Year: 2008

Report from Webstock & New Zealand

Posted on in On Tourby Scott Berkun

I’m writing this from within my rented campervan, on the west coast of New Zealand. It’s a popular summer thing here and after 4 days we’re finally getting the hang of it. But 1000 kilometers back in Wellington, I spoke at Webstock, a most excellent little conference here in NZ.

Natasha Hall, Mike Brown, and the other organizers did a kick-ass job, lining up some great talent (Damian Conway was a highlight for me), a sweet venue, and a stellar job with the conference badges, materials and a gorgeous canvas bag (As Kathy Sierra said, ‘stroke the bag’). If you get a chance to speak or attend next year, don’t miss it. They’ll treat you so well you won’t want to leave.

The photo is from Moeraki beach, and the famous, mysterious boulders. We head out to the glaciers via helicopter in a few hours, and hopefully we’ll see more cool stuff to write about.

molokaibeach.jpg

The secrets of the Parthenon

Posted on in architecture (real), design, historyby Scott Berkun

Parthenon
I watched a great episode of PBS’s Nova the other night about the design of the Parthenon. Heard lots of surprises of interest to designers and creators. It’s another example of how many innovations from history we take for granted without even understanding what they are.

What’s also amazing is how many different uses the building has had over 2500 years. It was a temple for Athena, a Christian church, a mosque, and an ammunition depot. It was bombed in several different wars, was stripped of marble and artwork by both the Turks and the British, and was seriously damaged by the first attempts to restore it in the 1890s.

  • They cheated on symmetry. Their understanding of aesthetics was so good they realized at the scale of the building several non-symetrical elements had to be added to make it look symmetrical. The middle section of the ground level is curved, and is six inches higher than the sides. Also the columns are tapered and few elements actually use the golden ratio.
  • We can’t replicate their quality of work. A $100 million renovation project is underway to repair 2000 years of damage, but they’re struggling to replicate the precision of craftsmanship. What took the Greeks ~9 years to build has already taken more than 30 years to repair, and is not finished yet. Without a computer or electric power, the Greeks had many clever innovations that were lost and are being rediscovered.

You can watch the video online and I highly recommend it if you’re into design history, architecture as technology, and the history of innovation.

Thursday linkfest

Posted on in linkfestby Scott Berkun

Creative thinking rules

Posted on in Creative Thinkingby Scott Berkun

A few folks forwarded different versions of this to me: hi+low had the image, but teczo had the writeup. And it appears to all come from an NPR story about Sister Corita Kent.

She was an art teacher who influenced many creatives, including Buckminster Fuller, Charles and Ray Eames, John Cage and Henry Miller, and is perhaps most famous for the 1985 love stamp.

corita_rules

    1. Find a place you trust and then try trusting it for a while.
    2. General duties of a student: pull everything out of your teacher, pull everything out of your fellow students.
    3. General duties of a teacher: pull everything out of your students.
    4. Consider everything an experiment.
    5. Be self-disciplined. This means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.
    6. Nothing is a mistake. There is no win and no fail. There is only make.
    7. THE ONLY RULE IS WORK. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all the time who eventually catch on to things.
    8. Don’t try to create and analyze at the same time. They’re different processes.
    9. Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.
    10. We’re breaking all of the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities. – John Cage.

Helpful hints: Always be around. Come or go to everything always. Go to classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully often. Save everything, it might come in handy later.

Love it! You can see some of her work online or check out the recent book about her work.

Live webchat w/me, Feb 5th on america.gov

Posted on in On Tourby Scott Berkun

The web is a funny place. I get requests to speak and write for people all the time, but sometimes the requests are from unexpected places, like, say, The U.S. State department. After a short chat with Alexandra M. Abboud, the coolest government employee I’ve ever known, I agreed to write an essay for their newly launched america.gov website, called How to innovate right now.

As a kicker, they run a monthly live webchat: anyone can sign in live and ask me questions.

Go to the Ask America website on Tuesday Feb 5th, 12pm EST. (The site currently says 9am EST, but it will be updated soon).

If you’ve got a question you’ve always wanted me to answer, now’s your chance.

And if you can’t make it, leave a question in the comments. That way when no one shows up in the live webchat, I’ll have something to do.

Wednesday linkfest

Posted on in linkfestby Scott Berkun

Why are people ignoring you?

