The Berkun Blog
Management, design, and the making of good things.
Book reviews: Engines of ingenuity & How Invention begins
October 31st, 2006
Sometimes good books sneak up on you - you enjoy reading them, but their full value doesn’t surface until afterwards, when in the days and weeks that follow you find yourself thinking back on how the book changed your mind. Engines of ingenuity by Historian and NPR host John Lienhard, fits this profile.
The book is comprised of short essays on the history of technology and invention, largely from his NPR show by the same title (transcripts onlne). These essays read well, cover many famous bits of technology history and offer insights and fresh perspectives on some stories I thought I knew well. Highly recommended.
Lienhard’s new book, How invention begins picks up where EOI leaves off. This time he looks deeper into how inventions develop, exploring how often desire, and not true necessity, led to many of the major technoligical innovations of our past.
It’s written in a more challenging style than EOI: longer pieces, more rigorous history, and covers less well known territory. For that reason I recommend EOI or Leinhard’s short NPR pieces first, and if you enjoy those, they’re excellent introductions for How invention begins.
Good ideas/innovations that lost?
October 30th, 2006
One myth that surfaces in innovation history is the faith that good ideas win: if a technology, product or concept is truly better than the status quo it will eventually win because of its goodness.
Many industry veterans love to tell me how often this faith has been broken for them.
But when I ask for examples of good ideas that lost - products that should have won but were out-marketed, out-politicked, out strategized, or lost for other reasons - very few names come up.
In my innovators survey and interviews I’ve heard the same four:
- QWERTY vs. DVORAK
- Beta vs. VHS
- Windows vs. Macintosh
- U.S. Street cars vs. automobiles
Can anyone name other examples of good products, or good ideas that lost, despite being “superior” to their competitors?
It’s fine if you dont have hard evidence, I can track that down myself. (And yes, I know defining goodness is entirely subjective - I’m leaving it all up to you)
This week in ux-clinic: managing sensitive designers
October 30th, 2006
This week in the ux-clinic discussion group:
I’m managing a small team of relatively young designers. They’re smart and sassy, but have trouble being told no - as in “no we can’t build this”, “no it’s too expensive” or “no there are more important things than this idea.”. They basically shut down if the rest of the team doesn’t unanimously swoon over their ideas: they don’t argue, complain or even put up a stink in private. But they do shut down and stop doing their best work, or any work at all.
In our org’s culture they need to be able to push back, but more importantly, not give up because someone doesn’t follow their thinking on the first try. What should I be doing to help them along?
I’ve tried the basics, but there seems something very personal/sensitive about their design work to them and I don’t know how to help them get past it.
- Managing SDS (Sensitive designer syndrome)
This week in pm-clinic: Innovate or die
October 30th, 2006
This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum:
Is innovation for innovation’s sake a good idea? I think not, but my new VP has it in his head that our entire organization needs to be more innovative - despite his lack of clarity about what that means. So all of the team leads (including myself) are like a pack of wolves, pacing and racing around our projects.
New ideas are flying all over the place (reorgs, new technologies, new directions), but progress on existing projects has stalled, morale is volatile (rising and falling daily), and there is a shortage on meaningful decisions about why we’re changing things, or how those changes will be made.
How can I help my VP sort out what innovation means? (Or is this some kind of leadership game where he’s testing us by watching our responses)? Or more cynically, protect my team and existing projects from this chaos until it passes?
- Innovate or die
Start-up camp: Nov 2&3 Mountain View
October 26th, 2006
I know a bunch of you readers are in start-ups, or hopefully soon will be - Well, here’s the event for you. Start-up Camp.
The rundown:
- It’s free. November 2nd & 3rd.
- It’s in Mountain View, CA.
- It’s an unconference.
- It’s being facilitated by Kaliya Hamlin, an unconference pro.
Start-up camp Registration and general info. Have fun.
How to make an innovative book? (help wanted)
October 25th, 2006
It’d be daft to write a book about innovation without some effort to make the book itself an innovative thing. So I’m asking you, wise blog readers, for some help: How can a book, in how its designed, written, marketed, or something else, be an innovative thing?
