Author: Scott Berkun

How to Overcome Cynicism

Posted on January 1, 2014March 20, 2021 in ask berkun, reader's choiceby Scott Berkun

How do you overcome cynicism in an environment determined to maintain it?

You overcome a toxic environment by walking out the door. Unless you happen to be a powerful person in the organization, it is not your fault that the environment is cynical, broken, dysfunctional, toxic, demented, twisted or incompetent. Managers and executives are paid a great deal more than the average employee and the main thing that comes with that pay grade is accountability. If the place depresses you, look upwards: the people in power make it this way. If nothing changes, it is no accident. It’s uncommon for people in power to be motivated to make big changes since they like being in power and change creates risk.

On a personal level, cynicism is for cowards. To be alive in this mostly dead universe is a miracle. To be born in a time and a country with clean running water, electricity and public schools is another. To be able to read, write and think well enough to complain coherently is a third. When it comes down to it, cynics are simply not paying attention.

Progress might be improbable, but low odds are what we’ve been working with all along. Do the thought exercise: if you had to time travel to the past, what year would you pick? If you do your homework I bet you’ll discover that the year you are in, as terrible you might see it, is better in most ways than any other so far. I’m not saying it’s great, or good, but if it sucks the least we can also say it’s the best we have, at least so far.

While I am all for skepticism, and by that I mean the challenging of assumptions, I am an unrepentant optimist about the opportunities we have, simply because we are alive. We can do almost anything. The problem is most of the interesting things take significant effort to do and it’s far easier to be cynical, not try, blame others and take false pride in complaining than to put effort into the uncertainties of trying to change things.

Cognitive bias wires us for denial and avoidance. It’s not easy to keep your eyes open but that is the only way progress is possible. History tells us progress can happen but is never likely. It is never the default and not something we get for free. In the worst of all cases I’d rather be Sisyphus walking up that hill every day, thinking, pondering, trying, learning, than the nameless guy at the bottom of the hill doing nothing for all eternity and whining about it.

If you do have an ally, talk to them. Come up with a plan. Aim for small wins and use them to draw others to your cause. You may need to do most of the work at first, but their support to defend what you do, and provisioning resources, may be enough to convince peers to join in.

If you don’t have an ally, make a friend. Who do you get along with in your world that you can share your point of view with? Maybe they see something you don’t. Outsiders can’t see everything insiders can and vice-versa. If you have no friends, read. You will find friends in our histories of people who felt like you do and did something about it.

Even if you are powerful, you can only change a culture one person at a time. See how to fix a team for advice on how to lead change. All change starts small. It must be grown, not constructed.

If you have no power, but have the choice, there is no shame in leaving a situation. It’s brave to quit in our culture if it’s for the right reasons. Only by leaving a bad situation do you give yourself the opportunity to create a better one.

“In this very real world, good doesn’t drive out evil. Evil doesn’t drive out good. But the energetic displaces the passive.” – William Bernbach

My Most Popular Posts of 2013

Posted on December 30, 2013 in this siteby Scott Berkun

There are always surprises in which posts earn the most attention and which are ignored. I’ve learned it’s hard to predict which posts will do well: some well written ones with great title hooks get little attention, and some throw-away quickies do really well. I don’t know any blogger that isn’t frequently surprised.

I don’t worry about traffic much, certainly not on a per post basis. I try to write for the long term, picking topics that will be relevant a year or more from now. I rarely chase headlines for this reason since the effort expended won’t pay off much in the long term. I want much of what I write to still be read a long time after I write it.

With all that said, here are the ten posts I published in 2013 that earned the most traffic:

The big surprise is my book review for The Great Gatsby. Most of the others are advice oriented, which make for easy twitter and Facebook fodder. The review somehow found a good home in google searches before the film came out and never fell off. Like I said, luck is a big factor in which posts pick up attention and which don’t. There are compounding effects too: once a post is popular, it ends up on top ten lists like this one, further ensuring it’s locked in place.

You can also see my best posts of all time, by category.

Why I’m Posting daily in January 2014

Posted on December 30, 2013 in ask berkunby Scott Berkun

I love writing by assignment, especially challenges that test my limits. I’m grateful to you readers for helping me out over the years, as many of the 1400+ posts here were responses to questions you asked (see reader’s choice to see them).

This year I created an easy way for you to submit questions and vote on previous submissions, called Ask Berkun. Its been great, except for my end of the bargain: I’m far behind, with over 30 questions in the queue.

To catch up, I’ll be posting every day in January (M to F) until I’ve caught up.

I’ll decide at the end of January about how to handle Ask Berkun requests in the future, likely returning to the originally planned weekly schedule. Please place your votes and add a question.

Thanks for reading, commenting and asking questions. I’m glad you’re here.

What designers can learn from the AK-47

Posted on December 23, 2013December 23, 2013 in designby Scott Berkun

Mikhail Kalashnikov, the primary inventor of the AK-47, died yesterday in Russia. His invention is possibly the most popular weapon ever made, as the design has been reused and modified to make more than 100 million weapons (an estimate, as no one really knows how many there are).

I’m not a fan of guns, nor of the unavoidable ethical challenges in designing for killing. However there are still lessons any designer can learn from the AK-47’s unusual story of success.

