Year: 2008

And the winner of the invention contest is…

Posted on in Creative Thinkingby Scott Berkun

A few weeks ago I ran a little creative contest on inventions people would like to see. The best of the bunch, although there were many was from Carlos:

Ctrl+Zetit: an invention to undo things in life that just happened to you. Broke an expensive jar at your inlaws’s house? No problem… just Ctrl+Zetit!

Not a big fan of the name, but I sure would love this. I remember back at CMU, after an all nighter working on a programming project, going into the elevator, hiting the wrong floor and looking for the undo command. Carlos’ idea made me think of that moment, and a signed copy of Making things happen is on its way to him.

Thanks for all the great ideas – made my day!

How to diagnose creative failures in organizations

Posted on in Creative Thinking, Innovation, Managementby Scott Berkun

One of the first things I do when asked to help organizations be more creative is diagnose where failures happen. The word innovation is so vague that even executives and groups committed to it don’t understand what to look for or where the problems are, if there are any at all. The best definition for innovation is: significant positive change. It’s impossible to get significant positive change in one fell swoop. Even the most brilliant idea has to work it’s way through an organization and there’s no guarantee that good ideas can survive.

As a fundamental rule, the more gates and gatekeepers you have, the harder it is for even great ideas to make it to customers. You can’t have conservative management and innovation at the same time. Innovation demands risk. It’s no surprise entrepreneurs drive many of the new ideas in the world, since they have very few people (with the authority to kill ideas). In most workplaces the reason not much progress happens has far more to do with politics, bureaucracy and culture, all things born of management, than any lack of innate creativity among employees.

What you need to do is follow the life of ideas in your organization. When a new idea is suggested what is the path it has to follow to make it to customers? The idea has to survive from it’s birth in someone’s mind, through meetings and proposals, through prototyping, through the organizational bureaucracy, through budget battles, and finally make it out into the world to customers. Where is the bottleneck? Where do most ideas die? To understand this life you need to make a map of the lifecycle.

The idea lifecycle

Every organization is different and you can make your own list of gates, but here is a simple one to work from. Ask yourself where your own ideas, ideas from your team, or ideas anywhere in your organization tend to die. That’s the point where work needs to be done to improve the number of ideas that survive to the next stage.

  1. Idea
  2. Pitch
  3. Proof of concept
  4. Prototype
  5. Plan
  6. Commitment of resources to the plan
  7. Navigation of the bureaucracy
  8. Execution
  9. Release / Launch

In many organizations the bottleneck is surprisingly at the pitch. Despite all of the rhetoric, the culture is negative and kills new ideas as they’re born in meetings and conversations. And the skillset of pitching is underdeveloped. There’s no reason to worry about breakthroughs and transformations if people are both bad at pitching and leaders are bad at listening to them. If people are afraid to propose ideas, the problem isn’t creativity, it’s stifling management.

Innovation also depends on experimentation. To do something new demands taking risks somewhere in the organization, even if it’s just at the cost of a few hours of an employee’s time. Healthy organizations have many experimental ideas in play, giving people room to explore whether an ideas has merit or not before it’s rejected (or accepted). 

If most new ideas fail at the prototyping stage, then you likely need to hire different people. It’s product designers who have the strongest training for converting good ideas into good plans. Even if  your organization isn’t focused on design, their skillset for developing ideas is likely the key deficit you need to fill to move more ideas further down the pipeline.

Once you’ve identified where the creative bottleneck is, you can ask questions about how to improve the number and quality of ideas that make it through that step. Perhaps different people need to be the gatekeeper. Or the size and shape of the gates need to change.

And of course each idea and project are different. There could be lessons to be learned that are purely about the way the project was developed, rather than a fundamental problem with the organization. Project debriefs or postmortems should be common enough that people with new ideas can look back on previous creative projects and read about what the people who worked on it would have done differently.

If you liked this, checkout the free summary of the bestseller, The Myths of Innovation.

