Year: 2009

Thursday linkfest

Posted on in linkfestby Scott Berkun

Telling stories about telling stories

Posted on in Creative Thinking, Public Speaking, Writing Wellby Scott Berkun

Krishna makes an interesting point on his thought clusters blog about professions that involve getting paid for talking about the profession itself.

Historically most professions made this impossible. You can’t make a building about making a building, or prepare a meal that’s about preparing a meal. It’d be a real stretch if you tried (“The mashed potatoes represent the mashing of my mind in trying to decide what to make…”). Most kinds of work don’t create a narrative that’s easy for people to follow. But speaking and writing are based on narrative, this happens and then that happens, and on it goes. And you can tell a story about anything, including telling stories. Or telling stories about telling stories. Or blogging about speaking about telling stories about blogging.

The problem of course is this gets annoying, fast. People who hate Wallace’s Infinite Jest or Dave Egger’s A heartbreaking work of staggering genius, hate it because these works are self aware and self involved in a way narratives traditionally are not. But other people love these works for exactly the same reasons. Any kind of story can be made interesting if told well. Master storytellers can get away with a lot of things the rest of us can’t.

Personally I’m interested in writing and speaking for the same singular reason. It’s about making connections between people and ideas. That’s really all I care about. If I thought I could do that better with oil paints or interpretive dance I would. But since I’m pretty sure I can’t,  I’ll stick with words.

My next book… details inside

Posted on in Public Speaking, Writing Wellby Scott Berkun

For the last few months I’ve been working on the next book. In fact, since the last book, I started working on at least two different books, each of which fell over, exploded into flames, and disappeared from the universe from their sheer badness, before I worked my way into this one, which I’m happy to report is going well.

What’s it about? The life and times of a public speaker.

For years I’ve been making a living from writing and speaking, and its been quite a life. I’ve taught through lectures, keynotes, university courses, workshops, seminars, architecture tours, campfires, and street corners. I’ve traveled around the world to do these things, and to get heckled in foreign languages, to watch helplessly as laptops crash, microphones die and the front row falls asleep. There are tons of great stories to tell, and those stories make for an excellent and funny way to share what I know about public speaking and teaching people.

Stay tuned for more. I do plan to blog about the book as it comes together. And if all goes well it should be in stores before the year is out.

Sound good? let me know. And if you have a good public speaking story to share, drop me a line.

New video: How progress happens

Posted on in Innovation, Management, On Tour, politicsby Scott Berkun

The folks at the Tools of Change conference posted a video of my talk this week on How Progress happens. Here’s the description:

Talking about change is easy making change happen in most organizations is ridiculously hard. But there are things we can learn from the history of technology, political revolution and change, and there is a playbook we can reuse to help us avoid easy mistakes and seemingly popular, but actually self-defeating approaches. This fun, interactive, and entertaining talk will prime you for leading change, enhancing your skills for motivating, and making change happen in your world.

It’s mostly new material – plus includes fun references to poorly named 70s rock bands, Gandhi, The Roman Empire, Christians and Lions, and other fun unexpected stories about progress.

Press play above to watch right now, or go to the blip.tv page – either way its 40 minutes long, including Q&A.

Thursday linkfest

Posted on in linkfestby Scott Berkun
  • Video viewing stats are inflated. There’s evidence few people watch more than a few seconds of video, even though many sites count those drive-by’s as a “view”.
  • Innovation @ Alltop. Alltop provides ‘topic based aggregation’, or in English, they grab the headlines from leading websites on a topic and put it all on one big page. It’s kind of handy, though I only know about this because someone found me via this page on innovation (Thanks Melissa!).
  • A printing press in your closet. The coolest thing I saw at this week’s Tools of Change conference, was the Espresso On Demand Print machine. It’s the size of a large file cabinet, and can print and bind a 300 page book, with color cover, in 4 minutes. I now own an extremely rare paperback version of Myths of Innovation (They sold a bunch to attendees at the conference).
  • Photos from the New York Times R&D department. Includes a “make your own paper” kiosk and various new kinds displays.

