The Incredible Power of Serendipity – Highlights of an Uncommon Life

How Serendipity Shaped the Life of Author Boyé Lafayette De Mente

 This is the personal memoir of author Boyé Lafayette De Mente, the 4th of ten children born to poor parents in an isolated valley in the Ozark Hills of southeast Missouri, and raised during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

He went on to have a remarkable life which he attributes to the incredible power of serendipity.

As editor of The IMPORTER magazine in Tokyo in the late 1950s and early 1960s and as the author of numerous pioneer books on the mindset and business practices of the Chinese, Japanese and South Koreans he made  major contributions to the initial rise of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and China as economic superpowers.

He played a leading role in helping to launch the career of Thunderbird School of Global Management alumnae brother Merle Hinrichs who became the largest trade magazine publisher in Asia, a major financial donor to Thunderbird and member of the board of directors.

And he launched the publishing career of Kentucky hillbilly Larry Flynt who achieved great wealth and notoriety as the publisher of HUSTLER magazine and champion of freedom of speech.  [On the day De Mente met Flynt he told his wife that he had just met a 26-year old man who had the intelligence and drive to become president of the United States by the time he was old enough to qualify for the office.]

De Mente’s encounters and relationships with such extraordinary individuals as Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, America’s ranking naval officer during World War II; Akio Morita, co-founder and leading light of what was to become the Sony empire; Toshio Karita, former protocol officer for the Imperial Family of Japan; and Daisetzu Suzuki, Japan’s leading Zen master, plus many more, were experiences he could not have even dreamed about before they happened.

His story is an example of the potential of ordinary individuals to achieve significant things when life presents opportunities and they follow up on them.

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To see a full list of the author’s books go to Amazon.com

I Owe Steve Jobs

 

I Owe Steve Jobs.

Author Credits Writing Success to Outliving His Competitors!

There is a decided advantage to outliving your writing peers, says author Boyé Lafayette De Mente, internationally known for his books on the business practices, cultures and languages of China, Japan, Korea and Mexico,  and on the “business, political and social foibles, failures and idiocies” of Americans.

 Now approaching his 83rd birthday, De Mente published his first book, Japanese Simplified, in 1951 while he was serving in the Tokyo headquarters of the Army Security Agency [ASA], an intelligence branch of the U.S. Army.

 In the mid-1950s he became the editor of the Tokyo-based trade magazine The IMPORTER. His second book, Japanese Etiquette & Ethics in Business, did not come out until 1959. That was followed in 1961 by How to Do Business in Japan and in 1962 by Bachelor’s Japan and The Tourist & the Real Japan—all pioneer works in their fields.

 De Mente retired from salaried employment in 1962, and has since averaged 1.5 books a year for a total of 74 titles—some 50 of which are still in print, including the 8th edition of Japanese Etiquette & Ethics in Business.

 He says that much of his success as an author resulted from the fact that all of the book-writing foreign correspondents and businessmen residents of Asia who were active in the 1930s and 40s have passed on and their books are long out-of-date, and most of the new crop of writers who came along in the 1950s and 60s are also either dead or no longer publishing.

 “A new crop of writers began appearing in the 1970s and 80s but the majority of them have been rewriters rather than authors of original material, particularly those who came from academia,” he added.

 In the 1980s and 90s De Mente summed up the insights he had gained about the mindset and behavior of the Chinese, Japanese, Koreans and Mexicans in a series of “cultural code word” books that explain why they think and behave the way they do.

 The books consist of detailed glossaries of the cultural nuances and uses of several hundred key words in each language—words he says that created and control the traditional etiquette and ethics of the people.

 De Mente maintains that it is key words in the languages of people that program them to think and behave the way they do, and that knowledge of the cultural nuances and uses of these words is essential for understanding them

His primary publishers are McGraw-Hill, the Periplus-Tuttle-Berkeley Publishing Group, Phoenix Books/Publishers—an imprint he himself created in the late 1960s—and over a dozen Asian, Latin and European publishers that have brought a number of his books out in Chinese, Croatian, French, German, Hebrew, Indonesian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

His latest book: HOW & WHY MALE DOMINANCE PLAGUES HUMANITY! – The Ultimate Challenge for Females!

 Authorsonlinebookshop.com  includes a list and synopses of his books, in both digital and print editions, that are available from Amazon.com, Barnes&Noble and other booksellers.