Simplicity can win. The AK-47 is not the best at any particular task rifles are asked to perform: there are rifles with better accuracy and lighter weight. However its simple, reliable, cheap to produce design has driven its popularity.
Focus on the common frustrations. The iconic curved metal design of the the AK-47 magazine both reduced jams and improved reliability (its heavy case is harder to damage). It’s a strange aesthetic for a weapon to have one element facing the opposite direction and it makes a good example of Sullivan’s adage form follows function. Many similarly motivated design adjustments, often at the expense of total weight and even accuracy, reduced common frustrations found in other weapons, or reduced the need for training to use, repair and construct the weapon.
Small markets can provoke designs that do well in large markets. The history of OXO Good Grips is they were trying to design kitchen tools for people with arthritis and other co-ordination issues. They discovered later their designs were valuable to everyone. The AK-47 was not designed with a plan for worldwide use. It was designed after WWII as a the basic service rifle for the Soviet Union. Because it was cheap to make and copy (in part because of failures to license the product successfully) the design was adopted by many other countries, and modified for dozens of different purposes. The Soviet Union used the AK-47 as its standard issue for arming allies, which helps explain the long history of the rifle’s success.
Dominant design matters. For many poorly funded armies the AK-47 has become the dominant design. Even when better rifles are introduced the switching costs of learning how to use, repair and construct can seem prohibitive, as it requires losing some of the major advantages of the AK-47. Much like the QWERTY keyboard or English measurements, some designs once adopted are hard to replace even when better alternatives exist as the psychological and economic costs to switch outweigh the perceived improvement.

How to present well without slides

Posted on December 19, 2013January 12, 2016 in Public Speakingby Scott Berkun

If you were having an important conversation with a friend at a restaurant, would you pull out a projector and put your slides on the wall? They’d think you were crazy as would the people at other tables. Rather that look into your eyes or give full attention to your words, your friend would have their minds divided between you and the images you were showing simultaneously.

Which raises the question: why use presentation slides at all? Most important conversations you will have in your lifetime happen without slides. And ask anyone who works in media: if the power went out and they could only show your slides or broadcast your voice, they’d go with your voice. Your voice, what you say and how you say it, is the most important thing. If you listen to This American Life or The Moth, it’s clear how powerful a speaker can be with their voice alone.

Look at any list of the best speeches of all time and you won’t find a single use of slides or other props. Of course slides and presentation software hadn’t been invented then so it’s unfair to make a direct comparison (For fun see The Gettysburg Address as a bad Powerpoint deck). Yet the question is easy to ask: would these speeches have been better if they were narrated over slides?

In many cases, no. You’d have to listen carefully to figure out when ideas would be better presented visually rather than with words alone, which is the secret for thinking about your own presentations: when do you truly need a visual image to express an idea? And when would it be better simply letting your voices tell the story?

Speaking without slides seems more challenging because:

You feel naked without the familiar crutch of slides behind you
It may require a different way to prepare
It demands more thinking and refinement of your ideas

Speaking without slides is often better because:

Audiences grant you more attention and authority over the room
You have no fear of slide or A/V malfunctions
You can never become a slave to your slides
It forces you to clarify and improve your ideas, making you a better speaker

But slides do have some advantages, including:

Some concepts are best expressed visually
They can serve as a handout (but true handouts work better than slideuments)

When is it best to speak without slides?

If I’m asked to speak for 20 minutes or less I often go without slides. More than 20 minutes and the dynamics of attention are more complex and I typically use slides, though less than many speakers do. I give the same advice to others: the shorter the talk, the simpler your presentation should be.

How to prepare a slide-free presentation

In Chapter 5 of Confessions of a Public Speaker (“Do Not Eat The Microphone”) I provide a simple, well-tested method for preparing talks of any kind. In short it looks like this:

Take a strong position in the title
Think carefully about your specific audience (why are they here? what do they already know?)
Make your 4 or 5 major points concisely (from a draft outline of 10 or 12 points)
Practice making your points without a single slide.
Revise #3 and repeat #4 until done.

This approach works with or without slides, but in all cases it forces you to develop your ideas into a solid outline and practice delivering it before you’d even consider making a slide. If you want to go entirely without slides, you’re already prepared for that. And if you decide as you revise that you need slides to best make your points, then add them, but only after you’ve proven their necessity by trying to present without them.

If you want your ideas to take center stage, the slides should come late in the process so that they are used only to support what you’re saying, rather than the other way around. Even if you are a visual thinker and need something to look at to develop your ideas, develop your ideas and rehearse assuming the slide deck is scaffolding you will remove. Don’t fall into the trap of polishing your slides and tweaking fonts when you should be revising your thoughts and practicing how you’re going to express them.

Given a choice between a great talk with lousy slides, and a lousy talk with great slides, what do you think most audiences would choose? Prepare accordingly.

What do you put on the screen if presenting at a slide-dominant event?

I simply put together a slide with my name, the title of the talk and the basic contact information I want to provide. There’s an argument that only having a single slide does far more to make you accessible to an audience interested in your work as the way to contact you is visible the entire time you’re speaking, instead of just at the end. Here are two examples from two different events:

How do you get over the fear of forgetting something?

Many speakers use slides to mitigate fear. Slides used for this reason often come at the audience’s expense. It’s common to see speakers reading their own slides, or facing their slides as they present, clear signs they made their slides first, rather than constructing the presentation first and using slides to support their thoughts. Slides should be for the audience, not for you.

If you work hard to have clear points, and you practice it’s unlikely you’ll forget anything important. Even if you did forget something, only you will know. Since there are no slides, as the speaker only you know what you planned to say. You could skip an entire point or express it in a completely different way than you intended and no one will know but you. Slides can lock you in and if you are a true expert on the subject you’re speaking about you may find advantages in flexibility.

The notecard

When I speak without slides I usually have one small piece of paper listing my 5 main points. For my recent keynote at Warm Gun 2013 on The Dangers of Faith in Data, here’s what I brought with me on stage:

This notecard is short and simple. Since I’ve thought hard about this topic and have practiced the talk, all that I need the notecard to do is remind me of the next point, and the overall structure. I cheated on #5 as it has sub-bullets, but I simply found while practicing I couldn’t recall all three, so I wrote them down. Churchill and some other famous speakers used similar lightweight systems for their speeches.

You can see the notecard on the conveniently transparent lectern:

What about the handout problem?