Posted on in Managementby Scott Berkun

Found this list in an old notebook – I have no idea what exactly prompted the list. Guess I was feeling ignored at work :) Instead of blaming others, I took a shot at self-criticism, and assumed the problem was mine. What could it be?

Why you are being ignored (The rude Q&A style list):

  • You are silent
  • You are not as clear as you think you are
  • You aren’t convincing them why they should care
  • You pick too many battles and have never won any of them
  • You sound stupid to them
  • You are stupid (at least about the thing you’re being ignored about)
  • You waste time and never get straight to the point
  • You haven’t earned anyone’s trust
  • You don’t share your passion
  • You haven’t worked to find an ally
  • You smell funny
  • You always ignore everyone else
  • The people you work with are true fools

I’m sure you know someone who has potential, but always gets ignored – what else should be added to the list?

Do constraints help creative thinking?

Posted on in Creative Thinkingby Scott Berkun

Can you be creative without constraints?

MacgyverIt’s a tricky question. Creative people everywhere complain that they don’t have enough resources to be creative at work. In the lingo, “blue sky” refers to a project where the sky is the limit, and it’s the creative holy grail. “If only I could get a week to think blue sky, I could do amazing things”.

But one definition of creativity is the ability to transcend constraints. Dr. Seuss did some of his best work with the hardest constraints.  To find a clever way out of a difficult situation, or use a new idea to make lack of resources an advantage. I think about the Ramones or the Sex Pistols, bands whose lack of training became an asset. Or Spike Lee & Richard Rodriguez, filmmakers whose first films cost less than the price of a new car.

It’s interesting to notice how big corporations, with enormous resources, often fail at being creative despite their blue sky budgets. Is there something in the nature of constraints that brings out the best creativity?

Constraints as a special tool. We think of them as rigid, but they’re flexible things. Constraints can be:

  • interpreted differently
  • intensified
  • diminished
  • created on purpose
  • eliminated on purpose

Thinking like a manager, the goal is to have appropriate constraints that roughly match the goals. A team that is on life support needs to have constraints removed. But a team that is unfocused or out of control needs tighter constraints to function well.

Back in the 90s, Microsoft used to hire 3 people to do a project they knew required 5. Why? To create a set of constraints that self-motivated people would love. In trade for the extra work people received autonomy, and the net result was a creative, and productive, win.

Thinking like a individual, routines like writing an hour a day, or making a certain number of alternative designs, is a self imposed creative constraint to force my best work to surface, and in that sense I think everyone uses constraints in some way to help them be creative.

How do you use constraints in your creative work? Both at a personal level, but also at the project or team level?

(MacGyver is the patron saint of creative constraints).

Wanted: Software war stories for an O’Reilly book

Posted on in Management, Software/Web developmentby Scott Berkun

Beautiful teams

Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene, authors of Head first PMP and Head first C++, are working on a new book called Beautiful Teams.

The goal for the book is to capture great stories about software development teams in a book, using a format similar to the bestseller Beautiful code. I think it’s a great idea and if all goes well I’ll be contributing a chapter.

If you think you can write about a true story from your experience in the tech-sector, that includes something about the team, and the relationships between people involved and how that helped or hurt the project, contact Stellman & Greene here.

What to do if the world hates your idea

Posted on in Creative Thinking, Innovation, Writing Wellby Scott Berkun

One of my most popular blog posts ever, how to write a book, generates tons of comments and e-mail every week. Here’s an interesting one I couldn’t help but respond to:

David wrote:

Great article, gave me lots of inspiration and hope. I just submitted a proposal to O’Reilly, and it was rejected within 30 minutes. Very efficient, and very nicely worded, but devastating nonetheless. What do you do if you think you have a great idea, but the world disagrees?


The first rule of creative work: expect to be rejected. Ask anyone who reviews creative work of any kind, whether it’s screenplays, music demos, or book proposals, and they’ll tell you they reject a ratio of at least 20 or 30 to 1. Sometimes it’s 1000 to 1 in the case of movie actors or works of fiction. There is nothing wrong with you or your work simply because you have been rejected. Rejection means you are doing something many others want to do and it’s hard work.

