With so much happening in dolphin waters, let’s get right to the news:

SNEAK PEEK AT LEAP!’S UPCOMING FRENCH LOOK
Later this summer, Montreal publisher, Les Éditions de l’Homme, is bringing out a French language edition of my LEAP! book. I’ve just seen the cover design, which looks very sleek, very arty, very inviting . . . and very Québécois, very French! The foreword for the book is being provided by Michèle Carrier and her life-mate and business partner, Charles Boulos (who looks and thinks remarkably like Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot as portrayed by David Suchet when he’s wearing his mustache). This talented pair has been BTC’s French language associates for more than twenty years. By the way, I’m head over heels in love with the French title for LEAP!: L’élan du dauphin. It translates more or less (so I’m told) as “The impulse of the dolphin.” What a wonderful way to describe the dolphinthinker’s penchant for doing “first things now!” L’élan du dauphin will be in bookstores (and up on digital services as an eBook) on August 14, the publisher says.

WHEN DOES AN AUTHOR REALLY LOVE HIS PUBLISHER?
When the greeneye-shade-wearing one has the vision and the cojones to issue a matched set of a writer’s works! The company named above, Les Éditions de l’Homme, is doing just that in planning to issue its third French language edition of my (and Paul Kordis’) Strategy of the Dolphin (La stratégie du dauphin). The eye-catching way that the two covers complement each other makes it clear that the folks at Les Éditions de l’Homme have thought this through very carefully. My hope—theirs, too, obviously—is that there is a new generation of French readers waiting to discover the appeal and usefulness that made “the dolphin strategy” a bestseller in French in a different century. We should know soon! The new edition of La stratégie du dauphin will be in the bookstores on September 18 and on digital services the same day.

TEACHABLE DUST-UP OVER WHEN TO EAT SHARK FOR LUNCH
Before we leave the subject of French-speaking dolphins, I can’t resist telling you about a well-flavored exchange this past week between two members of one of McGill University’s alumni e-mail groups. The exchange was prompted by the posting of a link to my “Thinking Like a Dolphin, Not a Shark” article on the “under30ceo” website.

That led a somewhat peeved alum in the tropics to write, “In the Caribbean sharks get eaten. They are best eaten with lettuce, tomato, coriander, ketchup, tambrand sauce, and other condiments, and in a bake (fried bread). Many North American tourist that are eating shark for the first time this way enjoy it. Businesswise, it is always better to eat your competitor’s lunch than have them eat yours, whether you think like a dolphin or a shark.”

And that led our Montreal colleague, Ms. Carrier (mentioned above), who doesn’t carry a stiletto in her purse for nothing, to post this reply:

Well, [name omitted for privacy], if eating your competitor’s lunch is your only choice and it matters, then have at it. Just hope that there is plenty of lettuce, tomato, coriander, ketchup, tambrand sauce and fried bread available.

A dolphinthinker will first look around to see if there are other, better choices. One of these, possibly:

1. An alliance that makes sense for both parties.

2. A surprise move that expands the playing field for everyone.

3. Something less than a full meal that produces about the same results all around.

4. A better tasting menu elsewhere.

5. A smokescreen that confuses the competition but doesn’t require that anyone be eaten.

6. Moves that reframe the situation so that the competition is confused about what to take a bite out of.

7. Sudden surrender because a longer range strategy suggests avoiding conflict now.

8. Sudden withdrawal because resources are better aimed elsewhere.

9. Sudden withdrawal because you see that you probably can’t win and it’s not worth the cost of losing.

10. Total, all-out war that not only involves eating your competitor’s lunch but his breakfast, dinner and bedtime snack simply because anything less is morally, ethically or rationally unacceptable.

To which I say, “Please pass the ketchup.”

I’M NOT EXACTLY SURE WHAT ALL THIS MEANS YET BUT . . .
The dolphin’s popularity as an aquatic metaphor for desirable new thinking and change skills has always been cyclical. It was an instant smash hit when I first rolled it out in late 1989. The core excitement lasted about two years. Then in the mid-1990s, non-U.S. publishers kept discovering and issuing the work, and there was renewed momentum. After that, I did other things for more than a decade, and interest waned everywhere but Germany, France and Québec. But when the Great Recession of the late 2000s showed no signs of relenting, I felt the time might be right for yet another revival of the dolphin concepts. And the reception given LEAP!, my “sequel” to Strategy of the Dolphin, has been very encouraging.

So is a development that has surfaced in only the past two weeks. Two websites with strong business-oriented readerships have featured articles of mine promoting a shift away from conventional thinking about how to be competitive in business. It pleases me no end that one of these sites is aimed at young managerial minds, this one here. And now a site that makes no apology for its relentless promotion of wealth-building and the pursuit of personal success has just published my article, “Competing At the Next Level and How to Get There.” You can view the piece on “Addicted2Success” here.

Both Cara Murphy, the editor of “under30ceo,” and Joel Brown, the editor of “Addicted2Success,” rushed my pieces into print (one literally overnight), intimating that they felt important new, perhaps even uncharted, waters for their readers were being described. I’d like to think that what I’ve been doing is using an approach that dolphinthinkers are urged to use any time it makes sense in dealing with users of non-dolphin world-views: talk to them in their own idiom to get through the filters of their mindset. Or maybe there are more and more dolphinthinkers and candidates for thinking this way riding today’s turbulent waves. Either way, I’m going to keep offering business- and self-growth-oriented websites a chance to talk the talk in the hope that it will help even more folks walk it.

THERE’S NO QUILL LIKE THAT OF A (SCOTTISH) DOLPHIN SCORNED
You may remember Peter Thomson. He’s one of the dolphinthinkers I profiled in LEAP! Up to now, this is what you’d have found on his highlight reel: risk-taking medic for Her Majesty’s Royal Navy, free-enterprise dentist in the pro-government-medicine U.K., crusader for new dental professionalism in Nepal and outspoken advocate for Scottish independence. And now . . . he’s just become a published, novel-writing satirist. Bitter Together tells (and pokes fun at) the travails of one “Prime Minister Cambourne” [does that remind you of anyone in real life?] who needs a way to sabotage Scottish free-our-country ambitions. A lowly civil servant proposes Operation Cockleshell, and it is no sooner authorized than “the wheels come off.” Bitter Together was being written, says Thomson, about the time of the London Olympics, but since Cockleshell is all about wrecking security at the London Olympics, real events kept interfering with his story telling. One reviewer has characterized Thomson as “a good and powerful writer, with an easy way with words,” and his tale as a “political satire for modern times.” You can order his book here.