If I prepare my talk as described above, it’s easy to write up a blog post with the same structure.

Here’s the blog post, titled The Dangers of Faith In Data, which I wrote in less than an hour while the ideas were still fresh in my mind.

Watch the actual talk based on the above

Now that you know how I prepared and practiced, you can watch the actual talk and judge for yourself. You’ll see me look down at the notecard, but it’s typically while I’m silent and trying to let the audience digest what I just said, while I collect myself to lead into the next thought.

Free Checklist For Great Talks (with or without slides)

You can download a handy, comprehensive, printable checklist for giving great presentations here (PDF) based on the bestseller Confessions of a Public Speaker.

The 3 best books I read in 2013

Posted on December 18, 2013December 18, 2013 in Book reviews, Booksby Scott Berkun

It’s common in December to see lists of “best of the year” for books and films. I read 20 to 30 books a year but rarely do I read books published in the current year. I don’t have anything against new books, I certainly buy many of them, but I’m drawn to books that have been around awhile and still interest me. Perhaps these books ask deeper questions and provide deeper answers? Or maybe I’m merely trying to combat the cultural pull towards neophillia and the rejection of things purely because of their age.

Since most people read only a handful of books a year it’s silly not to include books simply because of when they were published. Odds are high that even if you check out the NYTimes best books of 2013, you still haven’t read most of the books they recommended from 2012, or 2005, or 1905.

With this in mind, here are the three best books I read in 2013, regardless of when they were published:

The Great Big Book of Horrible Things, by Matthew White (2011) – It sounds like a children’s book, but it’s far from it. With great style and flair White takes an unconventional approach to explaining the history of civilization. He uses the worst atrocities, from genocides to wars, to explore the history of the World. My world history has always been spotty and I found this book to be a tour de force, making a laundry list of facts and events I’d never understood comprehendible and fascinating. The lists of his rankings of the worst atrocities, and their most frequent causes (religious wars? politics?) are worth the price of admission alone (my full review).

We Learn Nothing, by Tim Krieder (2013) – This collection of essays, with a few illustrations, does what all writers wish they could do: invite just about any reader into an intelligent, conversational exploration of some universal themes like friendship, belief and identity. It’s the kind of book you can give to just about any adult and they’ll respond with stories of their own and new questions about various notions they’ve held close, but unexplored until now. (my full review)

Brave New World, by Aldus Huxley (1931). I am a big fan of dystopian novels, and although I’ve read 1984 many times I’d never read Huxley. I was surprised to learn Brave New World predated 1984, first published in the 1930s, more than a decade before Orwell’s book. It was a true surprise how bold and prescient Huxley was, even though I knew many elements of the story through literary osmosis. And although the structure of BNW can be challenging at times, I’ve found myself thinking about it often since I read it (Related: this fantastic comic comparing the predictions of 1984 with BNW)

Banning Something Makes It Powerful

Posted on December 5, 2013August 25, 2015 in history, politicsby Scott Berkun

Today is the 80th anniversary of the repeal of the American prohibition of alcohol, and it serves as an excellent example of unintended consequences. For 13 long years alcohol was illegal, but early in prohibition it was clear the law change didn’t have the intended effects. Alcohol became more powerful in many ways, and since the mechanisms by which people obtained it were illegal, some of the cultural problems prohibition was expected to solve got worse.

Most bans in free countries today regard media: books, films, music and ideas. In most cases the announcement of a ban is free-PR for all of the people who are probably interested in the thing being banned who might not have heard of it if the ban didn’t happen. Most media love telling the story of things being banned, since it earns intense interest from both the people who agree with the ban and the people who are upset by it. Every time a parents group bans an album, or a religious organization bans a film, the film itself becomes far more powerful. Rather than a ban being a bad thing for an artist, it can often be a catalyst for their ideas and you can often see artists deliberately trying to manipulate this cycle to their advantage.

The same principles holds true among parents and children, or managers and employees. The more something is withheld, the more power and meaning it gains. For the powerless in these situations the banned item becomes a symbol of their lack of control, and their interest in it can only grow. Banning something gives that thing a personal meaning beyond whatever attributes the thing inherently has. Forbidden fruit often only tastes better than regular fruit because of what’s in the mind of the person eating it, rather than what’s in the fruit itself.

A ban is lazy policy. It’s a failure to examine causes and effects of human behavior, including the history of the causes and effects of banning things. It’s entertaining to learn the earliest known prohibition of alcohol was by Yu The Great in China in 2100 BCE, and surprise: his son ended the prohibition when he took over. Had Yu been great enough to develop a more mature and reasoned policy, his son might have embraced it.

A brief history of stupid book bans in America
Banned books that shaped America (Bradbury’s Farenheit 451, a book about a culture than burns books, was ironically banned)
List of banned books by country
Time to End the War On Drugs
PBS On Prohibition

Why Writers Are Cranky

Posted on December 3, 2013December 3, 2013 in Writing Wellby Scott Berkun

I enjoyed this recent post, 14 Ways to Tick off a Writer, because many of these things have happened to me.

My deepest thought however is that writers are a cranky bunch anyway. We’re arrogant enough to think the world needs our thoughts, despite all of the things about writing that make clear how far the supply of writers exceeds the demand. Even before a writer finishes a poem or a book they’re already cranky, or if not cranky, so loaded up with a cocktail of ego, exhaustion and expectation that they can’t possibly be described as sane.

I wrote How To Write A Book in 2007 out of desperation for hearing the same questions again and again, despite my at best modest amount of writely fame. And the kicker is if you read the 1000+ comments on that post you find that many of those people didn’t bother to read the post itself, setting off the loudest and most desperate irony alarms our species has yet to invent.

