While I like and use Facebook and Twitter, there’s enough hype and abuse of words like innovation, transformation and revolution around all things social media that a critique is warranted - if only to  take a shot at calibrating how people talk about this stuff. I hope this post is used whenever someone feels they’re being sold something phony or that makes little sense and wants a skeptical opinion to help calibrate where the truth is.

For starters: social media is a stupid term. Is there any anti-social media out there? Of course not. All media, by definition, is social in some way. The term interactive media, a more accurate term for what’s going on, lived out its own rise / hype / boom cycle years ago and was smartly ignored this time around - first rule of PR is never re-use a dead buzzword, even if all that you have left are stupid ones. I’ve been involved in many stupid terms, from push-technology to parental-controls, so I should know when I see one.

That said, here’s some points not made often enough:

1. We have always had social networks. Call them families, tribes, clubs, cliques or even towns, cities and nations.  You could call throwing a party or telling stories by a fire “social media tools”. If anything has happened recently it’s not the birth of social networks, it’s the popularity of digital tools for social networks, which is something different. These tools may improve how we relate to each other, but at best it will improve upon something we as a species have always done. Never forget social networks are old. The best tools will come from people who recognize, and learn from, the rich 10,000+ year history of social networks.
2. There has always been word of mouth, back-channel, “authentic” media tools. In Gladatorial Rome, in Shakespearean England and in Revolutionary America, motivated individuals had ways to express their ideas and share them. Call it gossip, poems, paintings or pamphlets, there is a long history of individuals taking action to express opinions through non-official channels. The ease of using these channels changes over time, but they always exist because #1 always exists.  Of note, IRC predates some, but certainly not all, of the features twitter is heralded for introducing to the world.
3. The new media does not necessarily destroy the old. TV was supposed to kill radio - this was wrong. TV forced radio to change and in some ways improve. The web forced TV, newspapers and magazines to change, and they will likely survive forever in some form, focusing on things the web can not do well.  Its unusual for new thing to completely replace the old ones and when they do it takes years. Anyone who claims social media will eliminate standard PR or mass media is engaging in hype, as odds are better those things will change and learn, but never die. It’s wise to ask what each kind of media / marketing is good and bad for and work from there.
4. Social media consultants writing about social media have inherent biases. It’s difficult to take posts like this about social media seriously, as it’s written by someone from a social media consulting firm without an ounce of humility or perspective. It’s hard to come across as authentic if you promote a revolution that you personally stand to benefit the most from. Much writing about social media is PR people writing about the importance of PR - see a problem of authenticity here? When did PR, like advertisers, become a reliable source for what is authentic? How is SEO optimization, or similiar techniques for twitter, authentic? When a system becomes popular the greedy will game it and social media is no different. We should be worried when people with PR and advertising backgrounds or consulting firms are leading us in the ways of authenticity or integrity. The Twitter Book, from my publisher O’Reilly, takes a surprisingly reasonable, authentic and low-hype approach to social media I wish was more popular.
5. Signal to Noise is always the problem. I’m someone who would rather read 5 or 10 really good things every day, than skim through 50 or 100 mediocre ones. I find all social media frequently consists of people re-forwarding things they were forwarded that almost none of them appear to have read, as they believe they are rewarded for publishing frequently above all else. Using twitter and digg I often feel I’m in the minority since what’s popular is rarely what’s good.  If you are interested in quality, and not volume, than the size of your network matters less than the value of what’s in it. I’m more fascinated by how kottke.org and metafilter.org have kept such high signal to noise ratios for years than I am about most media tools I see.
6. All technologies cut both ways and social media will be no different. For all the upsides of any invention there are downsides and it takes time to sort out what they all are. Blogs and Twitter have made self promotion, and self-aggrandizement, acceptable in ways I’ve never seen before, and I’m guilty myself. Is it possible to write or publish without self promotion? I don’t know anymore. I suspect digital tools for social media may have the negative effect of making authentic communication harder, not easier to find, as more people, and corporations, hover right on the gray dividing line between authentic and corporate, or selfish and generous.
7. Be suspicious of technologies claimed to change the world. The problem with the world is rarely the lack of technologies, the problem is us. Look, we have trouble following brain dead simple concepts like The Golden Rule.  Millions starve to death not because we lack the food, but because of greed and lack of political will.  We will largely behave like idiots on blogs and on twitter because we behave that way in real life. Every technological revolution must contend with the fact that we bring our stupidity, selfishness and arrogance along for the ride with our generosity, wisdom and love (12for12k.org being a great positive example). This is true for any new technology we use, and invariably its this fact that plays itself out and ruins the current technological wave, setting up the frustrated landscape for the next one.  Democracy, steam power, electricity, telegraphs, telephones, televisions, the Internet, and the web have all been heralded as the arrival of Utopia, and although there has been progress in each wave, it seems there are things we want that technological change can not bring to us.
8. Always ask “What problem am I trying to solve?” The smartest thing to do with something new is to ask what is it you need it to do for you. Recognize  good marketing will not make up for bad products or incompetent services.  If your company is marketing itself well to customers, or your social life is fine, perhaps you don’t need a revolution and need something much simpler and more realistic from social media. Spend time figuring out what you need. If you want to experiment and see for yourself, that’s awesome, but know that’s what you’re doing. But above all use whatever media/communication tools or methods work for you, whether they are old or new, no matter what anyone says, including me.