[Note: Post updated 3/4/2014]

Questions on Innovation from Microsoft

Posted on in Management, Microsoft, On Tourby Scott Berkun

Had a nice crowd of about 150, plus another 300 online at Microsoft today. The talk will be posted soon on the Microsoft research site, but in the meantime here are some of the good questions I was asked.

If you were there and recall others, or have some to add based on the Myths of Innovation talk (youtube version here for non-microsofties), fire away:

  • How do you rationalize your statement that there is no single method, with your advice for managers (delegate) at the end of your talk?
  • In your Luddite example you pointed out how hard it is to make change happen. Any advice for innovators on working around this challenge?
  • Is Microsoft an immitiator? Given your experience here and elsewhere, how do you view the perception of MSFT and other companies as innovators or immitators?
  • What is the role of culture in making innovation happens? Are there really as many recluses and lone geniuses as we think?

I’ll update this with my answers shortly.

Speaking in Chicago, Sept 22nd, Free & Public

Posted on in On Tourby Scott Berkun

I’ll be doing a lunch talk at DePaul University on Monday Sept 22nd, 11:45am. Thanks to my host, Professor Lisa Gundry, the talk will be open to the public. All that’s required is an RSVP by email.

What: Talk about Myths of Innovation + Q&A
When: Monday, September 22, 2008, 11:45-1:00
Where: DePaul Center (DPC) 11013 – Loop Campus directions.
Cost: Free!
RSVP: email creativity_center@depaul.edu

Description: How do you know whether a hot technology will succeed or fail? Or where the next big idea will come from? The best answers come not from the popular myths we tell about innovation, but instead from time-tested truths that explain how we’ve made it this far. These topics and more will be covered in this fun, interactive talk based on the bestselling book, The Myths of Innovation. Bring your toughest questions on creative thinking, innovation and management!

Hope to see you there – and please help spread the word.

Speaking at Microsoft next Tuesday

Posted on in Microsoft, On Tourby Scott Berkun

I’ll be swinging by Microsoft next week to speak at the Microsoft Research lecture series. I’ll be talking about Innovation, and telling stories that didn’t make it into the Myths of Innovation book with lots of Q&A.

WHO: Scott Berkun
TITLE: The Myths of Innovation
WHEN: September 9, 2008
WHERE: 99/1919 (Redmond, WA, USA)
TIME: 1:30-3pm
HOST: Kim Ricketts and Kirsten Wiley

Google’s web browser (Chrome): early review

Posted on in design, web browsersby Scott Berkun

I’ve written often about web browser design, so I happily downloaded Chrome, Google’s new web browser (download), a few hours ago. Although I’ve been running it through its paces, this is an early review, as its over days and weeks of use that some features shine, or disappoint. Disclosure: I worked on IE 1 to 5 for Microsoft in the 1990s, and currently use Firefox 3.0.1.

Summary: Chrome is a low-frills, light-weight, stable (for me) beta quality release. High points are the simple design, easy import of FF/IE bookmarks, and (promise of) greater performance. Low points are beta level completeness in UI, and few of the familiar frills from IE or Firefox. There are big bets in here that challenge existing browsers, but will take several versions to fulfill.

UI: The most notable move is starting with a thumbnail view of most recently visited pages. I’ve advocated for this in the past: anything a browser does to use past user behavior to accelerate future behavior is a win. Showing the choice of the ten most frequent places I go as the first place is downright basic UI design goodness. Otherwise there isn’t much UI to speak of. The the actual browser chrome is thin, making the name ironic. No menus. No home button (option to turn it back on). Dropdowns to the right of the address bar provide access to tools and options, much like IE7/Vista. Bookmarks, in a generic scrolling list, are accessed via “other bookmarks” in the lower right corner.

One clever perk is an improved find. Hitting Cntr-F extends the top right of the toolbar into an edit box, with a up/down arrow combo for moving through hits on the page.

Features: The big news is Incognito mode. You can open a window with maximum privacy: no cookies, no history, no nothing. Gripe is this can’t be a tab: it forces a new window. I was intrigued by this until I realized realized previous cookies still worked. So its not an entirely anonymous browser mode – it’s anonymous from the moment you create the window forward (either that, or I experienced a bug). History search is provided through the Most frequently used home page – it’s simple and worked well, and runs full screen (unlike FF or IE).