I am completely aware these are luxurious frustrations. No one told me or any other writer to quit more lucrative and less frustrating professions to write. In fact most writers are surrounded by people, animals, forces of nature, signs from the gods and omens of all shapes and sizes expressing in every language known to our species that we should not be writing. When people open a word processor it should say, Abandon all hope, all ye who enter here, or, perhaps more optimistically, Enter At Your Own Risk. But sometime tells me, like warning labels on cigarettes, we all know what we’re getting into before we start. Buy the ticket, take the ride.

Here’s some of my favorites from the article:

1) Go on Amazon and give the book one star because “the plastic wrapping was slightly ripped when it arrived from the seller.”

2) Ask what the new book’s about. After the writer answers, say, “Oh, that sounds exactly like that T. C. Boyle book that came out last year. Have you read that? You have to read it! Yours sounds exactly like it!”

…

4) Email saying you want to be a writer too, and you notice the writer lives in the same city, and you wonder if he could spare two hours sometime soon to have coffee and fill you in on how this whole writing thing works. Do not give any indication that you have ever read the writer’s work or care about it in any way. Do not address the author by name. Just cut and paste.

…

7) Read ten pages of the author’s book. Realize that it’s absolutely not for you: you thought it was a zombie story, and it’s actually historical fiction about Alexander Graham Bell. Go on Goodreads anyway, and give it one star for not being a zombie story.

And you should read the entire article for more.

Alternatively, you can take the same ideas and convert them for good use. It’s surprisingly easy to help authors and here’s a list of what you can do.

The Dangers of Faith In Data

Posted on November 22, 2013March 15, 2021 in Year Without Pantsby Scott Berkun

Here are the notes from my Warm Gun SF keynote, based on one of the stories from The Year Without Pants (An Amazon.com best book of the year). Thanks to folks that were there for being a great crowd.

“Confidence and faith in data grows in relation to your distance from the collection of it”

The Data Paradox. The more data you have, the larger the role intuition plays in deciding how to interpret, explain and apply the data. Intuition must be used to decide which data to focus on, how to collect or organize the data, and what samples to use and exclude. For example, in A/B testing, you use intuition to decide what B is. Underneath all of our rational intellect is intuition, which influences our “rational” behavior far more than we admit. Often data yields unavoidable tradeoffs where two or more options are equally viable and someone must make a judgment call beyond the data. In strict paradox form: the more data you have the less you know.
No team or organization is truly data-driven. Data is not conscious: it is merely a list of inert, dead numbers. Data doesn’t have a brain and therefore can’t drive or lead anything. At best you want to be data influenced, where (living) decision makers have good data available that they can use to help answer good questions about what they’re doing, how well it’s being done and what perhaps they should be doing in the future. All data has bias and blind-spots and a truly data-driven organization will drive itself into the ground chasing the illusion of purely objective truth.
Data is a flashlight. Data gives you specific information about a singular vector of information. Data, like a flashlight, is only as useful as the person wielding it and the person interpreting what it shows. It has no magical powers. To get good information you want multiple sources so you can triangulate information and compensate for the inherent biases each kind of data has. For example, A/B testing can tell you things customer interviews can’t and vice versa. Clickthrough data does not tell you what happened between clicks (Did they punch a wall or jump for joy?) One analytical model suggests one hypothesis but a different method can suggest another with the same data.
Ban the phrase “The data says.” Data can’t say anything for the same reason it can’t drive anything: data is inert. People, including data experts or growth hackers, can never speak singularly for the data. At best they are interpreters, offering one interpretation of what the useful narrative story derived from the data is (if there is one at all). Better experts yield better interpretations but never is their interpretation the only one available. If anyone utters “the data says” they are pretending data can have a singular interpretation which it never does, and this false faith prevents the asking of good questions, such as: is there an equally valid hypothesis based on this data that suggests a different conclusion than yours? (The answer is often yes).
Cognitive Bias pollutes our view of data. We know our brains are kludges, vulnerable to optical illusions. We also have blind spots in our cognition called cognitive biases. The most common one regarding data is confirmation bias, where we seek only to validate our preconceptions and stop doing analysis as soon as we have a singular hypothesis that supports our assumptions. Another dangerous bias is narrative bias, which is our attraction to stories. We love stories that are easy to understand, easy to say and that makes us feel good, and will prefer telling these stories over more complex ones even if the complex ones are truer.
Cui Bono -“who benefits?” Who paid for this data? What was their reason for paying for it? What ambitions do they have? Certain outcomes of data benefit the people asking for the data and the people who capture the data, biasing the results. In political elections it’s common to see competing campaigns find very different data for who is in the lead, each finding their own candidate in front. Another example is how company founders will select data that makes them sound the best when pitching for funding (And VC firms will listen for the kinds of data they want to hear). Generally in life when you’re confused about why a strange decision was made, or there is grand incompetence, or nothing is happening at all, ask cui bono?

Also see: Data Death Spiral, How To Call BS On A Guru.

You can watch the actual keynote presentation below:

The Year Without Pants Cover: how it was designed

Posted on November 20, 2013September 29, 2016 in Writing Well, Year Without Pantsby Scott Berkun

I’ve previously written about how covers should be designed (See How To Design A Great Cover).

My fifth book, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and The Future of Work, has the most polarizing cover of all my books. Many people love it and many hate it. Here’s the behind the scenes story of how it was designed.

Round 1

The design of a book cover naturally follows the title of the book itself. The odds of a a strong cover rise when you have a strong title to work with (See The Truth About Book Titles for my approach to choosing book titles). Stronger titles are simple, clear, short and attract attention.

Most publishers, and not authors themselves, lead the the cover design process. It’s a surprise to most readers, but often authors have little say about the covers their books get. I’m always very involved and it’s something I’ve earned with four popular books and a design background: I always make sure the publisher knows, before I sign, that I’ll be centrally involved.

