A few recollections of my late friend Shel Israel

There are a lot of people, mostly in Silicon Valley, who knew Shel Israel better than I did. But Shel made a positive impression on me and so many others, so I wanted to pay tribute as best I could, now that he’s gone.

In 2006, Shel and Robert Scoble published Naked Conversations: How Blogs Are Changing the Way Businesses Talk With Customers. This book pretty much marked the start of the social media revolution. While blogs (originally, “weblogs”) had existed since the mid-1990s, Shel and Scoble (everyone calls him that) staked out an original position: that blogs were not just a way for individuals to publish idle musings, but a new channel for businesses. From the moment Naked Conversations was published, companies began to think of social media as part of a communications strategy — and one they were ill equipped to use effectively.

Early in 2007, Charlene Li and I, both Forrester analysts, began work on our own book, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. Our hope was to expand the conversation Shel and Scoble had started beyond blogs to encompass a whole new set of social ways to communicate including social networks like Facebook, wikis, and podcasts. Looking back, I arrogantly wanted to treat Shel and Scoble sort of like John the Baptist, opening people’s minds so that we could emerge Jesus-like to transform the world with our book.

In the run-up to the publication of our book in 2008, I made a blog post about two types of bloggers, purists (focused on pure blogging and immersion in the social web) and corporatists (focused on promoting corporate goals). I cited Shel as an example of a purist.

To say Shel took offense at that is an understatement. It started a minor kerfuffle in the blogging world with all sorts of people weighing in on their blogs.

Soon after this I came to San Francisco to join Charlene and formally launch Groundswell. More than a hundred people came to our launch party, including Shel. And he took me aside to warmly welcome me to the world of the social media cognoscenti and to tell me, as emphatically as possible, that I’d somewhat insulted him with my blog post and I’d better not make that mistake again.

So our friendship began with an argument. But that argument and the friendship that followed will tell you two important things about Shel. First, he cultivated a broad and sincere collection of friends, and nearly everybody in that circle felt warmly about him. We loved Shel because Shel loved us; he was always ready to connect with any of us around the things that were important to us.

The second thing to know about Shel is that he was passionate about finding out the truth, boiling it down to essentials, and telling people about it in the most engaging way possible. This is what made Shel an author’s author. It also meant that if you were working with him (or arguing with him), that discussion was going to be about principles and facts. There was plenty of passion, too, but he brought a journalist’s soul to the task of explaining the world.

Editing Shel

Shel and I interacted from time to time during my visits to the Bay Area and his to Boston. But then there came a moment when he needed my help. After two books on his own and another with Scoble, he was working on a major new work, a book on virtual reality and artificial intelligence. This was in 2015, well in advance of the current AI craze. Shel’s favored editor had become unavailable or he’d had a falling out, I don’t recall which, so he hired me to edit the book.

As usual with Shel and Scoble’s books, Scoble was the wild idea generator, and Shel was the one gathering the supporting research, wrangling the content, and of course, writing the text.

My relationship with the people I edit is an intimate one. We are, after all, talking about the author’s intellectual creation, and my job is to tell that author not just what’s wrong, but why, how to fix it, and which of their psychological flaws have led them to create something so imperfect.

What I learned from working with Shel was that he had a unique genius that combined the personal and the intellectual. His prose and storytelling were excellent. He had a tendency to write sentences without verbs in them or where he’d clearly skipped ahead to the next idea without completing his thought. But the measure of an author is not in the perfection of their first draft, it is in the quality of their thinking and in their ability to respond to criticism with something inspiring. In this case, it was more complicated because of the presence of a coauthor, Robert Scoble, with whom I had little significant interaction — Shel managed everything directly with me.

There were two results of all of this. First, we had a blast working together and Shel, along with Scoble, deserves the credit for creating a first-rate book, The Fourth Transformation: How Augmented Reality and Artificial Intelligence Change Everything.

And second, even after a contentious editorial relationship, we stayed very friendly. I respected Shel because of his skill and intellect, but he was just a fun person to interact with. He told me I was the best editor he’d ever worked with, and that is a compliment I will cherish forever.

Shel died yesterday as a result of injuries sustained five weeks ago when a car ran him down in Florida, where he and his wife Paula have lived for the last few years. In the wake of his passing, I’ve now read dozens of posts from all sorts of people whose lives, like mine, intersected with his. Most of those posts included photos of people with their arms around Shel, smiling, because that was his natural state of being.

He was a nice guy. It said so on his business card.

But he was also a terrific author. Ask any of his millions of readers.

It surprises me not at all that the GoFundMe that Paula set up when he was injured — and which is still active, helping Paula to deal with the remaining medical expenses and end-of-life challenges — is bringing so much generosity out in people. We all have warm feelings with no place left to the put them.

I wish the world could have had him around a little longer, because he enriched us all.

I’ll miss you, Shel. Thanks for the time you spent with us.