I’m speaking on innovation at the upcoming adaptive path conference MX-EAST, on October 21-23 near Philadelphia, PA. It’s a small, single track conference for people who lead designers or work at intersection of business and design. Here’s a summary:
As the business value of design becomes clearer, creative managers building the next generation of products and services are confronted with an increasingly demanding set of challenges. MX East brings thought leaders from IDEO, Google, The New York Times, The Mayo Clinic, and many others, to show you what it takes to get great experiences out into the world.
As an experiment, I’ve been given my own personal promotion code (MXSB). If you use it when you register you’ll get the following bonuses:
Other speakers include Irene Au, Director of UX for Google, Khoi Vinh, Design Director for the New York Times, Mark Jones, Director at IDEO, and more.
Interested? Take this link to see the agenda and details.
Someone yelled at me on e-mail that i have a curiously sweet technorati ranking, but that i don’t link out to very many websites, which he didn’t think was very nice. I recently discovered a sports website called truehoop, that does link roundups in a way that doesn’t suck, so I’ll give it a spin. Here’s hoping links from me aren’t the kiss of traffic death.
“It often happens, with regard to new inventions, that one part of the general public finds them useless and another part considers them to be impossible.
When it becomes clear that the possibility and the usefulness can no longer be denied, most agree that the whole thing was fairly easy to discover and that they knew [it] was significant.”
- Abraham Niclas Clewberg-Edelcrantz, an inventor of the optical telegraph
Despite how simple this observation is, it’s clear to me that anyone who wants to innovate needs to understand this pattern and expect to confront it again and again in their work.
Chapters 2 (on history of innovation) and Chapters 4 (on the human nature of change) from The Myths of Innovation summarize the research I found on both understanding and overcoming the pattern.
A free version of chapter 4 can be found here (3MB PDF).
Writing books is hard enough, but selling them is an entirely different challenge. While I’ve learned much, I’m no expert. What follows are my experiences which hopefully will interest those who know less and simultaneously attract the opinions of those who know more.
With that in mind, here’s part 3 of a series I’ve been doing on the sales life of my books (part 1 and part 2, were about my first book). It’s almost three months into sales for my 2nd book and that’s focus of this post.
Sales summary
Through use of the ever-handy rankforest.com, here are the first three months of sales rankings on Amazon.com for my latest book. Of course amazon.com rankings tell you nothing about what goes on at physical bookstores or over at bn.com, but it’s an easy, free indicator of how well a book is selling.
The Myths of Innovation, Amazon.com sales 5/15-8/15:
And for comparison, below are comparative sales rankings for The art of project management for its first 3 months of sales. The graphs aren’t to scale, but it’s easy to see that my first book (below) had slightly better amazon sales rankings than my 2nd (above). Both sets of numbers are respectable: both books have hovered on and off various amazon and O’Reilly bestseller lists, but the question is, what explains the difference in sales? Shouldn’t a successful book aimed at a bigger audience generate more sales?

PR summary – For Myths of Innovation:
By comparison this is more than twice the amount of PR effort, in terms of my own time, than for The art of project management.
The surprise has been that despite the increased effort, a better written book, and a higher profile / sexier topic, the new book has sold well, but trailed The art of project management by comparison for their respective first 3 months of sales.
Assumptions / Lessons learned:
Overall, my plan is to keep learning. My goal is to be a career author so any positive PR, even PR that doesn’t translate directly into sales, may pay off for the next book or for the next speaking gig. But if you know something I don’t, have advice from experience or your own war stories to share, please chime in.
For reasons I can’t fully explain here, the 2nd edition of Art of project management will have a new title. Yes, it’s a huge pain in the ass, but this stuff happens – and i swear, my publisher and I would avoid this if we could, but as things turned out, we can’t – that’s all I can say. We’ll do everything we can to make sure this change is clear to people who pick up the book.
As far as the 2nd edition itself:
Based on your feedback, the current goal is to add:
Now – the hard part – the title: my editor are debating options and wanted to ensure input from readers of the first edition, and possible readers of the 2nd – That’s you. If you want to write in a candidate, hit other. Some candidates are close to the original title, others go their own way.
I promise the results will be part of the decision making process. Cheers.
Over at the Jem Report, Jem Matzan had some great questions for me about how my studies of innovation relate to the open source model of software development. Here’s a taste:
Do you think that being able to see and modify a program’s source code is a good method of innovation?
SB: Sure. Understanding how things work is the fastest way to learn and gives people who come later reusable, proven methods for doing things. But at the same time, it provides sets of assumptions that are more efficient to follow than to reconsider or reinvent. So depending on what level of innovation we’re talking about (a feature? a product? a line of products? a paradigm?) access to source code has different levels of value. And there’s also the value of mystery — sometimes a locked box forces people to be more creative since they have to invent their own approach. Being angry at that locked box and wanting to figure it out can drive people to innovate who’d be bored if they had permission to take it apart and see the source (as the legions of hackers and reverse-engineers out there can attest).
It’s a great interview and you can read the whole thing here.