Our Audiobook Is Here

Hello! Sara and Mathias here. Our audiobook is now available, and we're excited to finally share it with you, along with some of the backstory around our narrating experience.

We spent a week back in June in Montreal recording the audiobook version of our book, The Intentional Organization, in our own voices. Then we recorded a special podcast episode about the experience once we were home. Bringing the book to audio gave us a chance to return to stories we'd spent years writing and to spend time together doing something new.

We came home with bagels, three new kitchen knives between us, and a word that captures something we've struggled to explain about our partnership: Weggefährte. It means a companion on the journey, and it became a fitting way to think about the week and our work together.

We work across nine time zones, between Los Angeles and Berlin. (Well, except this week, which we call the vortex, when the time changes happen earlier in Europe than in the US, so this week it’s only eight hours, but alas). We've now had a standing weekly conversation on our calendars for eight years, and we try to spend time together in person once a year. We call these gatherings “meeting in the middle-ish,” which gives us a little flexibility with the geography.

Last year, we met in London for a joint keynote and to promote the book. This year, we decided to make recording the audiobook the focus of our gathering. Montreal was somewhere we wanted to explore, and we could both get there without too many flights. One of our goals is no more than two flights each to reach our destination. For Montreal, it was one flight for Sara, and two flights for Mathias. That goal was accomplished.

Prior to arriving, we did a search for audiobook studios, which led us to Studio Loco and its owner, Martin, and after a conversation with him, we felt we'd found our guy. His studio was in an old shoe factory, with beautiful wooden floors and a recording booth in the corner. The booth's outside walls were painted red, so for the next five days, one or the other of us would disappear into what’s well-known (in Canada at least) as the red box.

We wanted to narrate the book ourselves because so much of it comes from our own experiences. We divided the narration so each of us could tell our own stories, sometimes switching readers in the middle of a chapter. Those changes also gave us regular breaks, which we quickly learned to appreciate.

Recording an audiobook takes more physical and mental energy than we expected. We arrived with throat lozenges and throat tea, then added ginger and lemon to the routine. We also had to learn how to pace ourselves, breathe comfortably in front of a microphone, and keep going without rushing toward the end of a page.

Between us, we encountered plenty of challenges. Being conscious of the microphone picking up every breath could make breathing itself feel strangely difficult. English “th” words like “months” and “paths” became tongue twisters, and once we started noticing them, it seemed we'd used them everywhere in the book.

Our careful reading assignments didn't save us from every pronunciation challenge, either. The plan was for Mathias (aka the native German speaker among us) to handle Scharmützelsee, the place where we'd once met for an offsite. That plan turned out to be less carefully executed than we'd thought, which led to a lot of laughter inside and outside the booth.

Martin patiently coached us through the pauses and retakes, and we gradually found our rhythm. Approaching the work with a beginner's mind helped, as did accepting that mistakes were part of the process. By Friday, we'd finished the narration and all of the edits, just as we'd hoped. We should have saved some of the funniest bloopers for a blooper reel. You can just ask us about “alas” the next time you see us.

We spent years writing The Intentional Organization, but reading every word aloud still taught us things about it. Some sentences were definitely too long, and a few passages made us wish we could reach for an editing pen. Reading aloud slows you down and makes you pay attention in a way that silently scanning a page doesn't.

It also gave us moments of feeling proud. Neither of us had spent this much time with the whole book in a while, and returning to the stories reminded us why we'd wanted to write it. We found ourselves appreciating ideas and passages we'd been away from for some time. More than once, we’d look at each other and say, “It’s a good book.”

We started working on the book in 2020, and a lot has changed since then. As we read, we talked about how much the tools people use at work have evolved, particularly with the arrival of generative AI. We also kept noticing how much of leadership still asks us to give useful feedback, collaborate, delegate, understand the people around us, and take responsibility for our impact on them.

Those are things we've had to practice in our own partnership, too. Being in the same place, taking turns telling our stories, and helping each other through unfamiliar work felt like a fitting way to bring this particular book to audio.

We spent about five hours a day at the studio, but there was plenty of Montreal sightseeing around those hours. We stayed in Mile End, rode city bikes to the studio, walked through the neighborhoods, and sat on stoops. We ate a lot of bagels, went bouldering, and made sure to have poutine.

We cooked at our Airbnbs, too, including a meal of German white asparagus with homemade hollandaise. Sara claimed it was the most beige-colored meal she’s ever had. The asparagus had traveled from Germany, properly declared, to revisit a meal from a trip years earlier. Having that history together means even dinner can bring back a story from another time and place.

We also decided to buy what we called partnership knives. If you've read the book or heard our podcast episode about kitchen knives, you'll know we both appreciate a sharp knife. A visit to a wonderful knife shop, named Stay Sharp, gave us the chance to talk with people who knew their tools, choose knives to take home, and add another shared experience to the trip.

We intended to buy one knife each, although we ended up with three between us. At one Airbnb, we found a sharpening stone and sharpened the kitchen knives as well. Our interest in looking after our tools apparently travels with us.

Once the recording was finished, we spent the weekend by a lake outside the city. We'd completed the project we'd come to do, and we'd also had time to talk, cook, walk, and enjoy being together without calculating the time difference. That time mattered as much as getting through the manuscript.

One evening at the dining table, we got talking about how we describe our partnership to other people. It was the kind of question that deserved putting away our devices and giving it some thought. We usually start with “friend,” “business partner,” or “coauthor,” then find ourselves adding more explanation.

We've worked together across companies and projects, started a coaching business, written a book, and made a podcast. Our partnership has spanned company sales and life events, alongside years of weekly conversations. Each description captures part of it, but explaining the whole relationship can take a while.

We wondered whether German might have a word that could hold more of that meaning, and landed on Weggefährte. We liked how “a companion on the journey” made room for friendship and professional collaboration together. It felt like a good description of the week we'd been having, too, with its mix of work, encouragement, meals, and laughter.

After we parted ways at the airport, we had the idea to record a podcast episode about the trip while it was still fresh. Back in our usual weekly Tuesday conversation, on opposite sides of the Atlantic again, we revisited the red box, the pronunciation challenges, the food, and the experience of hearing our book aloud. It was lovely to have another conversation about the week and share some of what went into the finished audiobook.

We're happy to have this new way to share the book with you. Whether you listen while walking, cooking, commuting, or sharpening your kitchen knives, we hope our stories and ideas offer useful company along the way.

The Intentional Organization is now available as an audiobook, narrated by both of us. You can find the audiobook here and hear more stories from the trip in our special podcast episode, “We Recorded Our Audiobook.”

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