Here are this week’s links:
If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been writing about a wider and wider range of things. This is no accident. My ambitions with books and the blog are wide. I’ll always be writing about pm, design and innovation things, but will always be writing about wider things too.
But I’ve failed to involve you guys in the process as much as I’d like, which I’m fixing now.
I put together a list of old requests from blog comments and emails, and found a little tool called slinkset that lets anyone vote, and submit new topics.
My promise: I’ll grab a topic every week and write about it. Anything goes. Whatever, and I mean whatever, makes it to the top of the list, I’ll write about on the blog.
Here’s what to do:
It’s that easy. No registration required.
If you guys use it, I’ll find a way to integrate something like this into scottberkun.com (perhaps there’s a WordPress plugin that approximates slinkset).
Give it a spin – let me know what you think.
The word secret runs rampant not only in business magazines, but also in self-help books. To our general disappointment, often the tips and advice described aren’t secrets, and never were, as no one, not even the people mentioned in the articles, ever really tried to keep these facts ‘secret’ from anyone.
The word secret makes the boring sound fun. Doing laundry isn’t something most people look forward to, but secret laundry almost sounds interesting. The word secret promises short-cuts, tricks, or things people don’t want us to know, which all connote ways to get one up on others. This little semantic trick works on the insecure and the inexperienced, since they’re prone to believing there is just one insight that will solve all their problems.
After going around the block a few times, we’re all disappointed to learn that secret sauces are rarely all that secret. As a kid, I remember being amazed by honey/mustard as sauce at McDonald’s – I somehow never realized I could make the same thing in 12 seconds in any American kitchen. Certainly McDonald’s would be the last to inform me I was already in possession of honey mustard sauce in my very own home.
Innovation has similiar (ab)use, as sticking it on front of things can bring new life to the ultra-dull. I once saw a laundromat with a neon sign that said Innovative dry-cleaning, but I couldn’t figure out what the innovation was, as they couldn’t get a small tomato sauce stain out of my shirt pocket.
It should be no surprise these days that the two words, secret and innovation, often appear together. They make quite a pair.
In this recent article on CNN, called learn the 5 secrets of Innovation, we hear this yarn:
One of the men behind the study, Insead’s Hal Gregersen, told CNN, “What the innovators have in common is that they can put together ideas and information in unique combinations that nobody else has quite put together before.”
Ok. So you have to be unique and special, or have unique and special ideas. I don’ t agree, but it turns out neither does Gregersen, as a paragraph later he’s quoted as saying:
“The way they act is to observe actively, like an anthropologist, and they talk to incredibly diverse people with different world views, who can challenge their assumptions,” Gregersen told CNN.
Anthropology has been a field of study for over 100 years. And was practiced long before it was ever called anthropology. Hard to call that a secret. For the sake of argument, before calling anything about innovation or invention NEW, it’s worth taking a quick pass at the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution to see if they did similiar things then. Much of what we get so excited about today (e.g. progress/invention/business), has been done many times, and often better in some respect, before.
To be fair, I highly doubt Gregersen asked CNN to put the word secret in the article – he’s just the expert they’re quoting and he’s along for their ride. And he does offer some excellent advice – hard work:
To improve your questioning skills, Gregersen recommends identifying a problem and writing nothing but questions about it for 10 minutes a day for 30 days. He says that over that period the questions will change, and so will your understanding and approach to the problem.
This is good advice. But it’s advice few want to hear. What he describes is work. At least it looks and smells like work. The work is called thinking, which is very rarely mentioned in lists of secrets. People who think harder about a problem, and work at it longer, are more likely to be successful. End of story.
Over at Harvard Business the same study is examined again, and Gregersen offers more solid advice:
You might summarize all of the skills we’ve noted in one word: “inquisitiveness.” I spent 20 years studying great global leaders, and that was the big common denominator. It’s the same kind of inquisitiveness you see in small children.
Small children get mentioned often in business articles about creativity, yet somehow the Fortune 500 hasn’t sponsored any kindergarden meet and greets just yet.
In part that’s because the most misleading thing in much research on “how to innovate”, and certainly in much business writing about such research, is the focus on creativity as the bottleneck. Inquisitiveness, sparks of insight, and creative talent is the focus of much writing on innovation, and it’s far from the whole story. The point about children, and any good book on creative thinking, is that ideas are cheap. It’s finding successful people who are willing to bet on different ideas, and people with ideas who are willing to do the legwork to convince others of the merits of something that doesn’t exist yet (and prevent them from killing their ideas), that’s the challenge.
If there’s any secret to be derived from Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, or any of the dozens of people who often have the name innovator next to their names, is the diversity of talents they had to posses, or acquire, to overcome the wide range of challenges in converting their ideas into successful businesses.
