The consultant leans closer to me to tell me a little secret. “I already know what I want my book to be like. I want to write like this.” They reach into their briefcase or portfolio and start to pull out a book. I already know what’s coming. It’s going to be a book by Jeffrey Fox.

Because it seems everybody wants to write like Jeffrey Fox.

The problem is, as I often explain to a prospective author, only Jeffrey Fox can write like Jeffrey Fox. It’s not a gimmick, or a style you can pick up, or a secret that once I tell you how it’s done, you can do it, too.

The real secret about Jeffrey Fox is that no one thinks like Jeffrey Fox.

I know this because I worked with him on his first book, How to Become CEO that was a bestseller for Hyperion. When Jeff sent me the complete manuscript it is was way less than a hundred pages. CEO was made up of short pieces, all right to the point about what it takes to succeed in business.

I could have told him we needed to flesh it out, or tell more stories. Maybe he should prove why everything he said was really so. But I refrained. I told him my gut was we should leave it alone — it would either be a huge bestseller or not get published at all. In my proposal I framed Jeff as the new Machiavelli, explaining to the princes of the 21st century how the business world really worked.

Jeffrey Fox’s twelfth book comes out this week — How To Be A Fierce Competitor, What Winning Companies and Great Managers Do In Tough Times. The title is kind of funny, since for Fox, we’re always in tough times. You can never let up, never sit back on your haunches, never get comfortable with success. A smarter, better more aggressive competitor always lurks around the corner. It was true in How to Become CEO, true in How To Become a Rainmaker, and true in these Tough Times.

The new book is comprised of 60 Chapters. You could read it in a sitting, or more likely, a flight from New York to Chicago. And as with every Jeff Fox book and every Jeff Fox page, you might wish it was printed on only one side of each page, so you could take the entire book apart and paste the pages all over your office and even your bathroom. This is stuff you want to remember and use and share with your colleagues every day, because there is no way you can follow Fox’s advice and not succeed in business and in life.

Now for those who aspire to write like Jeffrey Fox, I lied about there are no secrets. In fact, I’m going to share a few Jeffrey Fox How To Write secrets direct from the horse’s mouth: Keep it simple. If you can find an extra word, kill it. Tell the truth. If you don’t know what the truth is, don’t write. Accept nothing from common wisdom without giving it the piñata test. Repeat 60 times. Publish.

Wow. Volkswagen wants us. Well VW, you’ve got our attention. Our phone lines are open, and come tomorrow morning one of us (either Volkswagen or Agency for Social Media) will be picking up the phone and sorting out the time differences between Tiburon and Wolfsburg.

We’re ready right now. VW, we’ve got a strategy for your social media and a way to integrate the new media with your existing plans. We’ve got ways to build VW communities around the globe, build viral interest for new products, manage your tweets at major events, keep your Facebook pages magnets, and bring new and old customers back to your dealers when it’s time to swap wheels. And thanks to our relationship with another client, accolo, we can staff faster and better in any language and any place than anybody else on the planet.

We’ll be ready for our meeting even if you want to meet us at 9:00 AM in person tomorrow morning in San Francisco. We’ll pack the ASM top team into Max’s GTI and show up in a real driver’s car.

We’re reposting her piece here:

Joanne’s Sales Blog: Back in the Black

The lesson? Humor moves almost as fast as emergencies. But funny is in the eye of the beholder and can easily backfire and offend.

iTablet Beta Tester Breaks Embargo

Recently I was given just 24 hours to explore a first production build of the Apple iTablet — and here are my first impressions and discoveries. First, it’s more like an iPhone than a MacBook. The operating system depends on gestures, and expands the vocabulary. Your hand is going to be dancing.

Second big news: it’s not just an application platform and full-color reader and media player. It’s also a dual camera and, yes, read this twice, a phone. And therein lies a tale. For those whose habits have been formed around their iPhones, be very, very careful when your iTablet rings for the first time. That urge to whip the thing with its ginormous 10 inch screen up to your ear is going to play havoc with your eye. In the small group of folks I ran into who were returning their demo versions, most of us had nasty shiners.

Apple assures us that final production versions will come with training corners — foam wedgies that will soften the blow until the user gets used to answering the giant device. And the second mod will be a catcher’s mitt-like webbing on the back of the iTablet so you can one hand it.

Killer apps? Try this — for those who will want to mount the iTablet high on their dashboard, this thing is going to block your view. So Apple has come up with the brilliant iDrive. The camera on the back side stays live and you basically can see right through your iTablet, like a virtual window. A second camera, imbedded invisibly in the screen, can provide help in backing up.

When you’re not in your car, the embedded cameras creates iMirror, and one of the coolest apps we’ve seen so far is iTrim. Male or female, select your hairstyle from dozens of possibilities, and then iTrim gives you cut by cut directions so you can do it yourself. You might need a little help for the back and top, or you can sync up two iTablets and put them on the Infinite Barbershop Mirror setting.

Now with all that extra screen area to dance your hand on, Apple has greatly expanded the gestures it understands. First, there’s the Full Palm Down. Just spread out your hand and plant it on the screen. Whatever program that’s currently running will screech to a halt. Flip your hand over and give it the Brush Off, and the program will go away. Do it several times and the screen will clear. Then there’s the Fist Bump. Closed fist means ‘Yes.’ Or Agree, or Continue, Install, or ‘Can I have some more, please?’

Finally, all of publishing has been praying that the iTablet will be a Kindle killer and free the publishing world from the threat of world domination by Amazon. Success may depend on whether people will want the reading part of their life to be as easily interrupted as everything else in their world. When your book can hurl e-mails at you, ring your phone, cut your hair and even show you who’s sneaking up behind you, some may not find that to be the ideal reading environment.

Then there’s the concern about the infantilism that permeates Steve Job’s attitude toward culture. “People don’t read anymore,” is one of his brilliant observations. On iTunes, all music has become a “song.” Verdi’s Requiem Mass is downloadable as a bunch of songs. For an entire generation, a Beethoven symphony is now four songs. This is surely a crime against humanity of some sort.

So take the same attitude and apply it to books. And guess what? You aren’t going to be buying a ‘book’ on the iTunes store. You’re going to be buying a ‘story’ one chapter at a time, whether it’sWind in the Willows or Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, everything is going to be just a chapter in a story.

The good news is the color is great. You can zoom in for spectacular detail. And when you check in to that “mirror” function you’ll be able to track the progress of your shiner.