Scott Berkun » 2009

Wednesday linkfest

Scott Berkun — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 18:13:57 +0000

Here are this week’s links:

Terrorism on airlines is overstated - In a simple argument of reality vs. perception, terrorism on airplanes, even if there was an event every month, are so small in the spectrum of fatalities as not to warrant the dramatic attention and worry people seem to have.

Related posts:

What should I write about? You decide!

Scott Berkun — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 21:17:58 +0000

If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been writing about a wider and wider range of things. This is no accident. My ambitions with books and the blog are wide. I’ll always be writing about pm, design and innovation things, but will always be writing about wider things too.

But I’ve failed to involve you guys in the process as much as I’d like, which I’m fixing now.

I put together a list of old requests from blog comments and emails, and found a little tool called slinkset that lets anyone vote, and submit new topics.

My promise: I’ll grab a topic every week and write about it. Anything goes. Whatever, and I mean whatever, makes it to the top of the list, I’ll write about on the blog.

Here’s what to do:

View and vote on the list here (click on the up arrow to vote)
or add your own topics.

It’s that easy. No registration required.

If you guys use it, I’ll find a way to integrate something like this into scottberkun.com (perhaps there’s a WordPress plugin that approximates slinkset).

Give it a spin – let me know what you think.

The secret about innovation secrets

Scott Berkun — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 19:49:36 +0000

The word secret runs rampant not only in business magazines, but also in self-help books. To our general disappointment, often the tips and advice described aren’t secrets, and never were, as no one, not even the people mentioned in the articles, ever really tried to keep these facts ‘secret’ from anyone.

The word secret makes the boring sound fun. Doing laundry is pretty boring, but secret laundry almost sounds interesting. The word secret promises short-cuts, tricks, or things people don’t want us to know, which all connote ways to get one up on others. This little semantic trick works well on newbies, since they know so little, anything can seem like a secret.

After going around the block a few times, we’re all disappointed to learn that secret sauces are rarely all that secret. As a kid, I remember being amazed by honey/mustard as sauce at McDonald’s – I somehow never realized I could make the same thing in 12 seconds in any American kitchen. Certainly McDonald’s would be the last to inform me I was already in possession of honey mustard sauce in my very own home.

Innovation has similiar (ab)use, as sticking it on front of things can bring new life to the ultra-dull. I once saw a laundromat with a neon sign that said Innovative dry-cleaning, but I couldn’t figure out what the innovation was, as they couldn’t get a small tomato sauce stain out of my shirt pocket.

It should be no surprise these days that the two words, secret and innovation, often appear together. They make quite a pair.

In this recent article on CNN, called learn the 5 secrets of Innovation, we hear this yarn:

One of the men behind the study, Insead’s Hal Gregersen, told CNN, “What the innovators have in common is that they can put together ideas and information in unique combinations that nobody else has quite put together before.”

Ok. So you have to be unique and special, or have unique and special ideas. I don’ t agree, but it turns out neither does Gregersen, as a paragraph later he’s quoted as saying:

“The way they act is to observe actively, like an anthropologist, and they talk to incredibly diverse people with different world views, who can challenge their assumptions,” Gregersen told CNN.

Anthropology has been a field of study for over 100 years. And was practiced long before it was ever called anthropology. Hard to call that a secret. For the sake of argument, before calling anything about innovation or invention NEW, it’s worth taking a quick pass at the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution to see if they did similiar things then. Much of what we get so excited about today (e.g. progress/invention/business), has been done many times, and often better in some respect, before.

To be fair, I highly doubt Gregersen asked CNN to put the word secret in the article – he’s just the expert they’re quoting and he’s along for their ride. And he does offer some excellent advice – hard work:

To improve your questioning skills, Gregersen recommends identifying a problem and writing nothing but questions about it for 10 minutes a day for 30 days. He says that over that period the questions will change, and so will your understanding and approach to the problem.

