Author: Scott Berkun

Are Hospitals More Important Than Art?

Posted on in art, ask berkun, reader's choiceby Scott Berkun

Each week I take the top voted question from readers and answer it (submit yours here).  With 35 votes, this week’s winner was “Are Hospitals More Important Than Art?” submitted by awesome reader Sara Vermeylen.

Questions like this are fun, even if absurd. Like Street Smarts vs. Book Smarts, it’s a kind of false dichotomy. But like the game Zobmando where you must decide between two ridiculous choices, you can have great intellectual fun in crafting arguments for one side or the other (or both).

Great_Wave_off_Kanagawa2If survival is at stake, I’d choose hospitals. A hospital, assuming it comes with smart doctors and fancy equipment, keeps a popular healthy, lengthens lifespans, improves the survival odds of reproduction, and provides a core public service everyone needs. If everyone is sick and dying, art has limited value, and of course it’s harder for sick and dying artists to make art than healthy ones.

But art is a critical part of what it is to be human. As miserable as conditions were for our ancestors 30,000 years ago, they took time to make elaborate cave paintings. If art were meaningless, why did they bother way back then? The answer is we are both social creatures and tool makers. Central to our survival has been the ability to communicate ideas, and art is one tool for developing the ability to imagine, observe, record and communicate thoughts. Art is also a tool of expression, a way to capture ideas, feelings, memories and dreams for others to see. Art, in the form of tattoos, face-paint, and even flags, has helped us throughout history to define our identity and remind us of shared connections. Music, books, paintings and movies are forms of art we depend on to help us understand who we are and how we want to live. We are aspirational creatures and a primary way we define what is possible for ourselves is through the art our artists makes for us.

What do you think?

Why Do Some Innovations Spread Slowly?

Posted on in Innovationby Scott Berkun

I’m a fan of Atul Gawande’s books  (here’s my review of Checklist Manifesto). His essay in the New Yorker, Slow Ideas, suggests most good ideas spread quickly.

I take the opposite position. The default state of a new idea is non-adoption. Most new ideas go nowhere. Most ideas travel slowly, if at all, and the examples of technological change we often site area tiny minority of the ones that were attempted: it’s selection bias. Consider how many posts on social media get ignored (it’s 71% of tweets). Are these all new ideas? No, but the sheer volume of information and ideas we are exposed to, and the limited channels of attention our brains can handle, should make clear most ideas in the world we never even hear about. We can’t adopt an idea we’ve never even heard.

And even if you knew about every good idea, there is a limit to how much change you can adopt. How many new diets can you try at one time? Modes of transportation? Techniques for getting your job done? Change, even to a clearly good idea, has what should be obvious costs that slow, or make improbable, the adoption of anything new.

Any good study of psychology and history shows that we are, by nature, conservative creatures when it comes to change. Most people, most of the time, defend the status quo, since they’re alive! It’s a valuable survival trait. Unless survival is at stake most of us, most of the time, resist change. Adoption of most knowledge, including social and philosophical beliefs, often shift only when the young age into being the dominate generation (or the old die) and the new ideas they bring with them enter the center of culture.

But of most importance to this post is Gawande’s misuse, or glancing over, of one of the pioneers in understanding how ideas spread: Everett Rogers. Gawande refers to his theories in an offhand way, overlooking how Rogers answered many of the questions Gawande is asking. Roger’s explained why most ideas don’t spread, rather than the opposite. Here’s all the Gawande has to say about Rogers:

“…incentive programs are not enough. “Diffusion is essentially a social process through which people talking to people spread an innovation,” wrote Everett Rogers, the great scholar of how new ideas are communicated and spread. Mass media can introduce a new idea to people.

But, Rogers showed, people follow the lead of other people they know and trust when they decide whether to take it up. Every change requires effort, and the decision to make that effort is a social process. This is something that salespeople understand well.”

But he never mentions the 5 major factors Rogers identified (in his book Diffusion of Innovation)  for why some ideas gain traction and most do not:

  1. Relative Advantage: this is perceived advantage. Marketing usually tries to tell you this explicitly (“save time”, “save money”, “double your income”)
  2. Compatibility: How much effort is required? If the perceived cost of change is higher than the perceived relative advantage, most people won’t even try. Marketing typically attacks this too (“Free money back guarantee”, “Even a child could do it”)
  3. Complexity: How much learning is required to apply the innovation? (“Easy to learn”, “5 of 6 people like you”)
  4. Trial-ability: Is it easy to try out? Most clothing stores let you try things on, and many products have free trial offers.
  5. Observability: How visible are the results of the innovation? Fashion fads are highly visible which helps them spread. Tech gadgets benefit from this too.