Ask any writer, including the famous, how many rejection slips they’ve seen. They’ll laugh and tell you about how they papered their wall with them. Seriously, rejection is part of the game. I note many of these stories in The Myths of Innovation. The Star Wars screenplay was rejected by almost every major studio. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance was turned down over 100 times. Stephen King, J.K. Rawlings, John Grisham, you name it, they’ve been rejected. Do not give up hope: instead, use rejection as fuel. Prove them wrong. Get better at your craft. Work harder, and when you’re finished, send them a signed copy with your warmest regards.

Fear & doubt kill far more dreams than failure. -Jeet Banareet

In some ways how you handle rejection is self selection for creative work – if you cant handle a few rejections from publishers, how will you handle a few bad reviews of your finished book? No matter what you do, if you’re making something, many people won’t like it. In fact the more popular the thing is, the more people who will pick on it and for increasingly trivial reasons.

As I mentioned in the post, one major advantage of living in 2008 is how cheap it is to make things yourself. The only approval you need to create something is your own. You can self publish a book, make a video or a bunch of mp3s for just a few hundred bucks. If the world isn’t behind you, to hell with the world – do it anyway. The only thing stopping you is you. After you make the thing you imagined the world may respond very differently than it did to just the idea alone.

(Update): Of course you do need to consider now and then that the world might just be right, in some small way, about something you are missing. Perhaps you’re idea isn’t all that good, or you’re not explaining it very well, or it needs to be focused and directed in a different way. One of the best skills creatives need to learn is how to convert criticism into useful feedback.

Who I write for

Posted on in Creative Thinking, Writing Wellby Scott Berkun

The ever creative ze-frank is currently asking a great question about creative process.

From his current post:

When you make things with an audience in mind, do you have internal representations of that audience to help guide you in the process? Are you in dialogue with a cast of proto-audience members that somehow represent different facets of your perceived audience? Are there little homunculi that provide editorial voices different from your own?

My answer, which I posted, is that I don’t have formalized characters when I’m writing a book or preparing a talk. But there is an ongoing dialog in my head when revising that approximates three or four imaginary people:

  1. The curious neophyte. If someone at random walked in off the street would any of this make sense? Would they keep reading/listening?
  2. The expert asshole. What if the person who knew everything about this subject and loved to criticize read this paragraph or heard this lecture. What vitriol would I hear? What bullshit would they call me on?
  3. The daily grinder. How about the guy who actually does whatever I’m talking about for a living and when I’m done will go straight back to work. Will anything I write or say impact what he does the rest of the day? week? month?
  4. The fan. Will someone familiar with my work find this boring? repetitive? derivative? Can I make this more fun for them instead of less?

How to handle tough cricitism: an example

Posted on in Booksby Scott Berkun

Awhile ago a wrote an essay on how to give and receive criticism. Writing about it is one thing, but doing is another. Recently I saw someone handle a tough situation in public quite well – here’s the story:.

Sun engineer Bryan Cantrill gave an offhand review, at a videotaped talk at google, of Rosenberg’s recent book, Dreaming in code (A book I reviewed last year). Rosenberg, instead of doing what many bloggers do, and either a) ignore the issue or b) escalate things into a juvenile flamewar, he looked carefully for the intent, instead of the sizzle, of Cantrill’s statements and offered a well reasoned response.

The result was an intelligent, respectful, and illuminating discussion than spanned across both blogs. Kudos!

Anyone know of other recent examples of maturity handling of criticism? This should awards for this kind of thing.

(Seattle) Full day courses – interested?

Posted on in Seattle, Teaching/Trainingby Scott Berkun

Hi folks – you may know I make most of my living performing lectures and teaching workshops. I love to teach and it provides a solid income to support all the writing I do here and in books.

After 4 years of doing this exclusively for hire by fancy companies, universities and big conferences, I’m exploring offering my best courses to the public, so anyone interested can throw tomatoes at me in person.

What I’m looking to find out is:

1) Are there enough people interested in Seattle?
2) Which course I should offer first?
3) How much would you (or your company) pay for a day of training?

If you live in the Seattle area, please give the short survey a spin. Will take you exactly 45 seconds. Cheers!

If I can get this running here in my hometown, I’ll happily take the show on the road to other cities if, and where, there’s enough interest.