This is good advice. But it’s advice few want to hear. What he describes is work. At least it looks and smells like work. The work is called thinking, which is very rarely mentioned in lists of secrets. People who think harder about a problem, and work at it longer, are more likely to be successful. End of story.

Over at Harvard Business the same study is examined again, and Gregersen offers more solid advice:

You might summarize all of the skills we’ve noted in one word: “inquisitiveness.” I spent 20 years studying great global leaders, and that was the big common denominator. It’s the same kind of inquisitiveness you see in small children.

Small children get mentioned often in business articles about creativity, yet somehow the Fortune 500 hasn’t sponsored any kindergarden meet and greets just yet.

In part that’s because the most misleading thing in much research on “how to innovate”, and certainly in much business writing about such research, is the focus on creativity as the bottleneck. Inquisitiveness, sparks of insight, and creative talent is the focus of much writing on innovation, and it’s far from the whole story. The point about children, and any good book on creative thinking, is that ideas are cheap. It’s finding successful people who are willing to bet on different ideas, and people with ideas who are willing to do the legwork to convince others of the merits of something that doesn’t exist yet (and prevent them from killing their ideas), that’s the challenge.

If there’s any secret to be derived from Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, or any of the dozens of people who often have the name innovator next to their names, is the diversity of talents they had to posses, or acquire, to overcome the wide range of challenges in converting their ideas into successful businesses.

The big ideas were just part of the story, and arguably a small part. Kindle was not the first digital book reader. The i-pod and i-phone where not the first music players or cellular phones. Google was far from being the first search engine that sold ads. Amazon was not the first on-line bookstore. The ideas, at least the big ideas involved, were not new or original, at least not in high level concept. The story of all these companies and ideas has more to do with how they elevated and improved upon what already existed, or took it in new, simpler, smarter, more useful, more profitable directions.

This story is much less sexy. It’s not as dramatic and nowhere near as romantic. But I’m convinced it’s way more accurate and more useful to people who want to do interesting things with their own lives.

Most important, the story of moving an idea into a product, and then into a successful business (the definition of innovation suggested by these CNN and HBD’s articles) involves these progressions of challenges:

Studying a field / business
Finding opportunities to attack
Developing rough ideas
Successfully pitching the ideas to others (to investors, to customers, to partners)
Making smart contracts and business relationships
Developing the ideas into a prototype
Developing the prototype into a high quality product (can take years)
Marketing the product successfully to customers
Abandoning most of your free time and sanity to pursue your vision
Hiring good people and convincing them to stay
Convincing those people their vision matches yours (or bending your vision to include theirs)
Balancing short term tactics with long term strategy
Getting lucky – your competitors do stupid things
(note: A similiar list appears in The Myths of Innovation, Chapter 3)

And the list goes on. How many of these challenges are overcome primarily by inquisitiveness? Or creativity? Not many. Good thinking is required all along, but no special creativity technique or magic insight is a key link in the chain. The role of ideas and creative thinking in innovation is always overstated because the other stuff is hard to romanticize, hard to sell and hard to get ordinary people excited about.

To be an entrepreneur, an inventor, a researcher or even an artist, is to take a bet that you can overcome a hundred different kinds of challenges that no person could ever entirely prepare for. It’s to realize, or simply pretend to ignore, that you will face challenges that slice across a dozen fields of study and degrees, in the same way that life and the universe does.

The closest thing to a real secret is this: In my years studying and teaching all things innovation, there’s one fact that’s the hardest for people to swallow and it goes as follows – To invent or create is to take a bet against the unknown. No matter what you do, you are still betting you can do well in the face of many things that are out of your control. Don’t like that? Don’t want uncertainty? Then do something else. Comfort with risk and uncertainty is the real secret. Or at least acceptance of the fact you can work your ass off for uncertain rewards. Anyone who wants to create something new is placing a bet that their view of the future is better than everyone elses’, or at least their competitors. It’s no surprise many of the elite CEOs/Innovators/Inventors have supremely large egos – they likely had these character traits well before they became famous.