To Gawande’s central point, you need both leaders and salespeople to actively participate in pushing for adoption. Without the support of influencers in a culture, and a sustained effort to convince people of the 5 factors, ideas tend not to be adopted no matter how beneficial they are.

Rodger’s also coined the term Early Adopter, as part of his breakdown for the sub-groups that form around new ideas.

800px-Diffusion_of_ideas

If you want more depth on Innovation adoption I have three recommendations:

[Mild edits: 10/4/2019]

How to make smart project decisions: the checklist

Posted on in Making things happen, Managementby Scott Berkun

Yesterday I was working on a complex project and found myself stuck. I was out of time and had to make a tough decision. I’d been thinking it over and over in my mind for days but was still unsure. Then I remembered: I’ve done all this before. In my book Making Things Happen I wrote an entire chapter about how to make good decisions as a project manager. And to write that chapter I’d read dozens of books on decision making and overcoming project challenges. Even writers forget the things they’ve written.

In Chapter 8 of Making Things Happen, there’s this list, perfect for a quick skim when stuck on a big choice:

  • What problem is at the core of the decision? Decisions often arise in response to new information, narrowing your thinking on what the decision actually is. Someone might realize “We’ don’t have time to fix all 50 issues before launch”, which sets many managers off in frantic scramble to hand pick which to fix. But a better, and less narrow problem, is “we don’t have a criteria for triaging issues”. Deciding on that criteria will make dozens of other decisions easier and delegatable. Ask questions like: What caused this problem? Is it isolated or will we deal with this again? Did we already make this decision? If so, do we truly have grounds for reconsidering it?
  • How long will this decision impact the project? The longer the impact, the more time you should spend considering the decision.
  • If you’re wrong, what’s the impact? The more possible damage in being wrong, the more time you should spend on the decision. The phrase “death by a 1000 paper cuts” refers to a series of small decisions that seem inconsequential individually, but if the same failure is made in dozens of them a compounded and serious problem arises.
  • What other decisions will be harder? easier? Some decisions avoid big issues and make them harder to deal with later. Other decisions take on my responsibility in the present, and make things easier in the future. Walk ahead a few weeks in your mind for each option you’re considering and compare.
  • What is the window of opportunity? If you wait too long to make the decision, it might be made for you. Big decisions don’t necessarily come with commensurate amounts of time to consider them. And sometimes the speed of making a decision is more important than the quality of the decision itself.
  • Have we made this kind of decision before? This is the arrogance test. If stranded on an island you had to perform heart surgery to save your friends life, how confident would you be? There’s no shame in admitting you’ve never done the thing you need to do right now. If a decision maker admits ignorance or inexperience there’s a chance someone else can fill the gap or offer advice based on what they’ve done before. Don’t pretend you know everything: you make worse decisions for the project when you do. Do some reading or networking to find someone who has been in the situation you’re in now.
  • Who has the expert opinion? (Is this really my decision?). Just because someone asks you to decide doesn’t mean you’re the best person to make the call. Often the best decision possible is to delegate it to someone better able to make the decision. Or to at least pause the proceedings until you can get the advice of the best expert available.
  • Whose approval do we need? In large organizations it’s just as hard or harder to get the approvals you need to make something happen as it is to sort out the decision itself.  The sooner you know the map of the hills you need to run up to get everything approved, the greater the odds you’ll be able to make a good decision in time for it to matter.
  • Make a pro/con list and use it to get feedback on your thinking. It’s a grade school technique but forces you to clarify both sides, and gives you an easy too for getting feedback on your thinking from other people. Often just explaining your thinking to another person forces you to think more clearly and you’ll find better alternatives or more confidence in an already proposed choice.

And I’d add:

  • The bigger the decision, plan more time for exploring alternatives. Some people think spending time seeking alternatives when they already have a good choice is waste. Spending time exploring other options always raises good questions about the choice you have in hand and improves your thinking. Even if you stay on the same path, you’ll likely improve the details of the path based on what you learned while looking at alternatives. 