From How To Design A Great Cover, I reused the four principles in the cover design discussions:

Bet big on one visual concept
Title should be readable in online thumbnail / 10 feet away
Simplicity wins
Be bold: it’s better to have some people love it and some hate it than be bland and have no one care at all

Once the title was chosen I made four quick and deliberately rough mock-ups to get the design conversation started.

The first one has an image from No Pants Day, an annual event around the world. The last two use an amazing photo by Paul Zollo, who was kind enough to let me use it in chapter one of Confessions of a Public Speaker. I wanted a design that was playful and put nudity or the notion of being naked in a funny and social context, rather than in a sexual one.

Round 2

Adrian Morgan was the lead designer from Jossey-Bass, and he generated most of these mockups and did the final version of the design. He did an excellent job of exploring widely different directions, which is the only way to arrive at something strong. The biggest mistake in the early rounds is only considering a narrow range of similar options.

One challenge the titled created was it was about the absence of something: The Year Without Pants. The challenge, as fun as it was, was to figure out how to show the absence of something. Here’s the first round of mockups with brief commentary from me.

This was good, until you notice where that left hand is.

We liked this, and eventually made many variations of it, but there was always something creepy about the figure. We tried to do something more like the cover of Naked Statistics, going for cute rather than creepy, but it never quite worked.

This was interesting, but had little to do with pants or any other concept really (why is this on the back of a shirt, other than it looks interesting?) It didn’t take enough advantage of the opportunities for fun or surprise that the title provided.

The grey, yellow, white palette is strong, and surprising in a positive way for a business book. This was a strong candidate. It did hint at the smell of old gym shorts, but since the underwear was a background element, rather than in the foreground, it worked.

This one made me laugh the first time I saw it. And it still does. What kind of mad man wears bright red underwear? (I’d learn later you you can buy them here). It’s provocative, simple, bold, polarizing and raises questions, all things the book itself does.

Round 2 Voting

I often invite readers to vote on big decisions. It’s useful even if I don’t end up going with the most voted choice, as you folks always offer thoughtful comments and help me think about what I’m trying to do.

This time I picked 5 of the options with my editors at Jossey-Bass and let people vote. 367 people voted and the red briefs came in first by a small margin.

Round 3 (WordPress logo)

One direction we wanted to explore was incorporating the WordPress logo into the design. Since the book is about working at WordPress.com it was natural to try. We experimented with a few options, including swapping the red briefs, which I knew some people hated, for the safer option of blue boxers. I pitched it to Matt Mullenweg, but he made clear the logo was a trademark and basically impossible to use in a context like this.

Forgetting the book for a moment, I think WordPress boxers would be a big hit in the WordPress swag store, don’t you?

This last design was far too July 4th (red, white and blue) but it was a worthy experiment, and then very worthy of killing.

Round 4 (Refinement)

With the logo out of the running, we returned to the red briefs and refined the details.

We abandoned putting “WordPress.com” in the waistband as the design was cleaner and stronger without it: the white waistband almost underlines the title. We cleaned up various leading, kerning and spacing bits (Matt Thomas, Creative Director at Automattic at the time, gratefully lent me his eyes) and made the main title heavier, with tighter spacing.

I also mocked up different sizes which made clear a smaller object in the center worked better (We went with the middle version).

Round 5 – Final

And here is the final design.

Impact: The cover contributed to the movie

I’d planned to do a movie trailer for the book and the cover design gave us plenty to work with (watch to the end):

Impact: General

If you have a theory of what a good cover is, you’ll be disappointed at how little impact covers seem to have on the success of books. Go look at the top selling books on Amazon.com – you won’t find any consistent cover design theory at work here. Many books with bad covers sell well, and many books with great covers don’t. We love to argue about cover designs, but in reality we buy books because of our trust in who recommended it to us more than anything else.

But of course I do think design matters. These behind the scenes posts take time to put together, and more importantly they illustrate how much effort I put into thinking about the book covers themselves. It’s a singular image that will be reused thousands of times to represent the book.

By using the design four principles:

Bet big on one visual concept
Title should be readable in online thumbnail / 10 feet away
Simplicity wins
Be bold: it’s better to have some love it and some hate it than be bland and have everyone not care at all

It has been much easier to have fun with branding and promoting this book than any of my others. Even at the book launch party it was easy to invite friends and fans to have some fun, and reuse the briefs, the colors and the ideas from the book in all sorts of crazy and entertaining ways and I expect that to continue.

I’ve had people tell me they’re afraid to read the book at work, or give it to coworkers, because of the cover, which is fascinating. It’s just a pair of ridiculous underwear! We are all wearing underwear right now (one hopes) in all workplaces across the globe. If your organization can’t handle a bright red book, or is terrified of the existence of undergarments, I doubt the challenging stories and ideas about management, work culture and creativity in the book itself will go over well either, which perhaps suggests the cover is doing its job of representing what the book is and who it might be for. But it’s hard to know: what do you think?

What I Learned At Hiroshima (In Photos)

Posted on November 19, 2013August 7, 2014 in Travelby Scott Berkun

I just returned from two weeks vacation in Japan. It was the first true vacation (no email, no lectures, no working) I’ve had in a long time. One highlight was the day trip we took from Kyoto to Hiroshima. We hadn’t originally planned to go to Hiroshima, or to be in Kyoto either actually, but when the opportunity arose I jumped at it. I love going to places that are well known in history, but that few people I know have ever been to (e.g. Little Big Horn).

The first surprise is Hiroshima is a large, pretty and healthy city. I didn’t have specific preconceptions, but I was somehow surprised to find a vibrant urban area of over 2 million people. The Peace Park is the historic area where many memorials and the Peace Memorial Museum, the name for the museum about the city’s WWII legacy, reside. It was easy to find the park as the Peace Boulevard leads from the train station straight to it.

