Rich Karlgaard
From the acknowledgements of Late Bloomers: “At the top of the list is Jeff Leeson, whom I think of as this book’s managing editor and co-author. I had worked with Jeff before on a corporate culture book called The Soft Edge. He was enormously helpful in helping organize a bundle of thoughts into a structured narrative and digging up research that would support The Soft Edge theses about why some companies were able to thrive for decades. For Late Bloomers, Jeff was even more involved and helpful. While I am by nature a conceptual thinker and collector of stories and anecdotes, Jeff is an architect. He has a disciplined sense of what works and doesn’t in a manuscript, what’s too loose or tight, what drives the narrative and what derails it, and where research is needed to lend authority to a point. I could have steered Late Bloomers into blind alleys right and left, but Jeff kept it going. He and his wife Rachel now run a high-level publishing consulting service out of Minneapolis called Benson-Collister. If you need the very best professional service of that kind, look them up.”
From developing the 50+ page proposal to collaborating with Forbes publisher Rich Karlgaard on every aspect of the manuscript, Benson-Collister has been involved with Late Bloomers since its inception. Jeff wrote drafts, translated academic research for a general readership, interviewed late bloomers, and successfully transformed Karlgaard’s ideas about late bloomers into a compelling narrative non-fiction book. Sold at auction in a major deal, Late Bloomers is represented by Todd Shuster of Aevitas Creative Management and was published by Crown Currency as their lead Spring title. Rights sales include China, South Korea, Japan, Russia, and Israel.
From the back cover: “A groundbreaking exploration of what it means to be a late bloomer in a culture obsessed with SAT scores and early success, and how finding one’s way later in life can be an advantage to long-term achievement and happiness. Based on several years of research, personal experience, and interviews with neuroscientists and psychologists, and countless people at different stages of their careers, Late Bloomers reveals how and when we achieve full potential–and why an algorithmic acuity in math is such an anomaly in terms of career success.”