Some thoughts:
As I’ve covered elsewhere, innovation means something new that’s good, or better than before. I’m not looking for fads or change-for-change-sake gimmicks: but I do want good, clever things you’ve seen other books do that should be emulated, or new ideas you’ve always thought should be part of what a good book is.
Book design: Aren’t most bibliographies a snorefest? Are there things about footnotes that drive you nuts? Isn’t there a smarter way to help people find other resources? Either in the book itself, or connecting the book to the web? Kawakasi made the cover a design competition (an idea I like) - what else has been done, or should be done?
Marketing: I did two no-frills low radar book tours to support artofpm. Is there a better way to use my time on the road besides the standard lecture, Q&A, drinks routine? Especially on a budget? Things more interactive, more fun, and more memorable? What’s the best book related event you’ve ever been too? The best book marketing you’ve ever seen?
Book writing: I’ve been doing my best to use this blog and open interviews (still open!) to help bring people into the process. But as I head into draft two, are there other new ideas I should be trying? Something I missed or you heard about that might work for this project?
Speak up! - now is the time to help a book be all it can be. Please pass this link on to all your designer and marketing friends :)
IDEA 2006 Conference: summary
October 25th, 2006
I’m finally figuring out that small conferences are better in almost every respect than large ones. You can easily find people, get access to the speakers, single track makes it a shared experience, and everyone is chill and informal in a way impossible at 500 or 1500+ person events.
(Wait: was the conference itself an experiement in designing large datasets? hmmm).
The IDEA 2006 conference worked for me on several levels:
- Venue/Event synchronicity. It’s so rare that venues match their event. The Seattle library was the perfect place for this.
- High intellectual space between sessions. The topics ranged so much that I felt my brain working to fill the gaps and make new connections. No one took the topic (large spaces) too literally, giving me lots of room to fill things in on my own.
- Speaker diversity. It went from Park ranger, to librarian, to data mappers, to web entrepreneurs: awesome range of ways to attack the topics.
- Big fat pile ‘O interesting ideas. Highlights were many, but deepest impact cam from the Local project folks, who make the most meaningful work out of design, and information, I’ve seen in some time. But the contrasts in hearing people talk about their approaches to designing data vs. design libraries, vs. designing parks, set off my thinking and left my mind buzzing.
I’m still going through my notes (my liveblogging entries can be found here) - Truly had an excellent two days: time well spent.
Tags: Idea2006
Can CounterStrike teach your team? (Video games as training tools)
October 25th, 2006
One of the many great conversations I had at the Construx summit was about how games like Quake, CounterStrike and Warcraft teach people basic teamwork and communication concepts.
Well, wouldn’t you know: A report was published this month by the American Federation of Scientists making similiar claims.
Here’s a CNN article on the topic and the full AFS report.
Report from executive summit @ Construx
October 25th, 2006
Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at Construx’s annual executive summit: an exclusive small conference of executives and C-levels from the software industry.
My talk on teams and stars was fun: lots of follow up questions, side conversations and� ocassional debates about star egos, military fire teams, and team compensation. Great crowd and I had a great time.
Slides from the talk: Teams and stars and the essay the talk is based on.
This week in pm-clinic: Haunted by ghost employees
October 23rd, 2006
This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum:
A handful of managers that have worked together for years are good friends. One of them, the one with the least competent reputation, left over a year ago, and is now being hired back into the company as a perennial contractor (product manager).
Every time my team has interacted with him, across various contracts and on different projects, we’ve had some kind of performance problem. However given his connections, despite feedback to the contrary, he keeps getting rehired (generally with different teams each time).
What can I do, as a manager myself, to exorcise this ghost employee from my world?
- Signed, Haunted by a ghost employee
Liveblogging the IDEA2006 conference
October 23rd, 2006
Rather than torture y’all with my first foray into liveblogging, I’m writing live comments, insights, and brlliant notes on each and every session.
Check it out here: Ideaconference blog.
Tags: idea2006
Maps of war: animation of middle east history
October 20th, 2006
The folks over at mapsofwar.com have put together an exception little visualization of the history of the middle-east, showing the reigns of every major empire in the last 2000 years.
Highly recommended. Great example of how effective a little animation can be.
Maps of war: Imperial history of the middle east
(Link from Mark Denovich)
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