As the history goes, on Monday, August 6, 1945, at 8:15 a.m The U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb used during wartime, and it exploded, by design, 600 meters above the ground at Hiroshima. 80,000 people were killed instantly. Another 100,000 or more died within a year. The reason the bomb was detonated above the ground was to maximize the impact of the explosion. It was aimed at a T-shaped bridge, a bridge that still exists and is part of the park (I crossed it to get there).

The location where the bomb exploded is called the hyper-center and you can find it a few blocks away from the Peace Park. On an otherwise ordinary side street of parking lots and office buildings, there’s a small monument describing the significance of where you’re standing.

One reason I wanted to go to Hiroshima was to stand in this spot. A thousand questions were on my mind as I stood there. It seemed so ordinary a place in the moment, but looking up and imagining that bomb falling and what it would do was inexpressibly complex. It was mostly horrible, but wonderful for intellectual curiosity reasons, to be able to stand there.

The first building hit by the bomb was this one, called the A-Bomb dome (formerly called the Hiroshima Commercial Exhibition Hall). They debated whether to restore it or not, but chose to leave it as a monument to what happened. It has been preserved to look like how it looked right after the bombing.

At the peace museum are detailed diagrams and models of the city, before and after. Here’s what it looked like before the bombing. Notice the t-shaped bridge at the top. To its right is the A-Bomb dome.

And here’s what it looked like after.

The biggest and most pleasant surprise from my visit was how the Japanese have converted a horrible episode from human history into something positive, without skipping past the difficult parts. The peace museum tells a balanced story of WWII and the bombing itself, leading visitors through rooms about the current nuclear weapons treaties and the effects of nuclear radiation on citizens.

But the park is called the Peace Park and Memorial for a clear reason: they want to use their example to prevent similar horrors from ever happening again and they did an excellent job of making that the clear theme in the experience of visiting the place. They did a far better job at this ambition than any other historic war site I’ve seen, and I’ve seen many.

It seems mandatory that young students visit the center, as they were there in busloads. The primary frustration I had with the Peace Memorial Museum was having to navigate around gangs of Japanese kids. Even outside the museum we met many groups of children in the park and they were curious about foreigners, which was great to see. I’d say hello as they passed by in groups, and they always laughed and waved back at me.

Many of the younger students had assignments to talk to foreigners and practice their English. They asked me where I was from, what my name was, and what thoughts I had about the museum and world peace. It was a highlight of the entire trip to meet these children and talk with them for awhile.

One section of the park is dedicated to the story of Sadako Sasaki, a young survivor of the blast who was hospitalized as a young girl with radiation related health issues. She believed in the legend of 1000 cranes, that if she folded 1000 paper cranes, she could have any wish granted. Her story became a legend after her death and thousands of children have made paper cranes to honor and remember her. There are display cases with some of them in the park near a statue dedicated to her and other children who were victims that day.

There’s an online petition, sponsored by the museum, that calls for the reduction of nuclear weapons in the world. You can sign it here.

Amazon.com names The Year Without Pants a best book of 2013

Posted on November 18, 2013November 18, 2013 in Year Without Pantsby Scott Berkun

Last week Amazon.com announced its best business books of 2013 and The Year Without Pants made the list.

Meeting the Street Poet of NYC

Posted on November 6, 2013March 11, 2021 in On Tour, Writing Wellby Scott Berkun

Selling books is hard. It’s a surprise for most writers, even experienced ones, how much harder finding people interested in your work is than writing books themselves.

So last month while I was on book tour, feeling down on my luck as I walked from a lecture at the Foursquare office to another one at NYU, I was surprised to notice a man on the corner selling poems. I’d certainly heard of street poets before, but I couldn’t recall ever having seen one in person. Born in NYC, I know the rules of the street. You don’t stop for anything. To stop means you are from somewhere else and are easier prey.

But stop I did. How could I not stop? What could be harder than selling writing on the street? And poetry no less? This must be a superior writing creature I thought, and I had to talk to him.

I stood and watched for awhile, and soon he came over to me, asking me not to block one of his signs. He said, with a smile “it’s hard for me to sell poems if people can’t see the signs, you know?” And I understood exactly what he meant as I was in town putting up signs of my own. I told him I was a writer myself, and we talked for awhile.

We talked about our favorite writers, our favorite poems, and all the while I couldn’t believe that there, in the middle of my tour, I’d meet someone that was having a harder time with this writing thing than I was, but yet who was more committed to his work than I was too: I didn’t have the courage to sit on a naked corner and pitch strangers on my writings.

I’d learn later his name was Donald Green. He’d been written about in the New York TImes years ago, and was a rising star, doing readings of his work on the radio and TV. He’s fallen on harder times, and his life on the street has been documented in various articles about him. He told me his family has always helped him pay for a place to stay, and he is living this life by choice. I wasn’t sure how much I believed him, but it didn’t matter.

I offered to buy his books of poems, and he offered in return to write me one on the spot. He asked for a topic and I told him: Serendipity.

A Positive Sign, By Donald Green
So A fellow writer,
I feel, a poet as I.
Though I hear from this writer, one of prose,
and of non-fiction, and of “how-to” this and that,
but just as I began the writing to him I felt the poet,
Wallace Stephens comes to mind,
The unusual in art,
as my sister’s textbook said,
a phenomenon,
or some thing of the kind,
a successful businessman, a successful poet,
perhaps Scott, the same with you?
Oh, stay alive, time can reveal?
But our meeting serendipitous?
Accidental Encounter?
or meant?
God above or destiny, or life’s way, deemed meeting?
Flow like much of life Scott, serendipitous?
Just chance? Just accident?
Mere occurrence?
Show how much is meant?
Is everything SET?
The force or life, or God has it all planned?
How much even is in ones own thinking? feeling? whether bad or good?
I hope Scott, sincerely, I,
as a poet, and of a true poet,
A bearing of truth about life,
A giver of the beautiful language,
a most often challenging language,
so I hope I am as a poet,
A POSITIVE SIGN
of the truth you see and can gather.
And the success as a writer,
and the peace life can bless someone with,
and the protection from God, or life’s good side,
sweet side,
in a wild world with its danger.