Another big move is task monitoring by tab. You can look at each tab as a separate process and kill individual tabs. Right click on the title bar, hit task manager, and there you go. In a couple of hours I didn’t get a chance to use this, but if it works as promised whole-browser shutdowns should be uncommon.

Performance: There doesn’t seem to be an easy way to test javascript perf – no stanard test suite i could find. Across the board of 3 different (kane, WD, SunSpider) test suites i ran, Chrome won. Margins ran between 20% to 100% improvement over FF or IE7. For subjective measures I spent a good half hour on Jay Is Games, as flash games tend to push browser & system perf to its limits, but didn’t notice significant differences. This is an ad-hoc perf analysis, and focused purely on Chrome’s strength (javascript), but it was nearly all in Chrome’s favor.

Platform . Much of the promise described in the Book about Google Chrome (Charmingly cartooned by Scott McCloud, but a 2 page doc would have been an easier read) is about the platform. Improved security, enhanced performance, and an architecture that makes plugins and extensions easier. It’s hard to test or evaluate these things in an afternoon. I definitely liked their story for what they’re doing and why, but platform plays require getting FireFox and IE developers to take advantage: a long and slow process, no matter how amazing the new kid on the block is.

Bugs/Gripes:

  • Tools.Options. There should never be consumer facing UI with labels “Minor tweaks” and “under the hood”. Anything in Tools.Options is under the hood. Call the different groups something that helps me pick which grouping I need: Browser Preferences, Network Settings is easy split. This UI is a conceptual mess, which is fine for a beta and common for the UI ghetto that is often Tools.Options, but a proper UI designer should get in here and sanitize.
  • Wrong Shortcuts. Rule #1 of being the new browser: make it easy for people from old browsers to switch. At best even early adopters will be switching back and forth between Chrome and something else for months. Most of the IE7/Firefox shortcut keys do not work in Chrome. Easy to fix, and hope to see this in the final release. It’s easy code. Why not have a FF or IE user mode that swaps in the right shortcuts (Firefox is guilty of this too)?

Chrome info and download

Going to SXSW? Vote for my panel

Posted on in On Tourby Scott Berkun

Never been to SXSW but was asked by Susan Price to be on a panel about Attention and Design at SXSW in March ’09. I have opinions galore about attention (See my essay attention and sex), and think this is a great topic.

The way it works is everybody votes and the top panels chosen become part of the program. So if you’re going and want to see this panel, or help me get to SXSW, please go vote.

Panel – Designing Experiences in an ADHD Culture: Attention Deficit Disorder is increasingly recognized as a cultural adaptation to information barrage. How can experience designers cope with distractability and lack of attention? What do we need to be doing, or not doing, to continue to connect with users amid all the noise? Is there an ADD upside?

More details and voting here.

If nothing else it’s worth checking out their cool voting tool and how their panel selection process works.

Upgrade your life: interview w/Lifehacker’s Gina Trapani

Posted on in harvard businessby Scott Berkun

Over at harvard business, I interviewed Gina Trapani, Editor at one of the most popular blogs in the world, lifehacker.com. I asked some tough questions about personal productivity and and she has great answers.

Here’s an excerpt:

S: There are so many ways to optimize work and habits, that it’s easy to get lost, or to spend as much time seeking out new hacks as using the old ones. Are there meta-hacks, or hacks for managing all of the hacks out there?

G: The hack is simple: pick a system and stick with it. The irony of productivity media is that it gives you an excuse to put off actually doing the stuff on your to-do list by trying out a new way to keep track of your to-do list. (This is the reason why sites like Lifehacker even exist!) But the reality is that, like humans, every task manager, calendar, smartphone, or productivity tool is flawed…

Real the full interview here.