If you liked this post, you might also like my general purpose essay, How to detect bullshit.

Update: @jmichelle posted a response, In defense of social media, on O’Reilly Radar. I responded in the comments.

Posted in Innovation, Web 2.0 / social software, politics, rant | 55 Comments »

Everybody likes to criticize NASA for various reasons. There’s the budget problems, various $100 million blunders, and of course the aging space shuttle program.

But one thing they are doing right with the Hubble telescope is planned obsolescence. This current space shuttle mission is the last act NASA will take to repair the Hubble telescope ever.

They know that in order to build whatever will replace the Hubble, they have to let go of Hubble, even if that means letting it die, so they can have the funds and resources to invest in the next thing (It’s called the Webb telescope and it’s made from Beryllium - sounds like Star Trek).

And the space shuttle is also being put to rest. With 9 missions left NASA is finally moving on, using the resources consumed by the shuttle for the next big thing.

What old ideas, products, services, habits, assumptions, excuses, will you let go of to make room for whatever you want your future to be?

If they can ditch the Hubble and the shuttle, I can ditch something too.

Posted in Innovation, Management | 2 Comments »

Of all the stories in the web world, the story of the Opera web browser is one of the most interesting, and least frequently told when it comes to understanding innovation.

Today they’re celebrating their 15th year, and it’s clear they’re going strong, claim to have market share growth and still have a sense of humor.

They’re a fascinating story because in the early browser wars (’94-’00) they were the third horse, but they consistently took larger risks, made bigger bets on design changes, bet heaviest of all players on web standards,  and were the first of the major browsers to implement now standard features like tab browsing.  But they rarely got much credit for their innovations or their intensely progressive attitude then, or perhaps even now.

Why? Did they not innovative enough? or too much? Do they need to be in the U.S. to get more attention? Or are  there other issues? There are tons of lessons to be learned from the case study of Opera, both for the 90’s and for the present.

Until someone writes one, you can do a small, fun one of your own.

If you’re interested in UX design or understanding innovation, I highly recommend giving their latest release a spin: it will be the most interesting software you’ve installed in some time.

Download Opera 9.6

Related:

• Here’s my older review of Opera 9.02
• My other posts about web browser design, including reviews of major browsers
• I’ll be speaking at Opera next month and look forward to learning more from these folks

Posted in Design, Innovation, history, web browsers | 3 Comments »

Microsoft recently announced the end of the product known as Encarata. Way back in the day Encarta was cool. It was one of the few things made in the CD-ROM era that, looking backwards, made sense (Yes, I owned a copy of both Art Gallery and Microsoft Dogs, and as idiotic as it seems now, the later actually got good reviews) - and was actually designed quite well.