If you liked this, get the book Making Things Happen, my bestseller on leading project teams. You can read a free chapter on the amazon page.

 

Best Book On Self Publishing: APE – Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur

Posted on in Writing Wellby Scott Berkun

KAWASAKI-WELCH-APE-HOW-TO-PUBLISH-A-BOOKI was pleased when I heard that Guy Kawasaki was working (with Shawn Welch) on a book about self-publishing. He’d written many popular business books and had a straightforward and no nonsense approach to most topics he covered, and I expected he’d an interesting perspective on self-publishing. I was right.

This is the single book I’d recommend to anyone considering self-publishing, for the first time or any time. It’s far better than any single book on the topic I’ve seen.

The title is a reference to how self-publishing comprises three distinct roles. Many self published books fail because the author only takes responsibility for one or two. Kawasaki comprehensively explains all of the dimensions, the common mistakes, and frames each role around tasks and tools that he himself has used or reviewed. He also includes actual numbers from his experiments with different marketing approaches and other efforts. It’s a truly honest guide to a topic where there’s too much snake oil and bogus theories.

The balance of APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepeneur, is pragmatic and focused on the confusing decisions that are hard to find good advice on, like pricing, which services to use, how to hire needed experts, and this  is balanced by the perspective of a very successful published author. Many books on self-publishing are written by people who had little success in the traditional publishing world and can’t offer a comparison, or shed light on how to approximate the advantages of traditional publishing when working alone. Kawasakai can, and did, in this book.

Like Kawasaki, I’ve successfully done both traditional and self publishing, but even I learned quite a few things from APE.

Much of the book is comprised of handy lists that support a particular decision point. Sometimes theses lists are mini-reviews of tools, other times they’re shorthand notes for rules of thumb for different ways to make decisions. Depending on where you are in the process some of these lists won’t be useful now, or ever, and you might even make a quick read of the book, easily digesting the sections relevant to your particular situation. But the comprehensive nature of the book makes it something you know you’ll want to keep around as a reference for future projects.

Get APE from Amazon or check out the book’s website.

[Disclosure: Kawasaki has endorsed several of of my books]

How to read an amazon.com book review

Posted on in Books, Writing Wellby Scott Berkun

We read for different reasons, but we often write reviews as if everyone in the world is just like us.

A review that says “I hated this book” suggests the book is bad, but if the reviewer is a Yankee fan and the book is about how awesome the Boston Red Sox are, it likely reflects their biases more than anything about the book. And of course a review that says “This is the best book ever” written by the mother of the author is cute, but has enough positive bias to be useless.

A good reviewer frames their opinion with context so you can see if your sensibilities and needs match theirs. Some readers like to be challenged, some don’t. Some readers want an introductory book, others want something very advanced. If you’re in one group and base your decisions on reviews written by the other, you’ll miss books that might be perfect for you.

Since most book reviews are narrowly written we’re responsible for asking the clarifying questions ourselves.

Before you let an amazon review influence you, consider:

  • Does the reviewer have a strong point of view? How does it match yours?
  • What level of expertise did they have compared to you?
  • Are they rating on how inspired they feel or what they learned?
  • Are they rating because they were entertained or because they got value?
  • Do they emphasize their response to the concept of the book, or it’s execution?
  • Did a single minor disappointment that you might not care about distort their perception of the book?
  • How is their star rating calibrated? Do they often give  5 stars or 1 star reviews? Or is a 4 star review exceptional for them?

What other questions do you ask to get the most out of amazon.com reviews for a book?

Understanding Detroit: Detropia (documentary review)

Posted on in moviesby Scott Berkun

I watched the documentary Detropia on Netflix Streaming recently and I highly recommend it.  With the recent news of Detroit declaring bankruptcy, something shocking for a major city, the stories and images from the film rose again in my mind.

If you want to understand how a great city has fallen and how good people have been struggling to turn things around, this is the film for you. Film has storytelling powers beyond what headlines and news reports can match. If you’re interest in cities, economies, globalization, design and the future of America, don’t miss this.