Thursday linkfest

Posted on in linkfestby Scott Berkun

Interview w/Jared Spool, on Innovation (Podcast)

Posted on in Innovation, Managementby Scott Berkun

A few weeks ago I was fortunate enough to be interviewed by Jared Spool, industry legend and CEO of User Interface Engineering, about innovation, management and doughnuts. It’s a fun conversation, as both of us are fond of wisecracks and sarcasm. and I’ll be speaking at UIE 13 this October in Cambridge.

You can listen to the podcast (MP3), subscribe to UIE’s podcasts or read the text transcript.

Here’s an excerpt:

Jared: So, one of the questions that we got on our blog recently had to do with measuring risk, or measuring innovation. I think, they asked something like, “How do I track how innovative we are?” I hear that on a quarter to quarter basis.

Scott: [laughs] Which is terrifying to me! I was terrified of this person. Just imagine, right? Think of all the great innovators. Think of DaVinci, Edison, Picasso, Van Gogh. Could you imagine someone sitting over their shoulder saying “So Vincent, how innovative have you been in the last hour? Five? OK, great. I will come back in an hour and I will ask you how innovative you have been.” It just doesn’t make any sense.

Jared: Exactly. Just like the idea of Leonardo Da Vinci filing quarterly innovation assessment reports.

Scott: Exactly. Yes. Da Vinci, you know, your innovation ratio is down this month. With your performance evaluation, sorry, you are not going to get that bonus. Give us another Mona Lisa. Can you give us another Mona Lisa please?

How do you teach leadership in high school?

Posted on in Teaching/Trainingby Scott Berkun

I was recently asked by a high school teacher about ideas for teaching leadership to teenagers (She heard about Making things happen, and is considering applying some of its content). They start in middle-school and the students are hand picked to continue throughout highschool:

The Middle School Leadership students are in seventh and eighth grade (12-14 years old). Every year they are hand picked or re-picked. If they demonstrate “leadership skills” they may apply to the High School Leadership class. These are the students who will primarily benefit from your perspectives on project management and leadership.

In an effort to stave off senioritis I would also like to incorporate some of the project management and leadership lessons in my twelfth grade honors and regular curriculum this year. Any suggestions?

I have my own ideas, but I’m hoping some of you will offer thoughts or experience. Anyone know of other programs like this? Or have experience running leadership programs for high school age students? Please leave a comment. Cheers.

More on learning from mistakes

Posted on in Essays, mailbagby Scott Berkun

Some recent e-mail about my essay on how to learn from mistakes. Brian wrote:

I enjoyed reading your article “#44 – How to learn from your mistakes”. One other category of mistake I would add to your list, really a continuation of the “Stupid” mistake, would be “Habitual”, or “Automatic”, whichever phrasing you like better. This is the case where you repeatedly make the same mistake(s) out of habit, it’s automatic. Take the person who wakes up every Saturday around 2pm and says “Gee, I wish I didn’t drink so much, why do I always do that?!”.

These are mistakes that we regret and always ask “Why do I keep on making the same mistake over and over again?”. From my personal study, I feel at the moment that the answer lies in making a new habit of pausing before we make a decision, and imagining the possible outcomes of the action and making a CONSCIOUS (rather than automatic) decision this time.

Absolutely – In fact Leo Buscaglia, in one of his books (I think it’s Living, Loving and Learning) talked about how being healthy depends on making more of our behavior choices. To grow as a person, in his estimation, hinges on seeing more and more of our own behavior, and even emotions, as choices and taking responsibility for them, instead of blaming others, or perhaps, the entire universe.

I’m at least at the point that when I wake up at 2pm on Saturday, I know full well why I made the choice :)

Ten Inventions I Want To See

Posted on in Creative Thinking, Culture, humorby Scott Berkun

I’m a reluctant technologist. I have a latent love for technology, but 90% of what gets bandied about as “the wave of the future” is about productivity, which I find funny, since I think our problem is quality, not quantity. I often miss what whizzes by as the latest and greatest because I want what’s timeless. Things so good they last more than a year, or crazy as it might sound, a lifetime.

And one day, instead of ranting to a friend by just complaining I listed the I wanted to see. Sure, they’re impossible, but so what. I’m turning all the filters off to see what happens.

