The Seed
She peeked tentatively, but with a spark of mischief. She knew she would expand the party, and engulf everything in her path. But first, she had to gain entrance. Ms. Inspiration, the cheeky one. Entrance she gained through a humble idea at a team meeting. "Hey, let's showcase the powerful journeys of the women we have placed?"
At FlexiBees, we have been enabling women professionals to work after a career break or balance their work and lives via flexible working for half a decade. We had witnessed firsthand that what these women were going through was nothing short of phenomenal. We had internalized their stories of struggle and triumph over the last few years and each story made us come back to work the next day with a renewed spring in our step. We wanted to share this privilege of Women's stories with the World, and a Book seemed like the perfect medium to do so.
The Book transcended the themes and teams and soon became FlexiBees’ inspirational and helpful offering to the World. Our vision for the Book grew, as it imprinted itself on our minds.
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The Book would only comprise "Real Stories"
Hence we had to plan utmost care in honoring them with honesty, and sensitivity. We believed realness would play an important role in inspiring others who may be going through similar experiences - which was a primary objective of the Book.
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The Book would be a Tribute to the journeys, and resilience of the Women who made it back to work on their terms
Everything and everyone else (including us) would have to be secondary and referenced only when needed for the Stories. The Women were, and would always be the heroes. -
The Book would offer practical advice to other women, men and families on how these protagonists tweaked the World of work to suit their lives
The Book would be a guide, but "would not teach". It would hold their hand, but would not drag the reader where they did not wish to go. The learning would be embedded in the stories - and each would have her fill, according to her circumstance and aptitude, cognizing for the multiple pathways that were indeed possible for each person to reach her destination.
As creators, we thought we were drawing the boundaries for our Book - but in reality, we were only the instruments, shaping the Form that the Book was already taking. Ms. Inspiration's take-over was complete.
The Soil
With an ambition as lofty as we had for the Book, it was tempting to make it into a year-long project. After all, to do justice to its vision, we would need to get all aspects of the Book near-perfect, working in serial order across the Book publishing value chain. Fortunately for us, there was another competing ambition at play. It was important for us to release the Book for International Women's Day in March. We were at the beginning of January. Nobody whom we took advice from encouraged this schedule. They told us it was simply "not possible". That “one cannot conceptualize, write and publish a book end to end in 3 months. You would need 3 months, with luck on your side to find a publisher alone, after the manuscript was done”. As of then, we had no manuscript, no publisher and did not bother about luck. All we had was a steely resolve and the power of the stories in our hearts.
There were, though, a few assumptions with the well-meaning advice that we got, that did not align with our reality. 1) This was a company project, and we had huge strengths to draw from - most notably the presence of our dedicated team, the passion, and knowledge resident in all of us who have been living our vision for years
2) We had experience with delivering multi-stakeholder, complex projects with deadlines. The Book at the execution level - was just that. A challenge that our team was geared and capable of taking up.
3) We only had to drop the expectation of perfectionism to gather the momentum to move. We were a startup, incubating yet another new idea. We called it our "First Book" - because further editions were obvious. And that set us up for the mindset of experimentation and freed us from the pressure to get everything right. There was bound to be a learning journey, and we had to dip our feet into the soil to start.
With a grand vision, tight timeline and a God-like attitude in place, all we had to figure out was the rest of the details. Like research, writing, editing, designing and marketing the Book. All for the very first time.
(contd. In Part 2)