It’ was also a curiously successful work of innovation by Microsoft on several counts. Few people remember, but Microsoft bet big on CD-ROMs and consumer software, and of those efforts, many of which flopped, Encarta was a gem.  In 1994 it demonstrated many of the things people had been promising PCs would be good for (multimedia, education, instant access to information, etc.). There were other encyclopedias, but (I don’t think) anyone else invested as much in the design and technology as Microsoft did.

Many forget, or were still in diapers, but in 1994, years before web design would be something you could say at a bar without people thinking you were into spiders, Encarta demonstrated much of what we call information architecture, interaction design and consumer aesthetics, all in one high profile consumer product. Many, many companies and software teams used Encarta as a reference for not only what was possible, but for what a good experience should be like. Microsoft didn’t invent many of the technologies involved, but the encapsulation of so many into a well designed experience is similar in some ways to the success of the i-pod.  Both are examples of innovation through superior user experience and integration of various technologies made mostly by other folks.

And most importantly, when Netscape and Internet Explorer began the browser wars, many of us looked at Encarta as an approximation of what a great web experience should feel like, with rich media, consumer appliance simplicity, and great search and navigation. In the hallways on the Internet Explorer team we had screenshots of some of the Encarta team’s work, among various other bits of software inspiration, up on the wall. It was definitely a reference used in designing features like Explorer bars,  Favorites & History.

Kudos to Bill Flora, Adrienne Odonnell, and Sheila Carter (who are listed here as the design team) and other folks who worked on this thing over the years.

Encarta also was one of the best product names Microsoft has ever had. Sure, that’s not saying much given how notorious MSFT is for lousy names, but like Excel (also a good name, at least it was in 1985, compared to Lotus 1-2-3) it somehow fit the vibe of the kind of thing the product was.

Can’t say I miss loading CDs into my PC (I can’t remember the last time I did that), but Encarta definitely deserves a notable place in the history of software design. They helped raise a bar many people still use today.

Posted in Design, Innovation, Microsoft, history | 2 Comments »

I’m stuck in the Vancouver airport, waiting for them to find a new plane.  Hard to complain about waiting for a new plane, when the old plane broke. Tell me the current plane might explode and I’m happy to wait, thank you very much.

Waiting in at the gate, in between trying not to strangle the kid dancing precariously close to my luggage, and the guy with laptop problems on my left who has his volume set to 11 (I will be hearing the Windows startup song in my sleep), I made a sketch for ideas in organizations.

The arrows are the paths of different ideas. The box in the middle is the organization.

Whenever leaders want more innovation, they typically start by adding more inputs into the process. They seek out more ideas. Hey, lets brainstorm! Or maybe we should crowdsource! Or how about getting everyone to mindmap!

Executives often do this flinchy sort of thing and it’s big news at many corporations to start “idea programs” to encourage people to submit ideas.

These programs are launched, ideas are submitted, and there is much rejoicing.

But little change.

The reason there is little change is that idea inputs were never the problem. The bottleneck was further upstream. Crowdsourcing, brainstorming, mindmapping, and the dozens of other techniques people obsess about help create early idea volume, but do little to help the curators, the people who winnow down the hundreds of ideas down to dozens, and dozens down to a handful. 

It’s much more useful to study where the bottlenecks are, when and why new ideas are killed, and who the people are that are killing them.

If you have 1000 new ideas a month, but 0 prototypes are ever made from them, what good is another 2000 ideas? It’s much better to study why there is no time or rewards for prototyping and focus on getting that number to go up.

An easy diagnostic for innovation is the list of 10 stages - Where do ideas die in your world? That’s the place to study and make changes to help ideas survive longer in your organization.

The real challenge is getting ideas out the door - not how you generate ideas. It’s more useful to study how ideas die - what reasons are used? Who has the power to do it? And when and why are they using it?

Sorting out the lifecycle of ideas in an organization requires study and thought, while slapping more idea generation techniques on the front does not.

Posted in Innovation, Management, creative thinking | 9 Comments »

Few people know that Ada Lovelace was likely the first computer programmer in history. She worked with Charles Babbage, a man who is most famous for making a machine that didn’t quite work. A testament to the role of failure in the making of every success.