Here they are:

  1. Annoyance teleporter: A device that teleports annoying people into a small, dark, damp room with someone they find as annoying as I find them.
  2. ChildMinder: Gun you can fire at people that makes them instantly remember the happiest moment of their childhood. Also comes in hand grenade form.
  3. Blabbermouth: Cell phone application that tells you what percentage of time you have been talking vs. listening per call, with lifetime and per contact stats.
  4. Comprehendo: An e-mail program that prevents people from replying to a message until they’ve actually read the whole thing.
  5. GarbageReality: A picture on every garbage or recycling container of where what you place inside will actually go.
  6. Food Scan-O-matic: A wand you wave over any food item that shows you where it originally came from, how it got to you, and which, if any, major food conglomerates were involved in its production.
  7. Treetalking: A language for talking to trees and stones so they can tell us everything they’ve seen.
  8. TempColor: Pots, pans, plates and cups that change colors to show how hot or cold they are (spectrum of red for hot to blue for cold). Also for water faucets, coffee mugs, bathtubs, etc.
  9. Travelrama light: A world travel stipend for every USA high school graduate. Sure, not an invention, but so what. Only 20% of Americans have passports. Is it any wonder we are often lost and clueless about how the rest of the world works? Most of us have seen almost none of it. We’d be collectively less stupid as a species if we all traveled more. And I’d start with the young: I’d make exchange programs cheap and highly incentives.
  10. UltraTravelrama: Instantly teleports everyone in the world to the place they most need to go, and teleport them back in a day. (Yes, includes auto-safety feature that wont teleport people in the middle of doing dangerous things, or into the middle of highways, etc.)
  11. Shop Idiot Remover: The requirement, by law, of a trapdoor at the front of the line of any busy Starbucks, bagel or sandwich shop, that auto-detects when the person at the front of the line is clueless, and moves them to the back of the line. (NYC does not need to install these – the staff thankfully do it themselves).
  12. Worldo: A bracelet that tells you three things, updated in real time. 1) How much wealth you have 2) How much of the earth’s resources you consume 3) How happy you are. All are indexed against national and world averages (See GNH).
  13. DreamPic: takes pictures of the things people see in their dreams. (I thought this was my own idea, until I realized I’d seen the movie Brainstorm, with Christopher Walken. So I’d want a dumb version of that device, that only takes pictures and only once per dream, ensuring people still have to interpret whatever they see in the picture).

Have some fun – forget constraints for a minute. What inventions are on your list?

Best invention gets a signed copy of Making Things Happen.

From the mailbag: Best request ever for writing advice

Posted on in mailbag, Writing Wellby Scott Berkun

I get a lot of email, and sometimes lots of blog comments. Some of it is very nice, has feedback and useful criticism, or suggestions for things to write about, and I’m grateful for it. Some are requests for speaking engagements which I make a living on, also awesome. A good chunk are requests to read, review, or watch things other people have done, which is fine if it’s not a generic piece of PR spam. And then there’s a pile that’s is harder to classify: I’m being asked for something, but it’s not entirely clear what it is.

Here’s a recent favorite that appeared in the comments of my post on how to write a book:

I PUT MY ENTIRE COMMENT IN CAPS LOCK SO IT WILL GET YOUR ATTENTION. (please read this!!! and help!!!) OK. I’M A MINOR (14) AND I WROTE A BOOK. I STARTED WITH JUST A PEN AND PAPER AND I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHERE TO BEGIN WITH A PUBLISHER. CAN PUBLISHERS STEAL IDEAS OF BOOKS? DO I NEED MY BOOK COPYRIGHTED? (please don’t think I’m stupid!) WHILE I WAS DOING RESEARCH, I READ THAT MINORS CAN’T GET BOOKS PUBLISHED AND I WANT A KNOWN PUBLISHER TO READ MY BOOK. MY BROTHER, WHO IS ALSO A MINOR, IS WRITING THE SEQUEL TO MY STORY. HOW DO I GET A PUBLISHER TO NOTICE ME? YOUR ARTICLE WAS DISCOURAGING, BUT IT WAS AN EGO DEFLATION THAT I REALLY NEEDED. PUBLISHING MY BOOK IS GOING TO BE HARD, AND I NEED ADVICE FROM SOMEONE LIKE YOU, SOMEONE WHO’S BEEN THERE, DONE THAT IN THE WRITING BUSINESS. (Sam)

