About Jack and the Just Jack White Papers

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Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

                                                                                                                                                          Ferris Bueller

Since I was pretty young, I’ve found that writing helped me to connect little pieces of learning together into a lesson. Like Ferris from the movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” I wanted to stop occasionally and transform some things I had observed and learned into a permanent lesson I could carry forward.  Once I had the lesson articulated on paper, I threw it away; the learning had been captured so I no longer needed the paper. Then, during the initial months of Covid in June of 2020, I wrote a paper on the impact Covid might have on how we would work years into the future.  That paper was intended just for me to get clear on what we should do as business leaders to prepare the new work environment and habits that I thought were coming. But the paper “got out” to others and I received some random emails asking for more papers and suggesting I not dispose of the papers anymore. So, that summer I started to keep them and now, a few years later, there are more than 30 of them and the number is still growing. To a great degree, they reflect not just my learning but also the learnings of my business partner and my teams.

Why the papers instead of a book? Because I think most non-fiction books are way too long. They can make their point in a few pages, not 300 or so. Or they try to make too many different points to fill the pages.  So, most of these papers are only a few pages and each focuses on a singular topic.

Finally, why the name “Just Jack”. There is a great Picasso quote: “The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.” I have enjoyed so much the lessons and learning that life has given to me. Perhaps capturing them is my one gift. And, if so, I want to share them so that hopefully, others can learn them without the cost and pain from the mistakes I have made in the process of the learning. Publishing them over my name felt like a lack of humility to me so I used the name that everyone called me when I was a kid, Jack. And the word “Just” was added because I’ve long believed and preached we should be “just” the best person we can be, never the title we may hold. In that sense, I am “Just Jack”.

Hope you enjoy the papers.

Jack