One challenge she faced is that given that his computer, known as the Babbage engine, wasn’t quite working, she had to write a virtual program. That’s right. She wrote code for a system that didn’t quite exist yet (To be specific, she translated a paper from French to English and in doing so added notes, which included a program - her actual translation, and notes, are here). Not too shabby.  If you complain about your compiler being slow, or about web standards not being followed, take a humility pill. At least the stuff you hate actually exists.

I just try and imagine the conversations she must have had with her friends in 1843.

Friend: So Ada, what did you do yesterday? I went for a horse ride and picked some flowers.

Ada: “Oh that sounds fun. Well, I translated a paper about a lecture, written about a new application of math to make a machine that can do complex computations on its own  and just for fun and I wrote up the instruction set to compute Bernoulli numbers automatically on this machine. Which doesn’t exist yet.”

Friend: <silence> That’s nice. Go for a horse ride?

Perhaps if you’re truly an innovator, you often have trouble explaining what you’re doing.

Sadly Ada died young, at age 36. The programming language Ada was named after her.

One of my favorite quote from her famous note is this:

It is desirable to guard against the possibility of exaggerated ideas that might arise as to the powers of the Analytical Engine. In considering any new subject, there is frequently a tendency, first, to overrate what we find to be already interesting or remarkable; and, secondly, by a sort of natural reaction, to undervalue the true state of the case, when we do discover that our notions have surpassed those that were really tenable.

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths.

She was writing about Babbage’s machine, but boy does it seem relevant to all the technologies we make.

Ada was born on March 24th -  Some folks celebrate March 24th as Ada Lovelace day.

Posted in Innovation, history | 4 Comments »

Next Monday, March 30th, I’m teaching my full day course on how to lead and manage breakthrough projects in San Francisco.

(UPDATE) Winner was announced yesterday.

There are only a few seats left, but as a perk I get one golden ticket to give away - So here’s your chance.

For reference, highlights of the course include:

• A top rated, world class, fun, interactive heavy kick-ass full day course
• Skill development for creative leaders on important projects
• Tools for developing, managing and executing on big ideas
• High energy, fast paced, minimal bs agenda (full agenda listed here).
• Interactive lessons on creative thinking & management from the great innovators of all time
• Covers material and exercises that go well beyond what’s in my books
• Free consulting or Q&A with me over email after the course
• A signed copy of the bestseller, The Myths of Innovation

If you’re in the SF area, or will be on Monday, and want a shot at a $600 ticket, leave a comment. I’ll pick one lucky winner for FREE entry to the course.

How to enter:

1. Leave a comment
2. Wait (and cross your fingers)
3. Winner chosen end of day Wednesday

If you don’t want to gamble, registration details for the course are here. Use the promo code berkunproj25 to get 25% off.

Posted in Innovation, Management, On Tour, Teaching/Training | 20 Comments »

Thanks to everyone who tuned in - we had almost 300 people according to WebEx.

The webcast will be posted soon on O’Reilly’s youtube channel.

Next time I do one of these I’ll be sharper - there were lots of good snarky comments I missed in the chat room during the talk, plus a twitter stream (#berkun).

Here’s some of my favorite snarky comments:

From Melina: How to make things happen: 1) Have a good idea. 2) Be willing to implement that idea. 3) Be persistent until you get your way. $39.99 please.

from Steven: Now you see the repression inherent in the system…. (watch this if it makes no sense)

From Keith: First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.  (GandhiCon).

from Andy: If you’re getting coffee at the risk of getting shot, you might have an addiction.

Questions:

From Kathy: How can you initiate change in today’s environment when colleagues/managers are scared and increasingly entrenched?

All emotions have power. If people are afraid or worried there is energy a persuasive person can use to support an idea. Anyone scared wants change - they want to feel safer from the thing they are afraid of. If you can propose an idea that makes them feel safer, they’ll be interested.

From Margaret: How do you recommend becoming better at persuasion and intuition?

Watch the ShamWow guy 50 times.