Dear Sam:

First off, Caps lock BAD. Very BAD. Don’t do it. Yes, you want attention, but there is good attention and bad attention. Good attention, in this case, is to seem smart and like you’ve done your homework so I’ll want to give you advice. Bad attention is to seem crazy, annoying, helpless, confused and random (which writing in ALL CAPS make you seem). Luckily your comment was so funny and genuine, it outweighed the bad stuff.

And on to your questions:

You mentioned “I WROTE A BOOK”: Really? How long is it exactly? Most books are 50,000 words or more (roughly 200 pages). Of course there are many published books that are shorter, but if all you have are a few pages, as far as a publisher is concerned, you have a short story on your hands, not a novel or a book. But then again, if you can find your local kinkos, you can make a book of any size you’d like. If I were 14 I’d be my own publisher – it’s faster, easier, and probably more fun.

Can publishers steal ideas? This is so unlikely it’s not worth worrying about. Can’t think of a single instance of this actually happening. It’s more likely another writer will “steal” ideas, but that’s unlikely too. Provided you can prove when you wrote what you wrote, it’d be pretty hard for a publisher to get away with it anyway. I bet you a zillion dollars you should be worrying more about finishing your book, and writing well, than about your ideas being taken from you.

Minors and books: There is no law that says a minor can’t write or publish books. There have been plenty of young writers who have had books published (Paolini was a teenager when his first novel was published).

Sequels: I was quite impressed you’ve got your brother working on the sequel before the original is finished. Perhaps you can get your sister or cousin to work on the prequel?

How to get a publisher to notice you: Start by rereading my post. They don’t find you, you have to go and find them. Find publishers that makes the kinds of books you want to write, go to their website, and find their information on submissions. But don’t worry about publishers until your book is almost done.

The limits of leaked memos (Apple & Microsoft)

Posted on in harvard business, Managementby Scott Berkun

Another post at Harvard business is up – here’s an excerpt:

There is a difference between talk and action, and memos are 90% talk. We all know this. If a CEO at a 20,000+ person company wants to take action, he will, and most of those actions will surface through the executive chain. The corporate-wide memo is the most diffuse and overrated tool in an executive’s playbook, but since it’s the only play that most of the world sees, we naturally over-represent its significance. In every paragraph ask “Is this talk or action?” and you’ll see more clearly what the memo actually means, if anything at all.

Full post here.

Speaking in Milwaukee, WI, Fri Sept 19th

Posted on in On Tourby Scott Berkun

I’m a travel whore, I admit. If I can go somewhere i haven’t been, and on someone else’s dime, I’m a happy man. So when I had a chance to speak in Milwaukee and the dates lined up, I said yes. I’ve been to 41 of the 50 U.S. states and this trip will make it 42.

I’ll be doing my famous full day seminar, Making things happen, based on the bestselling book. It’s a bargain rate: $125 for the full day, ridiculously inexpensive for any kind of full day professional seminar. Here are the details:

When: Friday Sept 19th, 2008
Where: University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Description: Despite all the jargon, methodologies, and magic bullets, most software projects do not end well–certainly not as well as everyone hopes they will when they start. This interactive, practical, and fun workshop, based on the best selling O’Reilly book, explores the true reasons projects work. There are no trendy terms or magic bullets in this workshop. Instead, we talk about the tough situations that arise on every project, explore different ways great project managers have handled them, and nail down how to avoid the big mistakes even experienced leaders make. Bring your toughest situations, challenges, and experiences, and they’ll be worked into the workshop or discussed during breaks.

Registration and seminar outline here.

btw: I’m working out the details for a public talk on innovation in Chicago on Mon Sept 22nd. Stay tuned.