(Seattle) Free training for unemployed tech workers

Posted on in Seattleby Scott Berkun

The good folks at Bellevue’s Construx software have a special offer for folks in the tech-sector recently laid off. Here’s a quote from their press release:

“During the dot com collapse the software industry was at the epicenter of the recession. Most of our clients were affected, and that meant we were affected,” said Steve McConnell, Construx CEO and author of five best selling software development books. “We remember what it was like before, and we are fortunate this time to be in a position to extend a helping hand to our friends whose companies are struggling.”

During boom periods many software professionals have difficulty finding time to sharpen their skills. “Our seminars focus on developing the skills to develop world-class software. We want software people to be able to build their careers, whether they have a job at the moment or not,” Mark Nygren, Construx’s COO stated.

They’re reserving 25% of the seats in some of their courses for folks that qualify (Must have been laid off after July 1, 2008). Details on the program here.

Wednesday linkfest

Posted on in linkfestby Scott Berkun
  • Review of idea generation / innovation management software. It’s more of a listing than a review, but it’s the closest thing I’ve found. I get asked about this all the time – anyone know of a better comparative review of these kinds of “creativity support” tools?
  • Designing in hostile territory. Good advice here. Especially the last bit: bite off as little as possible to generate proof.
  • How important is practice? Interesting thread on metafilter about the under/over rated nature of practice and how people think about it. Tech-y focus but not too much.
  • Innovation and invention. Found this transcript of a short speech by the CEO of Boeing the other day. Talks about his list of myths of innovation – different but similar to the ones in my book.

Why do designers fail? Interview w/Adaptive Path

Posted on in Creative Thinking, design, On Tourby Scott Berkun

Last year I gave a talk at UIE 13 on some research I’ve done into why designers fail.

I’ll be talking about failure again at Adaptive Path’s MX event in March.

In the meantime, I had the pleasure of getting some fun questions from Henning Fischer, on the topic:

Henning Fischer [HF]: Scott, welcome and thank you for joining me. My first question for you is: What inspired you to look into the reasons why designers fail?

Scott Berkun [SB]: Hmm. Let’s see. FAILING. I’ve worked on many projects and many of them didn’t work out well, or up to my expectations. And in talking to other designers over the years, I’ve learned it’s rare to find a designer who can point to the finished product and say, “This is exactly all that I hoped it would be.”

Read the full interview here.

No secrets: new project management blog

Posted on in Management, PM-Clinicby Scott Berkun

I get lots of thanks and kudos for pmclinic, a discussion list about real issues managers face, despite the fact I don’t contribute much directly to the thing anymore, and Shawn Murphy runs the list. Instead it’s 5 or 10 really smart, wise people who do much of the posting and advice giving.

One of these smart, wise, clever contributors is an industry veteran named Steven Levy. Why do I mention him now? Here’s why.

He’s set up shop on his own at a shiny new blog on project management called: No Secrets.

He’s already been busy with posts on How to kill projects, and is your boss a manager or an administrator?. Check it out.

Good advice from top bloggers

Posted on in Book reviews, Recommendedby Scott Berkun

My favorite books on start-ups and entrepreneurship is Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston. It’s simply a collection of good interviews with the right people asking the right questions. No phony big theories. No made-up jargony words in the title. Just good conversations with people who have experience I want to learn from. Love it.

In that vein, I’m happy to recommend Blog Blazzers: 40 top bloggers share their secrets. Stephane Grenier, the author sent me the book a few weeks ago and I read through it in a few hours. Seth Godin, Jeff Atwood, Eric Sink, Dan Lyons (Diary of Steve Jobs), and 35 other successful bloggers explain how they do what they do, what they’ve learned, and how they make money or get other rewards from their work.

For $16 and a couple of hours (books of interviews are fast reads) I learned some new tricks, had more confidence in the old ones, and definitely got my money and times worth. At first I was annoyed by some repetitive questions – but in some ways it was interesting to see how different bloggers answers compared with each other. I read a lot of blogs, including some blogs on blogging (but gratefully no blogs on blogs on blogs) but there’s still nothing as good as sitting down with a book.

Lose your job? Get a free book

Posted on in Making things happenby Scott Berkun

Been thinking much about what I can do in the face of all that’s going on in the economy (130,000 layoffs so far this month). Losing a job sucks and often triggers collateral suckage. I’m just a writer so I can’t do much in a practical way, but I can give out free copies of books.