Ok, only half kidding. My next book is about public speaking and I will talk about this. But persuasion involves two things:  1) know your stuff 2) know your audience.  I’d pitch very differently to Steve Jobs than I would Bono. I’d tell different stories and emphasize different things. So one easy local tip: if ever you have to persuade someone, ask for advice from other people who have tried to persuade that person. You’ll learn from what worked, and didn’t work, from them.

From David: are there systematic methods for coming up with innovations? can you recommend?

I think not. Systematic is not a word I would use. There are systems for experimenting, including what scientists and researchers do, but that’s not the same thing as a systematic method for innovation. They have a systematic way of creating an environment where innovation is possible, perhaps likely, but there are never guarantees.  Most start-ups fail: it’s hard and risky no matter how good your ideas are.

Much of the time the biggest hurdle for an idea are other people. Whose approval you need, what resources you need loaned to you, and convincing customers to try your new thing. There are no guarantees with these kinds of challenges. Many innovations sit around ignored and rejected for years, only to accepted later, the same exact idea or concept, when people’s attitudes finally change.

That said, you can systematically breakdown all of the challenges you have to overcome, and decide where you need the most help.

From Jeffrey: Scott, consider a situation where a small company is acquired by a larger company, and change means giving up the way things have always been done in favor of fitting into and aligning processes with the larger organization. Any special tactics/recommendations?

If you’re the smaller company, the time for this is before you sign. You have leverage then to ask for whatever you want, including keeping certain job roles, working conditions, etc.

If your the larger company, I’d ask the smaller company. I’d invite them to visit our offices (not just their VPs, but some of their line level employees too) and ask them to consider what provisions we can provide them to keep their culture, or their secret sauce, intact. Just inviting them into the conversation scores points and builds trust.

From Clinton: What to do in an environment where there is so much change being driven by the customers as a result of contracts? Really so much change that you can’t keep up.

All contracts are signed by two parties, you and the customer. If there is too much change to be successful, or sane, it’s not the customers fault. It’s yours. Saying No is always important. Saying yes to everything, including deals with customers, dilutes your focus, stresses your people, and makes priorities impossible. If a client asked me to do more than I could, I’d tell them it’s in their interest I say No.

From Praveen: How to control creativity to make it safe.

I don’t know that you can. Like the example of moving your desk in the webcast, change always effects someone negatively, or will be perceived as such, by them. However if I’m the boss I make creativity and change safe by funding it, supporting it and nurturing it. It starts by providing constructive criticism of ideas and accept some of them. When people see one idea get approved, they’ll suggest more and trust you to be fair in how they’re judged.

If you tuned in and have a question, fire away in the comments.

Posted in Innovation, Management | No Comments »

Tons of good stuff this week:

• The evolution of a project manager - Interesting take on the various levels of impact a project manager can have, from paper pusher to team leader (hat tip, Raven)
• Harry Beck: The Paris Connection - Some of you may know I worked on a book about the london subway system. Beck is the guy who designed the famous 1930s version of their map, the basic design that lives on today. It was news to me, but he also proposed a map for the Paris subway system (hat tip, Paul).
• 8 Brilliant Scientific Screw-ups - the problem with articles like these about accidental inovation is they overlook the important part. After the accident, all these people did tons of work to figure out why the accident happened, something few of us ever do.
  
• Wall of Deliverables - I love the idea of a place for designers to share prototypes and work for critiquing and exchanging ideas. Hopefully this will take off. It’s funny to me how most dialog in the design community is over text based email - for all our tech, we still mostly describe our designs with words instead of showing them.
• A Medical Madoff: Anesthesiologist Faked Data in 21 Studies: Scientific American - another reason to always ask basic questions about research that seems too good to be true.
  
• Mapping the Innovation Gap - This is the most important chart I’ve seen in months about understanding how innovation happens.
• Abraham Lincoln: A Two-Way Innovator - Nice article about how important problem defining can be.  Many creators I know can work either way, they might have a preference, but once they have an idea they like, or a problem they’re interested in, they don’t really care.
  
• BrokenPictureTelephone.com - The Game of Miscommunication - Home - If this doesn’t make you laugh you need to seek help.  Only gripe is registration is a bear and there’s no easy way to just invite 5 friends to play. This one about a tornado is one of my favorites.
  
