this was a problem for me, because of my religious convictions I don’t work on Sunday. I never have. And so because of my religious beliefs, I could not do this. Told the boss I couldn’t do it. He was extremely upset. Felt that it was an act of insubordination.

And here I am, the new kid on the block, first full time job out of college, and vulnerable with a wife and a child, in a strange city a long ways away from where I was going to school. But I made a decision, you know, I have to stick by my values. I have to stick by what I believe, and so I just didn’t comply. I didn’t come in on Sunday. In fact what I did do was I came in early Monday morning, and because I was new I didn’t have all that much stuff. I hadn’t accumulated as much as a lot of other people, and I was able to get up and running within a couple of hours. But it was a critical decision point for me, of what was going to drive me? Was I going to stick to my values and beliefs or not?

And so over the years, there were many other points where I had to stick to what I believed in to show integrity. But that was kind of the first one to set the course for me.

That early decision to do what he believed was right set the tone for a values-based approach to decision making that would ultimately spark the events that let him to found Berrett-Koehler.

Later on – I mentioned about when Jossey-Bass became a part of McMillan Publishing Company. In 1989, McMillan, at the instruction of Robert Maxwell, sent out a – I got a call from my boss in New York City saying that there was a corporate-wide workforce reduction going on, and that all units within McMillan were required to reduce their head count by 10%.

At that point Jossey-Bass had sixty-eight employees, and he told me that we would be required to reduce our head count to sixty. For a lot of the New York units it wasn’t such a big deal because they had so much turnover that if they just didn’t fill open positions, they would hit their head count target.

We however had almost no turnover, so we would have had to lay off eight people. There was no rhyme or reason for this. The company – we had just finished a record breaking year in which our sales went up 22%, our profits went up 46%. We had already been approved previous to this happening to hire eight people, and now we were being told, no, you have to lay eight people off.

I refused to do that, and we met with our management and decided we just could not go along with this, told New York this, they sent out my boss and the VP of Human Resources to meet with us to work out how were we going to cut out these people. We sent them back empty handed. Wouldn’t agree to it.

Then I got summoned to New York City. I met in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel with Mr. Robert Maxwell, who had the entire floor, and with the President of McMillan Inc. and the President of McMillan Publishing, who were three layers above me in the hierarchy. My boss was missing. They just skipped him. And they gave me repeated ultimatums that I had to carry out this work force reduction or resign, or I’d be fired. They made no argument that it made any sense for our company. They just couldn’t have this little California unit defying the corporate order.

I politely said I just could not do that. It was not the right thing to do. It would not be good for the company. Flew back to California. They arranged for my boss and the VP of Human Resources to come the following Wednesday. I thought maybe they would come and try and work out some kind of compromise. Instead, they showed up at 2:00 and I was immediately fired and out the door. The strength to take that kind of position started much earlier, with the decision I made earlier in my career.

The grapevine started working very quickly. The next day I started getting phone calls from people who’d heard about this and were very unhappy about it, from authors, and suppliers that Jossey-Bass had worked with, encouraging me to start a new publishing company and offering to support it in different ways. Authors offering to send their book projects. A group of suppliers got together and offered to provide much of the infrastructure needed to start a publishing company. Just on the basis of, not even a handshake, just over the phone, offering to provide credit and so on. That’s how Berrett-Koehler actually got started was all these people calling to encourage me to do so and offering support.

When I asked Piersanti what had been instrumental in his own and the company’s success, he pointed once again to values.

Well, I think the number one thing is having a fairly clear set of values and commitments of what do I stand for. What’s my view of what matters in life, and the world, and in business? And then sticking with it through thick and thin. Berrett-Koehler as a company, because of the changes and challenges in the publishing industry, as well as mistakes that I and others made in the company at times, various business mistakes, we’ve had many challenging times too. But through all of that we’ve tried to stick to our values, and have done a pretty good job of it. And not resorted, even when we were struggling, to blaming other people, or creating a culture of distrust, or one of fault-finding or that sort of thing. So I think the biggest key has really been clarity of what you’re trying to do in the world and what your values are and then sticking with it even when it’s not going as well as you would hope.

I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to ask him if he had any advice for today’s aspiring authors. He offered his take on the non-fiction publishing world.

Well, most of the sales today are going to the authors’ own communities and to the publisher’s community. In these realms of non-fiction, serious books, there’s not much of a general market any more. The markets have become too glutted, saturated, and so most of the sales are happening to the author’s own community. So the advice is really for an author to be a) building up communities of people that they work with, that they’re associated with, that they belong to, that know them, that they know the people in the community, and then publish books that are connected to those communities. Don’t try to publish something that’s outside of your community.

After I did this interview, I came home and started looking at my bookshelf. I was amazed to see how much of what I am drawn to buying is published by Berrett-Koehler. The books they publish have an inherent sense of hope and possibility.

I asked Piersanti where he finds his sense of hope.

Well, one answer is simply my personal religious beliefs. But beyond that, it’s getting to know, working with, benefiting from a lot of other people who are talented, intelligent, deeply committed to what they’re doing, and doing wonderful things. Simply seeing so many people who are doing good, whether they are the Berrett-Koehler staff members, or authors, or people we’re partnering with, or customers…it’s just the people.

Thank you for listening to Curt Rosengren’s M.A.P. Maker Podcast. If you’d like to know more about Berrett-Koehler Publishers, please visit www.bkconnection.com. And if you’d like to know more about how I can help you create a career that energizes and inspires you, please visit me at www.passioncatalyst.com .