The first 20 people who lost their jobs (scouts honor) who leave a comment or send in an email will get a signed copy of the bestseller Making Things Happen. Might help with planning whatever thing you decide to do next. Or make for excellent kindling, depending on much savings you had. It also has pretty pictures, which you can pretend is a very slow television show.

Sorry, but this is U.S. only. Think global act local and all that.

It’s not much, but until I find a better idea, I’m sharing what I have.

Failure: the secret to success (Honda & race cars)

Posted on in Creative Thinking, Philosophyby Scott Berkun

Nice little video on failure and its role in success. It’s vaguely an advertisement for Honda, but its very low key, and mostly interviews with engineers, product planners, and drivers about their stories of failure. It’s well produced, and definitely worth the 8 minutes.

Failure: The secret to success (YouTube)

(Thx to Livia for the link)

Also check out my essay, How to learn from your mistakes.

Top five things *not* to do when fired

Posted on in humor, Managementby Scott Berkun

I’ve quit several jobs in my life, I’ve been re-orged into stupid positions I didn’t like, but I’ve never been outright fired. On the other hand, my friend C. had 25 jobs in less than ten years and was fired from many of them. He wouldn’t answer his phone, so I imagined a conversation with him on bad advice to give the newly fired and here’s what we came up with. The funny ones are mine. The unfunny ones are his.

5.On your last day, send the following hiaku out to every large email list inside your company : “worker bees can leave even drones can fly away, the queen is their slave”. You will get many references for future jobs this way. (If you like this, see Fight Club). Other quotes from Fight club people will like to hear you say for no reason include “These are not my khakis” and “”Do you want me to deprioritize my current reports until you advise me of a status upgrade?” Inject them randomly into conversations, repeating them until you get a response, especially if talking to HR.

4. Paste your resume on your former bosses forehead. Walk right in, even if he is in a meeting, with a brush and a bucket of glue. Get a big stroke of glue across his forehead (or on the back of his head if he starts to run away) and then slap the resume on. You should be able to get one on there before s/he realizes what’s going on. If he resists, tell him “but you said you’d help me find a new job”. If he escapes, paste resumes to all of his items you can find. His briefcase, desk, chair, computer monitor, or his boat, spouse, dog, cat, or offspring. This is an excellent way to demonstrate both your initiative and your out of the box thinking.

3. Fire your manager. Nothing says you can’t fire your manager right back. When he says “You’re fired.” “You say No, you’re fired.” “No look we’re letting you go.” You say “No look here bossman, I’m letting you go”. Automatically negating what people say is not only entirely therapeutic, it’s a marketable skill used by many managers, some of whom you may have worked for.

2. Make a top 20 list of people at work you know are stupider than you and send it to them, including co-workers, superiors, executives. Make sure it’s in stack ranked order, with the review scores you think they deserve next to their names. And give each a nickname like “Stinky”, “Schmucko”, “Brickface” or “Smellster”. Print out 100 copies and post them on the walls in the hallway, bathroom stalls, and print another 100 for putting on the windshield’s of all the cars in the parking lot.

1. Start a mortgage bank. I’ve heard mortgage banking is the way of the future, especially this new thing called CDOs. Now that you are unemployed you are free to take all of your saving and start dishing out loans to people who have no savings of their own. It will work. I promise. A good friend of mine named Mr. Ponzi says so.

Bonus: Make sure to send out a final status report. The shortest one you will ever write in your life. One short sentence: I have no status!

——————–

Ok. If you’re here and haven’t smiled yet, that means you think this list sucks, I’m an asshole, and not funny. All might be true.

If so, I I invite you to fire me from making top 5 lists. It’s the least I can do for you. Go ahead, give me your worst in the comments. But be warned, I may fire you from leaving comments. Then you can fire me from commenting on your comments. And the fun will continue! (Seriously, I hope you’re doing ok).

What virtual seminar do you want me to do?

Posted on in On Tourby Scott Berkun

The folks at User Interface Engineering UIE have been great partners and I’ve done work for them at a few of their events. The cool news is they’ve asked me do a virtual seminar for them. You know – you can sign in online from anywhere in the world and learn / debate / heckle as if we were all in the same room. Here’s their list of past virtual seminars. It’s great. We can all be in our underwear and pretend to be all professional and business like. God I love progress.

The challenge is this. I’ve done zillions of seminars of various shapes and sizes, but i don’t know what you people want anymore. So I’m giving you a chance to speak up and nominate a topic.

The only constraint is this: It’s for UIE, so it has to been design / usability related in some way shape or form. Creative thinking or manager-y stuff can count. But I’m always looking for a challenge. Crazy and interesting are good. Take a look at my essay pile: maybe you’ll get some ideas for me there.

If I get a nice list of candidates from you by end of next week, I’ll roll them up into a vote to decide.

Or if you hate me and want me to go away and you all leave me comment-less, I’ll lie to the UIE folks and pretend to have received 245 emails pleading me to do a talk I’ve done before. Please don’t make me a liar. It’s up to you. No pressure though. It will all be your fault and I’ll burn in hell and hate you forever, but no pressure. (Perhaps I should do a seminar on how to be passive aggressive in blog posts :)

Upcoming travel: SF, NYC, Toronto, Chicago

Posted on in On Tourby Scott Berkun

I’ve got a nearly full calendar of speaking engagements this year – so far I’m recession resilient. We’ll see if it lasts. Here’s what’s coming up soon:

Microsoft layoffs: thoughts

Posted on in Management, Microsoftby Scott Berkun

The big news in this corner of the world are the layoff announcement at Microsoft. Steve Ballmer’s email drops this midway through an email this morning:

As part of the process of adjustments, we will eliminate up to 5,000 positions in R&D, marketing, sales, finance, LCA, HR, and IT over the next 18 months, of which 1,400 will occur today. We’ll also open new positions to support key investment areas during this same period of time. Our net headcount in these functions will decline by 2,000 to 3,000 over the next 18 months. In addition, our workforce in support, consulting, operations, billing, manufacturing, and data center operations will continue to change in direct response to customer needs.

It’s the biggest cutback in company history and my thoughts go out to anyone who is impacted today.

My take:

  • This is small potatoes in business history. It’s 5000 jobs over 18 months, a long spread, with an impact that many parts of the company won’t even notice. The normal attrition rate at a tech company has to be around 10% and 5000 jobs from a company of 90,000+ is about 5%.
  • The company will open new positions at the same time. The sky is not falling here. Eliminating jobs but creating new ones too (although it doesn’t specify a hiring target). There was an 11% drop in profits from last year, but other than Apple this doesn’t seem far off the mark for the sector, or the business world at large.
  • Drawn out firings. More notable is the choice to leave this open ended and draw it out over 18 months. What a morale hit. Bad news is best all at once. It frees people to move on and doing it early gives them an advantage. But now, without guidance to the contrary (e.g. cuts will focus on divisions X,y and Z) everyone is led to believe their jobs will depend on their review performance, making people look out for themselves at work more than is healthy for any team over the next year.
  • No Merit increases in FY ’10. We’ve seen the stick, where is the carrot? Recessions should mean smaller carrots, or maybe a less expensive vegetable, but something. I’d drop an entire product, or close down the least strategic group in my company, before I took away performance rewards.

The best summary of news so far and juiciest insider comments can be found at mini-microsoft.

Success factors for program managers

Posted on in Management, Microsoftby Scott Berkun

In response to my post on the lost cult of PM at Microsoft, Charlie Owen’s was kind enough to post his notes from a conversation with Joe Belfiore, my first boss as a PM, and now a VP at Microsoft, where he outlines what it takes to be a great program manager.

1) Maniacally focus on building a product your customers will love.

– Pound, pound, pound on the features while they are being developed all the way through the process.
– Constantly ask ‘How do we know this is good?’
– Perceive the reaction of others to your features.
– Know others will want to have an opinion.
– Recognize constraints make it hard to develop products customers will love.
– This takes energy, persistence and creativity.

Highly recommended. It’s short, memorable and hard to achieve. Read the full post: Success factors for program managers

An interesting follow up question is if great PMs focus on making products customers will love, why does it seem Microsoft generally fails at this.