The study I want to see is to compare 20 smart inventors/entrepreneurs who failed, with 20 who succeeded, and see if a researcher can find any identifiable traits or tactics that distinguish them. My suspicion is that the difference between them will be very narrow. Just as the differences between the top 10 athletes in any sport in the world, and the top 50, are thin indeed. Once you get beyond strong basic competence, it’s small factors that make a difference. And when it comes to the history of business innovation, the factors are often very small, and often beyond the control of the players involved, facts CEOs and business writers rarely profit from admitting.

Best things of 2009

Scott Berkun — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 23:15:53 +0000

Went through my list of stuff acquired this year. Turns out I read a lot of books.

Here’s the best (purchasable) things I found in 2009:

Thoughtless acts, by Jane Fulton Suri – This is a great book for any design, or creative thinkers out there. Published in 2005, I read it back then, put it a stack of books, and only rediscovered it this year. It’s a collection of photos of objects redesigned by ordinary people to serve purposes beyond what the designer expected. (Nice article with many photo examples here)

Brain Rules – I’ve read many of the ‘neuroscience for general audience’ books out there, and this is hands down the strongest, best written, most applicable and best supported of the bunch. This book was a strong influence on Confessions, as the book emphasizes learning, improving brain function, and how our bodies and brains work best in harmony with each other, all points made in various ways in Confessions.

LogicComix – I have a degree in Logic, which is practically worthless, but studying logic had all sorts of hugely important side effects, including discovering the work of Bertrand Russell, who is likely my favorite philosopher of all time. This unusual telling of his life story in comic book form sounds like a bizzare idea for a book, and it is, but it makes for a surprsingly entertaining and moving read.

The Book of Genesis by Crumb -

Everything is a project, even this

Scott Berkun — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 10:59:15 +0000

As often happens in life, when I meet people at a party or some work thing and they ask what I do, I tell them I write books. They ask what kind of books, and when I mention I wrote a book about project management they get all condescending. Why would you write a book about something as boring as project management? They ask.

To which, I often say. Everything is a project.

And they say, what?

And I say, again, Everything is a project.

How did you get to this party? I ask. Well, that’s a project. How did you plan and deliver the last party you threw for others? That was a project too. The making of your home, the delivery of electricity and water to it, and the earning of wages to pay for all these things are all various forms of projects, or consist of activities roughly comparable to any definition of a project.

Then I say the kicker, project management is only as boring as the thing being managed.

On a good day, they they look at me for a long moment, their faces frozen with that lost in thought look we all make when someone surprises us with something interesting to say. And then they say “Huh”, in a way that implies their brain is doing actual thinking. To fill the void, I often ask where they are from, or if they’re having fun, successfully completing the project of changing the conversation with a stranger at a party. Often they decide to return to talk of projects, proving it’s possible to make it not so boring after all.

On a bad day, they conclude I’m more boring than they thought, and despite their full Martini in hand, excuse themselves to the bar to get a drink.

I wrote awhile ago about why project managers get no respect, and that’s because people who make a big deal out of the project-manageryness of their work, as opposed to the domain of the things they make (homes, software, films, cookies) come off as a kind of weenie, a pm-weenie if you will. They appear to be people who are more interested in schedules, budgets and methods than the results those tools help achieve, which is kind of weird. It’s like the director of a bad movie who talks only about his fancy zoom lenses, or that the film came in under-budget. They miss the point.

But the best project managers, including those people who do lead or manage things yet never use the pm title, somehow know instinctively that everything is a project. They know there needs to be a driving force of thinking, a constant source of social energy, a list or a table or a spreadsheet, that makes it easier for everyone to push their own small decisions forward, increasing the odds with every single effort that the results will be good. Good project managers aren’t even necessarily very organized, they know many ways to drive people forward and hold them to commitments, even without a GTD brain implant.

There are many ways to look at all that we do, but the project-centric view is potent. Everything in work, and many things in life, has a goal, a set of constraints, some design challenges, a schedule, a few dependencies, some key relationships, etc. And it’s hard to be good at managing, leading, teaching, creating, making or building just about anything if you have absolutely zero skills at project management. To me, anyone who is a writer, a VP, a salesman, a film-maker, a teacher or an athlete does project management of a sort nearly all the time.