I visited Detroit in 2010 and it was an urban experience unlike any I’ve ever had. The city had a population of 1.8 million in 1950, but now is barely half that. Walking the downtown streets past abandoned buildings that happen to be some of the best art-deco architecture in America was both disturbing and mesmerizing. If you have any interest in design or urban planning, you can’t help wonder: how would you turn the city around? How would you redesign infrastructure of a huge city to work now at a smaller scale? What policies and failures set Detroit on this course and what can other  cities in America learn?

The film deftly frames the story of the city around the lives of a handful of citizens, a business owner, an artist, an activist, and a union official, and lets them lead the telling of the story, anchored lightly by facts, history and some stunning cinematography. Even if you don’t agree with the assumptions offered, I guarantee the film will raise plenty of excellent questions to make it worth your while.

Watch the movie trailer below. The film airs on PBS and is downloadable from various online stores:

What is the meaning of life? (and why do people keep asking)

Posted on in ask berkun, Philosophyby Scott Berkun

[Each week I take the top voted topic from readers and answer it.  With 45 votes, this week’s winner was “What is the meaning of life (and why do people continually ask).”]

I’ve yet to hear my dog ask about the meaning of life and he seems pretty satisfied with existence. You could conclude that we’re better off not even asking about meaning. Kids don’t ask it, at least not with the same angst adults do. There is mild merit to the phrase ignorance is bliss, as ignorance comes in both pleasant and painful forms. If yours is the former, and you don’t fear boredom, you can float with contentment along the surface of existence never exploring what’s beneath. There’s a zen proverb that says “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water” and I consider this saying often. No matter how much you understand or don’t about your life, you still have to do the living.

Most of living involves simple tasks. The answer to the meaning of life question might just be there is no meaning other than living life for it’s simple pleasures and responsibilities. Modern life has millions of people who need kindness and there are thousands of skills that can be learned and put to good use. There’s plenty of obviously good meaningful things to do. But we have choose them, they usually do not choose us.

It’s notable that the people who ask the titular question most often are those who have a life successful enough to be beyond struggling to survive. You don’t hear this question much from people in need of work, scavenging for food, or running for their lives in fear on a regular basis. Most living things in the history of the planet never bothered to need to ask this question in part because they were too busy trying to stay alive to have a need to occupy their minds with metaphysical questions.

Kafka (possibly) wrote “the meaning of life is that it ends” which I love. Our choices matter because they are finite. The time I spent writing this essay was time I will never get back. Eventually I will die and and all my time will be gone forever. Even if no one reads this, or I decide later I hate it, it still has meaning to me because it’s where I chose to put part of my life. How I prioritize my time defines what my life means. This is pragmatic meaning. Meaning is not an ideal or platitude but something that I manifest in actions I take, or don’t take. In other words, the meaning of life is who you talked to, who you loved, who you helped, who you hurt, what you built, what you destroyed, and on it goes. Camus wrote “Don’t wait for the last judgement, it takes places every day”.

Socrates said “the life that is unexamined is not worth living” which appeals to me. However I think there’s possible merit in living without much examination, at least for periods of time, as my dog’s daily life, or a weekend in Hawaii, are proof of the joys of hedonism. The trap is the examined life offers superior pleasures. Unwavering hedonism loses its meaning over time, as we need contrasting experiences to fully realize what we have. No meal is better than one after a fast.

Following Socrates lead, the fundamental flaw in the question is that it’s asked in the singular. As if there was one meaning, written on a sacred mountain, visible only with a special magic spell, and all we need to do find the secret map, cast the spell, and reveal the meaning for 6 billion people as if it were a crackerjack prize. It’s clear there are an infinite number of meanings to life. You can have several of them that serve you in different ways, or that are useful at different times. The meanings of life for an 17 year old boy, is different than for a 27 year old woman, and on it goes. We go through many meanings during life and people who have fulfilling lives take ownership of the process of shedding old meanings and cultivating new ones.

Once you ask “what are the meanings of life?”, seeking multiple answers instead of singular, doors open. It’s easy to see that different people find different meanings, and that you have to do the legwork of trying different ones out, or even crafting meanings of your own based on what you learn from others and your own experience with what has meaning for you.

The reason people keep asking the question is it’s a cliche’. It’s the most well known phrase for attempting a philosophical discussion with someone. Most people, even when discussing philosophy, stay in the abstract, shy of sharing their own personal meanings, which contributes to the frequency of the question. We ridicule people who ramble about meaning as navel gazers, but the mistake is merely being shy of the personal and the specific.