Video: The Year Without Pants lecture (@Google NYC)

Posted on October 31, 2013October 31, 2013 in On Tour, Year Without Pantsby Scott Berkun

From this month’s book tour, the good folks at Google posted the video from my talk. Q&A begins at 31:27.

Updated: Speaking checklist for great talks (Printable)

Posted on October 30, 2013August 7, 2020 in Public Speakingby Scott Berkun

Here’s the best checklist for ensuring sure your presentation is as great as it can be. There’s a lot to remember so use this to make sure to you don’t forget a thing.

I hired Eva Giselle to design a proper checklist based on the popular post, How To Prepare: Checklist for Great Talks.

Or you can download the checklist here (1.2 MB PDF). It’s a great handout for event organizers to give to their speakers. Pass it on.

SF/Bay Area Book Tour, 2013

Posted on October 29, 2013December 2, 2013 in On Tourby Scott Berkun

The third leg of The Year Without Pants book tour will be in the San Francisco bay area the week of December 9th.

Tuesday Dec 10th, 12pm-1pm, Autodesk, Inc.
Tuesday Dec 10th, 7pm @ BayChi (doubleheader!)
Thursday Dec 12th, 12pm, @ Citrix
Thursday Dec 12th, 6pm, Tech Xploration @ PayPal

Hope to see you next week!

Book Review: Remote: Office Not Required, by 37Signals

Posted on October 29, 2013October 29, 2013 in Book reviews, remote work, Year Without Pantsby Scott Berkun

In writing The Year Without Pants, about my year working for the 100% remote organization at WordPress.com, I deliberately avoided exclusively writing a manifesto about remote work. I figured anyone could, and would, write a manifesto style book on the subject, but few would ever have the chance at a deep insider story of the trials and tribulations of a real team, with a real leader, on a real project of WordPress.com’s importance, where 100% remote workers and dozens of other new ideas about work, were in practice simultaneously. That’s the path I chose.

When I heard the founders of 37signals, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, were writing a book called Remote: Office Not Required, I was relieved. I finally knew who was writing a manifesto style book on the subject and they’re good folks to do it. I like the spirit of their other books.

I finished Remote last week and I recommend it. I’m happy to say it’s a clear, short, solid book of arguments for using remote work to your advantage. It has a nice section of common excuses, with refutations, and sound arguments about how many opportunities there are to help your company by allowing remote workers. They discuss the unnecessary pain of commuting, the improved access to talent from other places and how the right kinds of employees benefit from greater flexibility. All things I observed at WordPress.com, and which I argue for at times in my own book.

Like their other books they focus heavily on stories from their own experience running 37signals, a very successful software company. There are references and mentions of other data and organizations, but they presume most organizations have the same attitudes, talents and businesses that they do, which I doubt is true. They’re an amazing and compact company, but I would have preferred the story of other companies to have had the central stage. From my recent book tour for The Year Without Pants I’ve learned much of convincing executives to try anything new depends on them seeing an example of a company like their own that has succeeded with the method you’re suggesting. Culture change of any kind is hard, and I’d recommend reading my post How To Change A Company for advice on starting with remote work, or any new idea, in your organization. Books open doors but someone has to lead the charge to open them all the way and keep them open.

It’s a common failing of manifesto type books to presume the world is uniform, and therefore uniformly malleable, but at least in 37signal’s case they are always practicing what they preach, which is commendable. I’d prefer to read what they have to say over “experts” who haven’t managed a team or a business in far too long.

I’m very pleased to say Remote: Office not Required and The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com & The Future of Work make excellent companions. They take complementary approaches (and even have the same colors). Remote has a broad, manifesto style list of proclamations, and The Year Without Pants captures a deep, specific examination of remote work from the perspective of a specific team and team manager in an important company in a fascinating work culture.

Working For Free: An Argument

Posted on October 28, 2013September 16, 2015 in Business, Culture, Writing Wellby Scott Berkun

Tim Krieder, author of the excellent We Learn Nothing, wrote in the NYTimes about the mistake of working for free, in an article called Slaves of the Internet Unite. I don’t agree with him and here’s my response:

There are kinds of compensation other than cash. Exposure and experience are valuable forms of compensation. Sometimes these rewards are more valuable than cash. If you were a guitarist and could play a gig with U2, without pay, would you do it? Or, as an author, appear on a prime time news show (guests on TV shows, podcasts and magazine interviews are never paid)? I’m sure you would. No amount of money could equal the exposure you’d gain. How much exposure is worth working for free is up to you to decide, but any wise person recognizes opportunities worth the trade. There are many other examples of fields where working for free is expected until your reputation earns you pay, including athletes, musicians and other artists.
Any offer should be considered for its total value. If what’s offered is beneath your standard, then of course don’t do it. But like Krieder, I make my living as a writer (and a speaker) yet I get requests to work for free. I reject many of them but some I take. I base my decision on the total value of the offer (exposure? experience?) and I recommend everyone do the same. To reject all non-cash offers limits your opportunities.
There are many paid jobs that are unfair. Being paid does not guarantee fairness. You can be paid far too little, or even be paid fairly but asked to give up most of your rights to the work you made. Negotiations for writing, music and film contracts are largely about control over different kinds of rights, and not just revenue.
If I could work with someone I admired, on a fun and challenging project, I’d certainly consider doing it for free. Or if it was for a good cause, or the idea I’d get to work on was interesting to me and the opportunity was the only way I’d likely ever do the project.
Some people can’t afford to work for free. I understand that many people can’t afford not to be paid for their time. They have every reason to refuse work they can’t afford to do. But this doesn’t mean all unpaid work is unethical. Some of it certainly is, especially if it’s systemic abuse of free labor (unpaid extended internships are a tricky example), but that doesn’t mean a job without financial compensation can’t be a win for both parties.