When I get stuck, at work or in personal life matters, or I see someone else who is blocked, I say, out loud, everything is a project. If I’m blocked, what are my goals? What are my assets? What are my liabilities? How can I divide this big thing I’m stuck on into smaller pieces, one of which I might be able to tackle? And sometimes just realizing there is a simple easy way to re-frame anything into the form of a project is enough to get things moving again.

Wednesday linfest

Scott Berkun — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 10:19:06 +0000

Here are this week’s links:

Reverse ignite – In a variation of powerpoint karaoke, where people are forced to present with someone else’s slides, Reverse ignite does it with ignite format presentations.
Bike friendlyiest city in the world – Copenhagen – Well done little video about how they redesigned Copenhagen with bikes taking priority. Amazing to watch. I was there this year and it’s amazing to walk on streets with more bikes than cars.
New Interview with David Simon, of the Wire – Won’t make much sense unless you saw the series, which, if you like yourself and your brain, you really really should go watch.
Subway architecture – Man, someday I will finish writing that book about the London Underground. Meanwhile, here are some amazing photos of underground subway stations around the world.
Diagram of old world buildings (hat tip Ario)
Donald Barthleme’s syllabus – Famed author of the classic short novel The Dead father, made a reading list for a writing class that was dug up recently. Some I’ve read, some I’ve heard of, many I’ve never seen before.

Speaking in Portland, Jan 6 & 7

Scott Berkun — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 23:48:13 +0000

I’ll be in Portland in a few weeks, early in 2010. Speaking at the Art Institute, hosted by CHIFOO, on Wed January 6th, at 7pm, about Confessions of

What my office looks like right now

Scott Berkun — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 22:58:54 +0000

In a desperate fit of end of year holiday boredom, as I’m self employed and don’t quite long for these weeks off as I used to, I decided it’s time to fix up my office.

If I’m actively writing a book, over time my research methods create piles of books all over the place. I did heavy research for Confessions, and there were papers, books, journals, and articles just about everywhere.

When a book is done, there are several weeks of promotion, and it’s only now, about 8 weeks in, that I finally get around to fixing up the disaster area that is my office.

In the photo below, I’m 30% of the way in to sorting things out, and things are complete chaos. Hopefully I’ll post another photo this week with everything nice and fixed up.

That’s my knee on the right, and my desk above it.

I dare you to post a picture of what your desk/office looks like right now.

Quote of the month

Scott Berkun — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 08:33:53 +0000

I have a huge quote file I’ve been keeping since 1990, and it’s about 300 single spaced pages of quotes I’ve collected over the years. I think the practice of typing these things in is good for writing. Unable to sleep tonight I stumbled through the file, and found this one.

In the old testament and in the Jewish Interpretive and mystical texts, there is an emphasis on the importance of the spoken word. Speaking is the cause, not the antithesis, of an event or action. The words of the prophet are true because they are spoken, not the reverse. Prophecy is not witchcraft; it does not foretell the future but creates it. – Reesa Grushka

The curious thing about my affinity for this quote, and my last book, is I’m a big believer in the notion talk is cheap. It is. But talk can, at times, have great power. Saying things out loud, even if only to yourself, changes how you think and feel about whatever it is you choose to say. On the first day someone speaks the truth about something everyone else has been too afraid to say, or admit to themselves, the world changes forever. Telling someone you love them for the first time, or that they’ve hurt your feelings, or a thousand other scary things can take more courage than any amount of action.

Wednesday linkfest

Scott Berkun — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 21:31:32 +0000

Here are this week’s links:

College student brings typewriter to lecture hall – Seems legit and not staged – the professor eventually asks him to stop.
A better rating system – 5 point scales are the standard on yelp, amazon and elsewhere. Interesting to think if there’s a better way to do this.

Related posts: