Thanks to the fine folks at O’Reilly Media, both of my books are now available on Kindle:

Making Things happen (Kindle)

The Myths of Innovation (Kindle)

I think it’s silly that the customer reviews for the regular editions don’t migrate to these kindle pages, but then again I’m still bummed all the reviews for The art of project management didn’t get migrated over to Making Things Happen, as it’s the 2nd edition of the same book.

Posted in Making things happen, Myths of Innovation, books | 7 Comments »

Well not exactly. I’m speaking on Thursday at DePaul University, for Professor Lisa Gundry’s class on Innovation. They use my book in their course, and some of their students, led by Lukas Quanstrom of the band Beckon Q, put together a fun little video based on Chapter 4: People love new ideas.

Posted in Myths of Innovation, On Tour | 1 Comment »

Gladwell has another interesting piece in the New Yorker, but it’s another article with some important oversights and slight of hand with the truth. I’ve critiqued him before, and now he’s earned a second one.

The piece, titled Late bloomers: Why do we equate genius with precocity?, makes one major mistake in not calling out the many huge questions researchers into creativity have about the notion of genius. Entire books have been written with the premise that there really is no such thing as a genius in the sense most people use it, and that the distinctions of ‘prodigy’ and ‘genius’ are so abused and misunderstood as to be useless.

This essay uses the idea of ‘the young genius’ as a point of leverage for late bloomers, suggesting that you are either one or the other (this is the core thesis of economics professor David Galenson’s book, Old Masters and Young geniuses, whom Gladwell quotes in the article). Dualism of this kind is dangerous and nearly always misleading. It brings to mind that old joke: there are two kinds of people in the world, those that think there are two kinds of people in the world, and those that don’t.

The more I’ve studied creative thinking the more convinced I am these sweeping categorizations are 1) supported by selective research 2) not the best tools for those who want to follow creative paths themselves.

Gladwell wrote:

Picasso was the incandescent prodigy. His career as a serious artist began with a masterpiece, “Evocation: The Burial of Casagemas,” produced at age twenty. In short order, he painted many of the greatest works of his career—including “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” at the age of twenty-six. Picasso fit our usual ideas about genius perfectly.

But what are those ideas? He doesn’t say. I think most people imagine young Pablo, if he were a genius, learning to paint largely on his own. I think it’d be a surprise to learn his father was a painter, and taught Picasso to draw and paint from a very young age, sent him to an excellent art school as a youth, and encouraged his trips to Paris, where he quickly made an amazing assortment of connections in the art scene before he was 25. Similar family and community support can be found in the story of Mozart (his father was also a musician who trained him early). Who your parents were is hugely significant in the history of prodigies and geniuses.

Another fact that doesn’t usually fit our idea of genius: at the time Picasso painted Evocation, he was basically starving in Paris, in a situation similar to Van Gogh’s a few decades earlier, faced with the choice on many mornings of buying food or buying paint. Picasso had been working seriously, by most definitions, for years before Evocation was finished. We don’t think of people with prodigious, gifted talents starving and struggling, but there he was. Another counterpoint is that Picasso had a ridiculously vibrant painting career that spanned decades - one of his greatest works, Guernica, was made at the age of 56. The passage from Gladwell hints that his 20s were his best work, but that’s not true. It was an intense time of productivity, but not the only productive time in his life.

Gladwell continues:

Prodigies like Picasso, Galenson argues, rarely engage in that kind of open-ended exploration. They tend to be “conceptual,” Galenson says, in the sense that they start with a clear idea of where they want to go, and then they execute it. “I can hardly understand the importance given to the word ‘research,’ ” Picasso once said in an interview with the artist Marius de Zayas. “In my opinion, to search means nothing in painting. To find is the thing.” He continued, “The several manners I have used in my art must not be considered as an evolution or as steps toward an unknown ideal of painting. . . . I have never made trials or experiments.”

This is an outright contradiction of Picasso’s performance in the documentary The Mystery of Picasso, where he spends 70 minutes revealing his creative process as a series of experiments, risks and gambles. Over the course of an amazing hour we see him take risks, make mistakes, and continually reinvent and change individual paintings. It’s a rare and amazing thing for any artist to expose themselves in this way, much less the difficult and reclusive Picasso, but he seems, on camera to take deep pride in his creative experimentation.

Nothing can stop Picasso from having contradicted himself, but if he did, both ends of the contradiction have value in this discussion.

More to my point, there is a huge inventory of creators who have been called geniuses who mention experimentation as a critical to their creative process. They include Frank Lloyd Wright, Hemingway, David Byrne, Miles Davis, Paul Simon, and on it goes.