As a clear example all of the posts on this blog are free. Most videos of my lectures are free to watch. My Twitter and Facebook accounts let fans read things I write for free. Every guest you hear or see on radio and TV shows are never paid anything and when I’ve appeared on these shows I was working for free. These are all creative works I am not paid for, but I believe the total tradeoffs of these actions are worthwhile, even if I’m not paid.

Would you ever work for free? Leave a comment.

[Updated 2-27-15. This post is a revised version of this post]

Do You Need That Meeting?

Posted on October 22, 2013October 22, 2013 in remote work, Year Without Pantsby Scott Berkun

I’m sitting in Kevin Hoffman‘s session at UI18 on Running Better Meetings. He makes good arguments about facilitation and visual thinking and how they impact the quality of what happens during meetings.

But after my experience at WordPress.com, where meetings were rare, I now struggle to comprehend how many meetings most workplaces have. What evidence is there that we need these things? Many people complain about how much time they spend in meetings, yet the meetings go on.

Even back at Microsoft I had this rule about recurring meetings: at meeting birth, it should be planned that they will die. They will stop being useful at some point. But many of us suffer through zombie meetings, that live on in an undead state forever. Often there is one person who feels powerful in the meeting, and they will keep feeding the zombie with the coworker’s brains just to preserve that feeling.

The frequency and nature of meetings is an artifact of culture. An organization with long, or frequent, status meetings expresses the micromanagement in the culture. I once worked on a team that had 2 hour status meetings every friday. You could hear souls dying, or killing themselves, every fifteen minutes.

Creative meetings with 10 or 15 people in the room expresses a lack of trust of creatives. Too many cooks, rather than a lack of talent, expresses why so many organizations produce mediocre work. You can’t find or deliver on a vision if a dozen people all have equal say on defining it.

All leaders bring with them a culture of practice around meetings. In every bad meeting there is usually only one person with the power to end it, or redesign it. Often only that manager needs the meeting, even if just to stroke their own ego, and as long as they desire it the meeting will continue, whether it’s needed or not. Someone has to stand up and say: can we try working without this meeting for a week, and see what happens? Even if the meeting returns, everyone will see more clearly what the true value it has for getting real work done.

Also See: The 22 minute meeting

Stories from Book Tour Day 1 (w/photos)

Posted on October 16, 2013October 16, 2013 in On Tour, Year Without Pantsby Scott Berkun

I’m here in NYC all week on book tour for The Year Without Pants (full schedule here). There is nothing fancy about book tours: it’s all hustle, from organizing them, to living through them. I’m not Stephen King or J.K. Rowling, who maybe have everything arranged for them. For me I take charge or organizing and planning, using my network to find places interested in having me speak about the book. I work out a schedule, and then it’s all just showing up and trying to pack in as much as I can: often I give 3 lectures a day plus interviews and some lunches and dinners with old friends (or reporters interested in the book).

Amy Packard and Tess Woods are publicists from the book’s publisher (Jossey-Bass) helping get local interviews and media coverage, and it’s great to have help. They get the books out to reporters and give me some to give away. But the author is generally sought after at the center of marking a book: every interview or radio/TV show wants to have a person, not a book, to interact with. No matter how much help you get, it’s intense, chaotic and fun in a twisted way as marketing a book has at best a distant relationship to making the book itself. I simply accept it as part of the job of being a full-time author. I’ve been lucky to work with two publishers (O’Reilly Media and Jossey-Bass) that have supported doing tours and been partners in making them successful.

Here are some short stories and photos from my first couple of days.

Day 1 NYC: ABC, CUNY Journalism School, NYTimes, WordPress Meetup

What’s always funny is it feels great to be invited on radio or TV shows, until you arrive. Then you realize you are just one tiny slot in a day filled with interviews similar to yours. Monday started with a 15 minute slot on ABC News Radio.

And as wasn’t a surprise, the front security desk seemed surprised to have guests at all. It’s amazing how confused these security folks often are at the concept of a show guest arriving and needing help to figure out where to go. Notice how their entire security system is on paper.

Whenever you hear someone on a radio interview, this is what they see while they’re speaking. Radio studios often aren’t great to look at, and TV studios often aren’t stunners either, except for sound studio where they actually film. Sometimes it’s hard to even make eye contact with the radio show host, as there’s a wall of equipment or shelves between them and I.

Next stop on Monday was CUNY’s Graduate school of Journalism, a beautiful building just a few blocks away from The New York Times, where I’d be speaking a few hours later.

Their main student lounge is set up like a TV newsroom, with a big open space and TV screens showing news, twitter feeds and more.

It was a thrill to head inside the new New York Times building, having read the Sunday edition of the paper regularly for years.

Just walking around the different desks, organized by sections of the paper, made me realize how much of a fanboy I was.

Tuesday night I spoke at he NYC WordPress Meetup (lecture #3 for the day). You can see here a no-frills lav microphone. Had a nice crowd of about 70 people. Thanks to Dan and Beau for the photos of me in action.

The meeup was held at the impressive Alley NYC, a startup incubator and community center, which, from the signs, had trouble with elevator behavior.

This morning I had two early interviews, and then headed to a lunchtime talk at Google’s NYC office. Notice how they got the title wrong on their otherwise nice poster (and the mistake was corrected! nice).

Tonight I’m at NYU’s Stern school of business and I hope to have more stories for you tomorrow.