Favorite MLK quote on tech innovation

Posted on in Innovation, Philosophyby Scott Berkun

On days like this when someone famous is honored, I try to dig up something they wrote to compare what I think I know about that person and why they’re famous, with what they actually did and said. It’s always enlightening, but sometimes I find unexpected gems like this:

(yes it’s 3 long paragraphs, but I bet you $50 it’s the best writing you’ll read today).

Modern man has brought this whole world to an awe-inspiring threshold of the future. He has reached new and astonishing peaks of scientific success. He has produced machines that think and instruments that peer into the unfathomable ranges of interstellar space. He has built gigantic bridges to span the seas and gargantuan buildings to kiss the skies. His airplanes and spaceships have dwarfed distance, placed time in chains, and carved highways through the stratosphere. This is a dazzling picture of modern man’s scientific and technological progress.

Yet, in spite of these spectacular strides in science and technology, and still unlimited ones to come, something basic is missing. There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually. We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers.

Every man lives in two realms, the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live. Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal to become lost in the external. We have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live. So much of modern life can be summarized in that arresting dictum of the poet Thoreau: “Improved means to an unimproved end.” This is the serious predicament, the deep and haunting problem confronting modern man. If we are to survive today, our moral and spiritual “lag” must be eliminated. Enlarged material powers spell enlarged peril if there is not proportionate growth of the soul. When the “without” of man’s nature subjugates the “within,” dark storm clouds begin to form in the world.

If we believe this, then why is so little of what we talk about when we use the word innovation directed at helping people make, in MLKs terms, internal progress?

Related:

(hat tip to truehoop)

Thursday linkfest

Posted on in linkfestby Scott Berkun

Linkfest for Thursday:

  • This week in science podcast. If you want your science news infused with a sense of humor, this is for you.
  • Surprise – drug research biased. Apparently the efficacy of anti-depressant drugs has been overstated by the companies that make them.
  • Cool Tools. Kevin Kelly, a founder of Wired magazine, runs this website of smart tools and gadgets, mostly non-hi-tech, for people who like to work smart. There’s an e-mail newsletter too (Hat tip to Lynn).
  • Moleskinerie. One of my favorite cool tools are my moleskine notebooks, and this blog is about the many different ways people use ’em.

Is Google ‘white bread for young minds’?

Posted on in Creative Thinking, Philosophy, Teaching/Trainingby Scott Berkun

The Times Online has a short piece about the dangers of Google dominance for education, called White bread for young minds. It quotes a professor, Tara Brabazon, concerned about the trends:

Google offers easy answers to difficult questions. But students do not know how to tell if they come from serious, refereed work or are merely composed of shallow ideas, superficial surfing and fleeting commitments.

It seems unfair to blame Google for this. But in reading the article and some background on Brabazon, it doesn’t seem she blames Google either. It’s the author of the Times article who focuses the blame on Google.

In truth school textbooks are notoriously poor sources of information on history – as are television and films, mediums children spend as may hours getting educated by as their classrooms. Really what it seems she wants, is to teach children how to interpret all kinds of media. According to the article:

Her own students are banned from using Wikipedia or Google as research tools in their first year of study, but instead are provided with 200 extracts from peer-reviewed printed texts at the beginning of the year, supplemented by printed extracts from eight to nine texts for individual pieces of work.

I get the ban – but the article frames this wrong. The ban is to help people to understand what’s being banned, not to ban it forever. As best I can tell Brabazon is trying to teach a kind of
media literacy for research. The highlight of the article for me is this quote:

We need to teach our students the interpretative skills first before we teach them the technological skills. Students must be trained to be dynamic and critical thinkers rather than drifting to the first site returned through Google

And no technology can do our critical thinking for us – we have to depend on our brains for that one. However, there have been advocates of mandatory media literacy education for a long time. The core theme being to teach children how to compare sources, deconstruct advertising, and be savvy about what they read & see, instead of wasting time training students in rote research methods devoid of critical thinking.

Given the context, I’d hoped Tara Brabazon, the professor quoted in the article, had a blog, perhaps to respond to the thin, biased tone of the article. But her site lists only her books and CV.

She writes quite well and I’m intrigued enough by her smart, funny articles like Socrates in earpods: the i-podification of education to read more of her work.

Her most recent book is called the University of Google, which from the description advocates the teaching of research, but I couldn’t find a table of contents or even a review of the book. The best sumation of Tara’s own thinking on the issue was from these notes on a lecture she gave about the book.