The “Official” Jeff Cox Bio …
JEFF COX works in concert with business executives and consultants to create fiction that brings to life new concepts of organizational improvement. He has written eight works of fiction, published as either business novels or parables. The most recent of these is Velocity, which is about combining Lean, Six Sigma, and the Theory of Constraints to achieve breakthroughs in performance. He has been working independently as a writer since 1981.
And the (Short) Story of My Life . . .
Writing has been my day job all of my career. I began professionally writing at Ketchum, MacLeod and Grove Public Relations (now Ketchum Public Relations) in 1974 as an assistant account executive and within six years, when I was still in my twenties, I was made a vice president. Most of what I did there was write and manage projects.
Ketchum, by the way, was a fantastic learning experience, and I got to do all kinds of things at a young age. I wrote scripts and speeches, worked on annual reports of Fortune 500 companies, managed events, and of course I wrote and produced the more mundane items of PR: press releases, brochures, newsletters, that kind of thing. It was very much a sink-or-swim environment, but I quickly became a first-rate swimmer.
However, and as Fate would have it, I had had since my teenage years a yearning to become a novelist. So in 1981, I quit Ketchum to do just that. Since then, I have been continuously self-employed as an independent writer.
My only regret is that I became a victim of my own success. Immediately after I went out on my own, the clients I had worked with (and even my former employer) came to me with freelance work. And I was too financially insecure to say no. Therefore, many years passed before I had any time to write my own fiction.
Since 1983, when I began working with Eli Goldratt to write The Goal, I’ve done collaborations, writing stories about business and ways to improve it. This appears to be God’s plan for my life, because every time I try to go in in a new direction, I somehow get drawn back to writing another business novel.
Which is fine. The money is good, and the work is worth doing. The novels have made a number of concepts far more accessible and interesting than they otherwise would have been if written as conventional non-fiction. And I’ve made (most years) a decent living and raised a family doing something I truly love to do, which is to write books.
What might have happened if I had turned down the freelance work that kept coming to me back in the Eighties? If I had been more fanatical in my later charges to break away from business writing? Could I have succeeded following the path of the standard fiction writing dream? Who knows. And to some degree, who cares? I don’t anymore.
I have the talent and the skill to write fiction of the caliber that fills bestseller lists. Maybe that sounds arrogant, but there is no doubt in my own mind that it is true. But to make it through the commercial fiction gate, due to publishing realities I know only too well at this point, takes not only talent, it takes incredible persistence and zen-like patience, and frankly it takes a streak of luck. Even if a novelist makes it through that gate, long term success is never guaranteed, and is in fact unlikely. Yet let’s say I did make it through the gate with a mystery novel, followed by a second and a third and so on, and the books did at least reasonably well. How meaningful would that have been, cranking out mystery novels, compared to the business novels I have written?
Honestly, I think the business novels have the edge.