The big ideas were just part of the story, and arguably a small part. Kindle was not the first digital book reader. The i-pod and i-phone where not the first music players or cellular phones. Google was far from being the first search engine that sold ads. Amazon was not the first on-line bookstore. The ideas, at least the big ideas involved, were not new or original, at least not in high level concept. The story of all these companies and ideas has more to do with how they elevated and improved upon what already existed, or took it in new, simpler, smarter, more useful, more profitable directions.
This story is much less sexy. It’s not as dramatic and nowhere near as romantic. But I’m convinced it’s way more accurate and more useful to people who want to do interesting things with their own lives.
Most important, the story of moving an idea into a product, and then into a successful business (the definition of innovation suggested by these CNN and HBD’s articles) involves these progressions of challenges:
And the list goes on. How many of these challenges are overcome primarily by inquisitiveness? Or creativity? Not many. Good thinking is required all along, but no special creativity technique or magic insight is a key link in the chain. The role of ideas and creative thinking in innovation is always overstated because the other stuff is hard to romanticize, hard to sell and hard to get ordinary people excited about.
To be an entrepreneur, an inventor, a researcher or even an artist, is to take a bet that you can overcome a hundred different kinds of challenges that no person could ever entirely prepare for. It’s to realize, or simply pretend to ignore, that you will face challenges that slice across a dozen fields of study and degrees, in the same way that life and the universe does.
The closest thing to a real secret is this: In my years studying and teaching all things innovation, there’s one fact that’s the hardest for people to swallow and it goes as follows – To invent or create is to take a bet against the unknown. No matter what you do, you are still betting you can do well in the face of many things that are out of your control. Don’t like that? Don’t want uncertainty? Then do something else. Comfort with risk and uncertainty is the real secret. Or at least acceptance of the fact you can work your ass off for uncertain rewards. Anyone who wants to create something new is placing a bet that their view of the future is better than everyone elses’, or at least their competitors. It’s no surprise many of the elite CEOs/Innovators/Inventors have supremely large egos – they likely had these character traits well before they became famous.
The study I want to see is to compare 20 smart inventors/entrepreneurs who failed, with 20 who succeeded, and see if a researcher can find any identifiable traits or tactics that distinguish them. My suspicion is that the difference between them will be very narrow. Just as the differences between the top 10 athletes in any sport in the world, and the top 50, are thin indeed. Once you get beyond strong basic competence, it’s small factors that make a difference. And when it comes to the history of business innovation, the factors are often very small, and often beyond the control of the players involved, facts CEOs and business writers rarely profit from admitting.
Went through my list of stuff acquired this year. Turns out I read a lot of books.
Here’s the best (purchasable) things I found in 2009:
Thoughtless acts, by Jane Fulton Suri – This is a great book for any design, or creative thinkers out there. Published in 2005, I read it back then, put it a stack of books, and only rediscovered it this year. It’s a collection of photos of objects redesigned by ordinary people to serve purposes beyond what the designer expected. (Nice article with many photo examples here)
Brain Rules – I’ve read many of the ‘neuroscience for general audience’ books out there, and this is hands down the strongest, best written, most applicable and best supported of the bunch. This book was a strong influence on Confessions, as the book emphasizes learning, improving brain function, and how our bodies and brains work best in harmony with each other, all points made in various ways in Confessions.
LogicComix – I have a degree in 
Logic, which is practically worthless, but studying logic had all sorts of hugely important side effects, including discovering the work of Bertrand Russell, who is likely my favorite philosopher of all time. This unusual telling of his life story in comic book form sounds like a bizzare idea for a book, and it is, but it makes for a surprsingly entertaining and moving read.
The Book of Genesis by Crumb – R. Crumb is a legend of comics, known for his odd and disturbing images. Who better than to take a crack at the bible? He illustrates the entire book of Genesis in all its strange and odd glory.
When I meet people at a party and they ask what I do, I tell them I write books. They ask what kind of books, and when I mention I wrote a book about project management they often roll their eyes, half joking, and say with a smile why would you write a book about something as boring as project management?
To which, I answer. Everything is a project.
And they say, what?
And I say, again, Everything is a project.
How did you get to this party? I ask. Well, that’s a project. How did you plan and deliver the last party you threw for others? That was a project too. The making of your home, the delivery of electricity and water to it, and the earning of wages to pay for all these things are all various forms of projects, or consist of activities roughly comparable to any definition of a project.
Then I say the kicker, project management is only as boring as the thing being managed.
On a good day, they look at me for a long moment, their faces frozen with that lost in thought look we all make when someone surprises us with something interesting to say. And then they say “Huh”, in a way that implies their brain is doing actual thinking. To fill the void, I often ask where they are from, or if they’re having fun, successfully completing the project of changing the conversation with a stranger at a party. Often they decide to return to talk of projects, proving it’s possible to make it not so boring after all.