Finally, Gladwell offers:

This is the final lesson of the late bloomer: his or her success is highly contingent on the efforts of others. In biographies of Cézanne, Louis-Auguste invariably comes across as a kind of grumpy philistine, who didn’t appreciate his son’s genius. But Louis-Auguste didn’t have to support Cézanne all those years. He would have been within his rights to make his son get a real job, just as Sharie might well have said no to her husband’s repeated trips to the chaos of Haiti.

But what is not mentioned is the amazing social network that enabled and supported young Picasso to do what he did. Dependence on the effort of others is not a factor exclusive to late bloomers. On his first trip to Paris, he quickly met Max Jacob, who taught him French and French culture - they’d share a room for years. He had many friends in the art scene in those early years, including Andre Breton (founder of surrealism), Gertrude Stein, and Henry Matisse. Not a bad crowd to get advice from for an artist in his 20s. He also befriended artist George Braque, and through collaboration they would develop a little thing called cubism together.

(Hat tip, Ario)

Posted in Myths of Innovation, creative thinking | 2 Comments »

Stumbled across, via dive into mark, a clever tool for making word art from any text. For kicks, I plugged in the entire first chapter of The Myths of Innovation, and here’s what we got (click here for the full-size version).

The tool is called Wordle. It’s free and easy to use. Check it out.

Posted in Design, Myths of Innovation | 2 Comments »

Liz Danzico kindly interviewed me about creativity and related things over at the AIGA website. Includes mentions of puppy torture, flashes of lightning, and ridicule for the book Who Moved my Cheese. Full interview here.

Posted in Myths of Innovation | 1 Comment »

Thanks to John Przyborski and Carrie Chisholm at CMU, last week’s lecture was videotaped and is now online at youtube.

This version of the talk is quite different from the version I did at Google almost a year ago, so it might be worth a spin even if you’ve seen that one before.

If you feel claustrophobic watching videos inside my site, here is the direct link to this video on youtube.

Posted in Myths of Innovation, On Tour | No Comments »

One question I hear often is “what can I do right now?”. Well, it turns out there are lots of things to do if you want to become an innovator, and in many cases it’s not very hard.

Check it out:

Essay #58 - How to innovate right now.

(Note: This essay was commissioned by the U.S. State department).

Posted in Essays, Innovation, Myths of Innovation | 1 Comment »

The paperback edition of Myths of Innovation is underway. Now is a great time to let me know of any typos, mistakes, oversights, factual errors, or anything else that should be cleaned up.

The current list of typos, research issues and corrections can be found at www.mythsofinnovation.com.

If you give me a typo or correction I don’t yet know about, I’ll send you a signed copy of the paperback edition when it’s out.

Please take a peek at the existing list before leaving a comment or sending a correction in - thanks!

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The folks at IdeaConnection interviewed me about Innovation mythology, the rate of change, and how progress happens. The book’s been out for six months, but there were some fun questions here I hadn’t heard before. Here’s an excerpt:

VB: One myth you talk about is the one that says today’s technologies are a logical and foregone conclusion of our past. Do you think the potential existed in the past, for our present to be a very different place? If so, could you speculate in what ways and why?

Scott Berkun:
If we believe that we have free will, and that we have the power to make choices in the present, then we have to believe people 20 or 100 years ago had the same freedom to make choices. We could have had steam powered cars: the first trains and automobiles were in fact steam powered. Many U.S. cities regret pulling out their networks of downtown cable cars, as now it’s prohibitively expensive to retrofit cities with much needed public transportation. The rise of both Microsoft and Google depended heavily on the mistakes of their early competitors and predecessors. Had Xerox, Palo Alto Research Centre, Atari, IBM, or AltaVista made one or two different decisions; we’d have a very different world.

You can read the full interview here.

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Tomorrow at 12pm EST I’ll be live on america.gov, answering any and all questions. Hope to see you there.

Posted in Myths of Innovation, On Tour | No Comments »

As part of her Sunday business column on ideas, Janet Rae-Dupree quotes both me and the book a few times in Eureka: it really takes years of hard work.

Posted in Innovation, Myths of Innovation, creative thinking | 2 Comments »

This was a special talk for two reasons. First, as my opening story explains, I delivered a special surprise to someone in the audience. Second, the 9am crowd was surprisingly lively and helped me put on a good show.

The talk covers a few topics from The Myths of Innovation, including epiphanies, the problems with innovation history, and many true stories about how great innovations actually happened.

Podcast (70 minutes, 30mb), Slides and description.

(Skip to the 11:05 mark in the podcast to bypass intros).

Posted in Innovation, Myths of Innovation, On Tour | No Comments »