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 »

One interesting theme in the research I’ve done on creative thinking is the role constraints play in fueling creativity. Many people find this paradoxical: shouldn’t having infinite resources and freedom make creativity easier? Well, besides the fact that supplies of infinite resources are hard to find, there’s plenty of evidence creative people get fuel from constraints.

One favorite example comes from Dr. Seuss. The book Cat in The Hat, and many of the books that followed, were born out of a requirement to only user 250 different words.

In May 1954, Life magazine published a report on illiteracy among school children, which concluded that children were not learning to read because their books were boring. Accordingly, Geisel’s publisher made up a list of 348 words he felt were important and asked Geisel [aka Dr. Seuss] to cut the list to 250 words and write a book using only those words. Nine months later, Geisel, using 236 of the words given to him, completed The Cat in the Hat. This book was a tour de force - it retained the drawing style, verse rhythms, and all the imaginative power of Geisel’s earlier works, but because of its simplified vocabulary could be read by beginning readers. These books achieved significant international success and remain very popular. (From wikipedia)

Of course this isn’t to say that all constraints are good. Some constraints make a solution impossible. If I asked you to build me a spaceship to Saturn that cost $5.50 and have it done by noon tomorrow, it’d be insane to criticize your lack of ability to find a solution by saying you’re not creative enough. But on the other hand, JFK’s proclamation to go put a man on the moon by 1970 seemed impossible to many when he said it in 1962.

The challenge is knowing how to define problems such that they provide enough constraints to help creativity, but not so many that creativity, or any solution, is impossible. The skill of defining requirements, the PM jargon for defining constraints and goals, is all too rare skill that doesn’t get the respect it deserves.

(See also, do constraints help creative thinking?)

Posted in Innovation, The Art of PM book, Uncategorized, creative thinking | 5 Comments »

This is informal research, but it sure raises some good questions (Why isn’t there a business school or psych dept. doing this sort of thing?).

My friend Konrad over at uber Seattle design studio Artefact put together a mini-study on the effects of different pitches for the same idea. The surprising result? Well I can’t tell you, only that it has something to do with mad-libs.

Go here for the full article (with charts!):How an idea is presented impacts its appeal.

Related post: the ever popular essay: How to pitch an idea. A topic I explored in the University of Washington course I taught on Creative Thinking (Syllabus in PDF).

Posted in Innovation, The Art of PM book, creative thinking | 3 Comments »

I’m fascinated by what happens to books after they’re bought. Are they put on shelves, never even cracked open? Or are dog-earned, coffee-stained and highlighted until the cover falls off? Do they live on as doorstops or part of a makeshift shelf, or lie on the floor collecting dust.

I used to think books should be treated with care and kept in perfect condition, but as I’ve gotten older I find more appeal in signs of use. Nothing honors a thing more than using it well and it should show (Roughly the Japanese idea of wabi-sabi).

Over the last year a few folks have sent me photos of what they’ve really done with the artofpm book. Some are funny, some are sad, but it’s all honest and I love it.

Here are some, but I’d love to see yours: where is the book now? what funny things have you done with it? Post a photo or comment.

Posted in The Art of PM book | 2 Comments »

In the unexplainable department: I have a copy of the artofpm in my office that’s already been personally signed for someone named Edward. I have no idea at this point who Edward was or why I signed a copy for him.

As it’s not much good to the largely non-Edward named population I don’t really know what to do with it. So:

The first person named Edward that leaves a comment gets it sent to them.

Posted in The Art of PM book | 6 Comments »

(This is offer is closed - thanks for playing)

Are you, or is someone you know, currently working full time at a start-up company? Do you like free copies of bestselling books? Then read on.

I’m trying to learn if anything I said in the art of project management applies well to start-up environments. While some chapters don’t work as well as others, my hypothesis is that much of it holds together for any kind of organization. Decisions, leadership, and chaos are part of all projects, startup or not.

But I want to test the hypothesis instead of pretending I’m right.

I have 5 copies of the book ready to go - if you want one, here’s how you qualify:

1. Leave a comment with your name, or contact me here.
2. Include a link to your start-up’s website. No website, no book.
3. Give me an address to send the book.
4. Swear on your favorite person that you’ll read 4 or more chapters in the next month and send some feedback.