On a bad day, they conclude I’m more boring than they thought, and despite their full Martini in hand, excuse themselves to the bar to get a drink.
I wrote earlier about why project managers get no respect, and that’s because people who make a big deal out of the project-manageryness of their work, as opposed to the domain of the things they make (homes, software, films, cookies) come off as a kind of weenie, a pm-weenie if you will. They appear to be people who are more interested in schedules, budgets and methods than the results those tools help achieve, which is kind of weird. It’s like the director of a bad movie who talks only about his fancy zoom lenses, or that the film came in under budget. They miss the point.
But the best project managers, including those people who do lead or manage things yet never use the pm title, somehow know instinctively that everything is a project. They know there needs to be a driving force of thinking, a constant source of social energy, a list or a table or a spreadsheet, that makes it easier for everyone to push their own small decisions forward, increasing the odds with every single effort that the results will be good. Good project managers aren’t even necessarily very organized, they know many ways to drive people forward and hold them to commitments, even without a GTD brain implant.
There are many ways to look at all that we do, but the project-centric view is potent. Everything in work, and many things in life, has a goal, a set of constraints, some design challenges, a schedule, a few dependencies, some key relationships, etc. And it’s hard to be good at managing, leading, teaching, creating, making or building just about anything if you have absolutely zero skills at project management. To me, anyone who is a writer, a VP, a salesman, a film-maker, a teacher or an athlete does project management of a sort nearly all the time.
When I get stuck, at work or in personal life matters, or I see someone else who is blocked, I say, out loud, everything is a project. If I’m blocked, what are my goals? What are my assets? What are my liabilities? How can I divide this big thing I’m stuck on into smaller pieces, one of which I might be able to tackle? And sometimes just realizing there is a simple easy way to re-frame anything into the form of a project is enough to get things moving again.
Here are this week’s links:
I’ll be in Portland in a few weeks, early in 2010. Speaking at the Art Institute, hosted by CHIFOO, on Wed January 6th, at 7pm, about Confessions of
In a desperate fit of end of year holiday boredom, as I’m self employed and don’t quite long for these weeks off as I used to, I decided it’s time to fix up my office.
If I’m actively writing a book, over time my research methods create piles of books all over the place. I did heavy research for Confessions, and there were papers, books, journals, and articles just about everywhere.
When a book is done, there are several weeks of promotion, and it’s only now, about 8 weeks in, that I finally get around to fixing up the disaster area that is my office.
In the photo below, I’m 30% of the way in to sorting things out, and things are complete chaos. Hopefully I’ll post another photo this week with everything nice and fixed up.
That’s my knee on the right, and my desk above it.
I dare you to post a picture of what your desk/office looks like right now.
I have a huge quote file I’ve been keeping since 1990, and it’s about 300 single spaced pages of quotes I’ve collected over the years. I think the practice of typing these things in is good for writing. Unable to sleep tonight I stumbled through the file, and found this one.
In the old testament and in the Jewish Interpretive and mystical texts, there is an emphasis on the importance of the spoken word. Speaking is the cause, not the antithesis, of an event or action. The words of the prophet are true because they are spoken, not the reverse. Prophecy is not witchcraft; it does not foretell the future but creates it. – Reesa Grushka
The curious thing about my affinity for this quote, and my last book, is I’m a big believer in the notion talk is cheap. It is. But talk can, at times, have great power. Saying things out loud, even if only to yourself, changes how you think and feel about whatever it is you choose to say. On the first day someone speaks the truth about something everyone else has been too afraid to say, or admit to themselves, the world changes forever. Telling someone you love them for the first time, or that they’ve hurt your feelings, or a thousand other scary things can take more courage than any amount of action.
Here are this week’s links:
‘I rarely follow it 100%, but I do believe what people want for Christmas, or as gifts in general, are not consumer objects, but experiences and acts that require the giving of our time, not our money.Here’s my post from last year about some rules I made up for gifts:
So this year I made two rules:
I’m actually thinking this year to write a letter – not an email, but a letter, to various folks I care about. Will be more personal than anything else I suspect they’ll get this year.
My latest essay for Forbes.com is now up – it’s called the importance of what you say.
Many are surprised to learn that for centuries many of the great writers in history, from Emerson to Mark Twain to Peter Drucker, made much of their incomes not from their ideas alone, but from the interest people had in hearing them talk about those ideas in person. A different level of understanding comes from seeing someone explain his ideas to you, before your own eyes, in real time. You can’t shake hands or share some beers with an idea, but you can with its creator.
Read the full article here.
Sometimes information visualization goes wrong. We quickly confuse whizzy fun visuals with using visuals to make explaining things easier. Here’s a recent example.