It’s fascinating to hear how people translate meaning into the actions of their daily lives, as generally we fail at the process, distracted by shiny objects, status symbols, fears and entertainments. We so rarely share our personal struggles with the inconsistencies of our beliefs and behaviors, but it’s in those conversations the meanings we seek can always be found.

Photo by Gian. on Unsplash

What To Expect If You Follow Me on Twitter

Posted on in pr, this siteby Scott Berkun

Twitter is a curious place. It’s used in so many different ways that when I follow people whose work I admire I never know what I’m going to get. I stumbled on this post by Wil Wheaton that offers an explanation to would-be followers and I thought it was wise. It does seem both pompous and useful, and I hope you find it more of the latter than the former.

1. I’m an independent writer and I use twitter to help make a living.  About 30-40% of what I tweet about is entirely about me. Either new things I’ve written, places I’m giving a lecture, or news about upcoming books or previous ones. I’m conscious of the balance and try to keep it reasonable. When I have a new book coming out, books being the primary way I make a living, it definitely goes higher during the critical first few weeks, but then trends back down.

2. Twitter is unreliable – you never see all of someone’s tweets or even the best ones. If you’re thinking of following me to make sure you hear about big news, sign up for the email newsletter that 20k people currently subscribe to. That guarantees every few weeks you’ll get a skim-able list of the important things and my best posts since the last newsletter.

3. I hate the term follower and don’t think of twitter that way. I’d have preferred the word “listener” or even “fan” since follower makes me think of cults and drinking kool-aid (if you don’t know where that saying comes from, click the link. you might not use that phrase again). I’m thrilled anyone pays attention to what I do on twitter, but I know you’re all just a click away from leaving.

4. I use twitter to point to good work. I read voraciously and try to spread awareness of good things I find that people who like my work will also like. I rarely post about things I don’t like, or disappoint me, unless it’s about jargon, myths or lies. Twitter is in many ways an extension of this blog, with similar topics, themes and vibes. Of course when I RT (retweet) things it’s not an endorsement, I assume you give me the benefit of the doubt about why I’m sharing something. And I generally read any link I send.

5. I don’t follow many people on Twitter. I often check the profiles of new followers and read some of their past stream. If I love it of course I’ll follow, but I won’t do this as a courtesy – it’d be disingenuous if I did. Twitter by design is non-reciprocal: you can follow people who don’t follow you and that makes sense to me. I do look at all @berkun messages, and like when people cc: me on a tweet about a link they know I’d be interested in (and that isn’t purely self-promotional).

6. I frequently tweet aphorisms and observations. These are simply interesting  units of thought to kick around with other people. Sometimes I’m passionate about the idea, but often it’s just a thought I have no stake in, or find interesting even though I disagree with it. Don’t read too much into them or what it means about my current state of mind. If I tweet a quote by someone else, I generally try to verify it’s real before I do.

7. If you’re responding to a post, I prefer blog comments to tweets. Tweets are ephemeral. They get lost.  Leaving a comment on a blog lasts forever and guarantees I’ll respond and do it more thoughtfully. Some people reply to a tweet about a new post I’ve written with complex questions like “Did you consider X, Y and Z in context of the transverse Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?” or something similarly thoughtful and challenging, and I often think it’s a shame the question, and my answer, will simply float by in twitter. On twitter few will see that excellent question, or my reply. But if it’s a comment on the blog, most people who reads the post that inspired your question will see it, and they’ll also see my more than 140 characters worth of response. I sometimes even hand copy the tweet of a great question to the comment section to ensure it’s preserved.

8. If I’m on twitter I’ll banter, debate and play. But often I’m not on twitter. People forget twitter is a stream and it’s easy for even @ messages to get lost. DMs frequently get lost too. I see twitter as transient – I’d never ask an important question or make an important request there. If you have something important contact me the reliable way. If you have a topic you want me to write about, ask about it here.

9. I often repeat tweets and link to older work. I sometimes use Buffer to schedule things on twitter. I do this because few people are on twitter 24/7 and things get missed. People in different time zones read more at different times. I post older work because I have a decade of of good writing on evergreen topics: for a new follower it’s just as worthy to them as something I posted fresh that morning. I generally mark old posts with #archive so it’s easy to flag if you’ve been reading me a long time. I periodically tweet about the Best of Berkun list since it’s the easiest introduction for people new to my writing.