That’s it. I’ll sign each one personally for you and send it on it’s way.
Of couse if you’ve read the book already and work at a start-up, I’d love to hear what you have to say. Depending on what I learn, perhaps there’s an “artofpm for startups” edition in the future.

(This is offer is closed - thanks for playing)

Posted in The Art of PM book | 20 Comments »

Recent article about the Do-it-yourself MBA movement mentions The art of project management as a popular book among these groups, specifically the Personal MBA run by Josh Kaufman.

Can a personal MBA match the real McCoy?

(Thanks to faisal.com for the link)

Posted in The Art of PM book | 1 Comment »

My first book was published almost a year ago - While no one can predict book sales, that hasn’t stopped people, especially writers, from trying.

Below you’ll find a year’s worth of amazon.com sales data for The art of project management (provided by rankforest.com) with notes on my activities (This starts 4 weeks after the book was in stores because I didn’t know about rankforest until then). There are problems with amazon rankings, but they’re an easy indicator to track.

Here is the promotion rundown from 5/1/2005 to today:

• I used my newsletter, monthly essays and this blog to announce the book and get my writing out there.
• I created a postcard, and distributed it whenever I lectured.
• I did two self-organized book tours: one in the bay area (w/lessons learned) at book launch, and east coast 5 months later.
• I did one comically bad radio interview, two podcasts (at baychi and podtech), several web interviews and one webcast. I said yes to all credible requests (and still do).
• O’Reilly promoted the book in their catalog, website and bestseller list (once it got there), and invited me to write a few pieces for their website. They posted a sample chapter and allowed slashdot to excerpt another. Kathryn Barrett, publicist for O’Reilly, was fantastic, generously sending out reviewer copies to folks willing to write reviews for websites and magazines.
• This blog generates good traffic but most peaks in web traffic were driven by new essays.

Who knows if these efforts help - plenty of books do well without things like this, and many with big promotion budgets do poorly. It’s complex and a topic for another post.

However it happened, the book has been a big success. Thanks to all of you for visiting, reading, buying and spreading the word about the book. Every sale motivates me to work that much harder and write that much more.

The pairing of writing books and being for hire as a trainer/consultant feeds off each other: people who like the book often hire me and people who hire me often buy the book. So for any would-be writers out there, this is a great approach for a first book.

I’m doing well and have signed to write a second book for O’Reilly - I’m on track to put another dent in that shelf.

For fun, comparative data is listed for Malcom Gladwell’s book “Blink”. Not sure what happened to him on 10/16, but it looks like he survived his largest rank-drop: from the teens down to 57.

Posted in On writing, The Art of PM book | 8 Comments »

The nominations are in: The art of project management is a finalist for the 2006 Jolt Awards, sponsored by CMP.

Here are the General book nominations:

• Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become by Peter
  Morville (O’Reilly)
• Best Software Writing by Joel Spolsky (Apress)
• Innovation Happens Elsewhere: Open Source as Business Strategy by Ron
  Goldman and Richard P. Gabriel (Morgan Kaufmann)
• Prefactoring by Ken Pugh (O’Reilly)
• Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software
  Project by Karl Fogel (O’Reilly)
• The Art of Project Management by Scott Berkun (O’Reilly)
• The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century by
  Thomas L. Friedman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Posted in The Art of PM book | 3 Comments »

SlackerManager has a fresh review of art of PM:

This is a really great book and ought to have a permanent place on any manager’s (not just project managers) desk. Highly recommended for managers of all experience levels.

Full review

Posted in The Art of PM book, artofpm reviews | No Comments »

For all you Microsofties, I’m speaking on the main campus next week. If you the have a copy of the book, bring it and I’ll sign it (or anything else you bring) for ya afterwards.

Topic: Why smart people defend bad ideas
Date: Wednesday, December 7, 2005
Time: 12:00 P.M. – 1:30 P.M.
Location: 34/2615 Quinault

Posted in On Tour, The Art of PM book | No Comments »

Earlier today a brief review and chapter excerpt (13: How to make things happen) appeared on slashdot.org.

I’ve been reading a new book from O’Reilly which, despite my intense aversion to books of this type, outshines its class. Scott Berkun, has written The Art of Project Management. While my own review of it is tardy and still forthcoming, he & the fine folks at ORA have sent us an excerpt. Below is Chapter 13 - well worth reading, and getting the book.

Check it out.

Posted in artofpm reviews | 2 Comments »