Michael VanDaniker used the open source data-viz toolkit Axiis, grabbed the data from w3schools.com for browsershare, and made the chart below. He explains in nice detail how he did it. To be fair, I suspect his goal was just to show off the toolkit, not necessarily to make a useful or usable chart. Much of his blog is well written posts about how to use various visualization tools, with code samples.
But the web & twitter has picked up this sample of his work, and has called it ‘wonderful’, ‘fascinating’ and ‘fantastic’ which in any sense of practical value, it isn’t.
If you want to play with the chart and decide for yourself first, go here.
Here’s a snap of the chart:
So far so good. This definitely looks cool, no doubt. It even looks like the Firefox logo. But looking cool and being useful are very different things.
If you move your mouse over any block, you get a pop-up that explains what the hell you’re looking at.
Which is also fun and cool, especially when you fly your mouse around really fast, and see each unit flash, bubble up, and highlight. But after five seconds, it’s hard to know how each unit of info relates to the ones near it. It’s quite disorienting to wander around in these circles. If you try to use this visualization for anything real, it falls apart quickly.
The first missing piece of design knowledge is that the primary axis in data is (often) time, and time is easiest to understand linearly. Showing time in spheres, cubes, or concentric circles, while novel, adds little value, and makes time hard to understand. If you don’t get the direction the data is moving in, it’s very hard to see patterns or ask good questions.
The second problem is curves distort our perception.
After a month of promoting Confessions as hard as I can, and doing more than 30 talks or media appearances in the last talks in 4 weeks, I finally have some down time.
Here are this week’s excellent links and the only stuff I managed to read this week while on the road:
A recent email from the mailbag echoes other email collecting dust in the mailbag, so I figured I’d beat the rush and answer here.
Hello I will be graduating college in two weeks and want to more about certain careers. Project management is one of them and thought you might have some insight, based on your blog. I have a few questions that I hoped you could answer.
Signed – Mr. Student who wants a job
Here are his questions, with answers.
Q: As a graduate how do I get on the path towards project management?
For most of the industries in the world you never start out as a project manager. That’d be like getting off a bus in L.A. and becoming the director of a $200 million Hollywood film. You have to earn responsibility through experience, which makes sense. Often people who eventually become project managers start out in more junior roles and after earning credibility move into project management. Without front line experience it’s easy for the project manager to have no clue as to what she’s doing, or have no idea how insulting or destructive their decisions are to folks in specialized roles. MBA graduates who enter the workforce with little other experience beyond MBA-structured internships have similar challenges.
There are exceptions. Some schools have programs that focus on management, or even project management, and likely know of corporations that have entry level project manager roles. Microsoft does – it’s called program manager. You start with very small slice of a project and if you do well, that area of responsibility grows. If you don’t do so well, you hit the streets.
2. Are there entry-level type project management positions?
See above. They do exist, but they’re industry specific as they should be. You might need to do an internship, or work for less than you’d like, to get in the door.
3. What skills should I develop to market myself as a project manager?
This is easy: WORK ON A PROJECT. Go make something. Grab a friend, build a website, or a blog, or something. Anything. Build a house. Build a couch. Make a movie. Volunteer your PM skills wherever you can in return for a reference. The best way to market yourself is to get experience, as there is nothing more dangerous for the world than someone who wants to be a project manager but has never managed a project in their life.
If you’re already at work in a non-PM role, tell your boss about your interest to have a more leadership role, and suggest small projects you can manage that are related to your current work. If you’re willing to do it on a volunteer basis, and sell it right, often you can get PM experience without having to risk your current job at all. Then you’ll know if you like it or are good at it, before taking a bigger leap.
4. Any other advice?
If you’re still in college invest heavy in finding other people who want the same kind of work you do. The network you make in school is incredibly valuable. A year or two from now you might be looking for a new job, or still trying to find a PM role, and the number of people you know in the field will help tremendously. One of the best things I got from going to CMU was a circle of friends who went to work in the same industry as me, and could provide advice, job leads or connections I couldn’t make otherwise.
Yesterday the new book was reviewed on Slashdot – It’s a most excellent and positive review.
The book is loaded with chapter after chapter of practical advice. Berkun also shows what to do when things go terribly wrong; from how to work a tough room, when technology fails, microphones that go bad and more.
You can read the full review here.
While on tour in SF this week I ran into some folks who read my earlier books. They were surprised I’d write a book about a topic as boring as public speaking.
Happy to report Confessions is in stock again at amazon, and shipping.
I’m here in the San Francisco bay area all week, talking about the book. But my last stop on the tour, and my last speaking gig of the entire year is this Wednesday at Adaptive Path.
It’s a fitting place to wind things up as these guys have been big supporters of my work – I’m grateful and looking forward to putting on a great show.
It’s free, it’s open to the public and there will be some snacks and stuff.
When: Wednesday, Dec 9th, 6-8pm
Where:
