Salman Rushdie said yes! Sadly, it was five years too late.

A little history: From roughly 1989 to 1998, author Salman Rushdie was actively in hiding because of an Iranian fatwa against him. During that time, he occasionally gave interviews—but always in secret, with no public notice.

Which is how, one Tuesday in 1998, I found out that Salman Rushdie had done an interview with a KING-TV news reporter two days earlier…on the set of my TV show, Almost Live!

WHAT A MISSED OPPORTUNITY!

If only I had known!

I mean, the promo writes itself, doesn’t it?

“Hi, I’m author Salman Rushdie. I can’t tell you where I’ll be this Saturday at 11:30pm, but I can tell you what I’ll be doing: watching Almost Live! on KING-TV!”

We’d done funny promos before with other celebrities: Michael Jordan, Davy Jones of The Monkees, Terry Jones of Monty Python.

This would have been fabulous.

But I didn’t know he had been there.

Missed opportunity.

Fast forward to 2003. The University of Michigan.

I’m at a private reception for Salman Rushdie. (My sister, who taught there, had an “in.”)

I’m introduced to Salman, we chat for a few minutes, and then I casually (and by “casually” I mean awkwardly) recount the promo idea I’d had five years before. I finish by saying, “So…is that something you would…”

“In a heartbeat!” he said, before I’d even finished.

Salman Rushdie is a performer at heart, with a wicked sense of humor.

If only I’d known he’d been in the building.

The problem wasn’t a lack of creativity—it was a lack of connection.

Rushdie was on our set, and we never knew.

How many great ideas inside organizations meet the same fate because departments don’t talk, or information gets stuck in silos?

Innovation thrives where communication does.

The more connected we are, the more creative we become.

As I say in my keynotes, “It’s all about connecting dots!”