• Book Vs. Film: Watchmen | Books | A.V. Club - Interesting website focused on writing reviews of books made into films. This review is about the watchmen (a book and film I liked in both forms).
  

Posted in Design, Innovation, humor, linkfest | 1 Comment »

Next week I’m doing a fun, live, one hour webcast on my latest thinking about progress and innovation.

The best part is, if you’ve got a question you want me to answer, read below and I’ll work it into the presentation.

Description: Talking about innovation is easy - but making change happen in organizations is ridiculously hard. But there are things we can learn from the history of technology, political revolution and change, and there is a playbook we can reuse to help us avoid easy mistakes and seemingly popular, but actually self-defeating approaches. This fun, interactive and entertaining talk will prime you for leading change, managing true innovation, and enhance your skills for motivating, managing and leading people in the real world. And Scott takes requests: if you have a specific question or situation you want Scott to try and work into the presentation, leave a comment, or drop him a line at scottberkun.com/contact.

Attendance is limited, so register now. We’ll send you a reminder before the webcast. And please feel free to share this invitation with others.

Date: Thursday, March 19 at 10 am PT
Price: Free!
Duration: Approximately 60 minutes
To register: oreilly.com/go/progresshappens
Questions? Please send email to webcast@oreilly.com

Posted in Innovation, Management, On Tour | 1 Comment »

In 25 minutes, David Heinemeier Hannson of 37 Signals slices through most of the nonsense and hype around startup companies that I’ve heard over the years, including several myths around innovation (I don’t think he even uses the word once, until someone asks a question that includes it).  It’s by far the most bs free talk about start-ups and web entrepreneurship I’ve seen. Peter Drucker would love this.

Jump to 28:50 to get past the introduction if you get bored early.

Or Watch video on its own page.

Posted in Innovation, entrepreneurship | 3 Comments »

I’m getting a bit of roasting over on Forbes.com for gender bias - there were exactly zero women mentioned in the article.

Women are in fact my favorite half of the species. But my problem is the assumption that omission of diversity implies bias. I happen to be Ukrainian by heritage. Yet, there were zero Ukrainians mentioned in my post. Sure, there are a ridiculously smaller number of Ukrainians in the world than women, but the fact that I didn’t mention any of either doesn’t mean I went out of my way to exclude them.

In a 790 word article it’s not a surprise I used the most well known geniuses I could think of. It makes stronger points, provides more leverage and requires less explaining. All things useful to do in a short piece where comprehensiveness isn’t expected.

To get to the point, the fact is women and most minorities were denied many intellectual and creative opportunities in many cultures through Western history. The right to go to school, to publish, to research were denied and for generations there was an unnatural bias against women and minorities that repressed the possibility of them discovering or displaying their talents.

But regardless of the reason, if you study great creative and intellectual works in Western history, many of them were done by men. This does not mean men are better at becoming geniuses (however you define the term) than women - far from it - it just means that’s what happened. If you talk about innovation history, a disproportionate number of stories will involve men. Same for leaders of nations and authors of books - generally speaking, for hundreds of years, in most of Europe, women were not allowed to do either.

I was asked about this bias by the President of CMU when I lectured there last year, and the above answer is basically what i said then.

I do happen to know of many female geniuses or women of extraordinary or creative abilities. They didn’t fit this piece, but I’ve studied them. Here’s my list of favorites:

• Marie Curie - First person in history to win two Nobel Prizes (only other person to do it was Linus Pauling). She also discovered this little thing called radioactivity, a discovery she died for.
• Ada Lovelace - The first computer programmer in history. She is possibly an example of historic gender bias, as some of the work Babbage is credited with should be attributed to her.
• Georgia Okeefe - The movements of her creative work over a prolific lifetime are comparable to Picasso’s in many ways.
• Jane Austen - In many ways helped define the style and structure of the concept of a modern novel. I’m actually not a fan of her writing, but her impact and influence is worthy of study anyway - especially as her fame and influence was largely posthumous.

Posted in Innovation, The Art of PM book, creative thinking | 8 Comments »