But this is merely my view of what I do on Twitter. Does it match your experience? Is there something else you wish I did? Or did less of? Leave a comment.

The law does not guarantee justice

Posted on in Philosophy, politicsby Scott Berkun

“The court doesn’t exist to give them justice… But to give them a chance at justice.”

-Galvin (Paul Newman), The Verdict

America suffers from superficial assumptions about not only our criminal laws, but the details of individual cases. We base our “knowledge” on headlines and soundbites, a thin stream of ignorance for evaluating someone’s guilt or innocence. We forget that the jury is sequestered away from the news, and that we in the public have different information than what the jury hears. Even the same information is expressed differently to juries. Our view of a trial from the outside is a watered down, over-simplified and twisted mess that bears little resemblance to the environment where these important decisions are made. As sad as I am about the entire case, I’m grateful we don’t let our emotional, thoughtless mob at large decide much of anything.

I’ve seen dozens of proclamations for what the Zimmerman verdict means, as if the entire 300+ million citizenry of America (or the 1000 people running the show if you believe in conspiracy theories) met together in Florida and agreed on a plan for how to ruin our nation through a single decision. Perhaps the most glaring oversight in our outrage is that a jury trial puts the burden of judgement into a handful of people. The six or twelve members of a jury are alone empowered to judge, which explains why most lawyers, victims and accused criminals avoid them (only 10% of cases go to trial, which, against my point,  could also indicate something is wrong with our system). Whatever was wrong with America before the trial was wrong regardless of the outcome of this case. And unless those six people are a secret cabal running our nation, they never had the power to change America at large no matter what they decided.

Before you judge me and the tone of this post, if it matters, I think Zimmerman should have been charged at least with manslaughter. But what I think is irrelevant. as I was not on that jury. That’s my point.

There is no law that can guarantee everyone, or even a majority’s, sense of justice will be carried out. Instead we have laws that attempt to do the heavy lifting in providing a machine that gives everyone a chance at justice. A chance to make their case. And it’s not about what you know or believe but what you can prove to the satisfaction of the members of the jury. This means skill is a critical. It’s not the most righteous who wins, it’s who has the most skill in proving righteousness to the satisfaction of the jury. Is this fair? No. But it is clear.

If you read even a cursory critique of the prosecutions case against Zimmerman you’ll find reasonable questions about the actual evidence in the case, and how the prosecution used, or didn’t use it. Forget whether you agree with this critique or not, the outcome of the case means the jury likely did agree with some of it, and that’s all that matters.

In America we believe in reasonable doubt, and what a burden it is against immediate justice. Reasonable doubt means the job is on the prosecution to prove guilt, not on the defendant to prove innocence. The defense has the much easier job. Even the presentation of conflicting evidence and testimony can quickly create reasonable doubt on a jury, and there was plenty of conflicting testimony in the Zimmerman trial.

Reasonable doubt is unfair because it puts the prosecution at a disadvantage, but it’s unfair by design. Reasonable doubt prefers to let some accused people go free at the expense of preventing the innocent from being sent to prison. Reasonable doubt has its problems but it’s objective is clear, and it has been part of our legal system since its beginnings. It bets the sacrifice of justice of some guilty going free is more than compensated by preventing the innocent from being found guilty. Even if you don’t agree this is as good bet, it is the bet we have.

I am aware of the deep problems with racism, guns and crime in America. I understand why people feel outraged by the verdict and I feel sadness for everyone personally involved. But I won’t let one decision decided by six Florida citizens define much of anything for me or my country. I wish most of all for us to use our brains as much as our hearts in sorting our what the verdict means and what work we have to do to make our nation safe for everyone.

Book Review: Jung’s Man and His Symbols

Posted on in Book reviewsby Scott Berkun

ManAndHisSymbolsSmI’d heard of the work of Carl Jung by reference, and despite never reading anything he wrote I knew about archetypes and the abused false dichotomy introvert and extrovert. He’s referenced often, even by the Police in the songs and the title of their popular Synchronicity album. I like to read original sources for ideas, and have had a copy of Man and His Symbols for years. I finally read it last week.

The first disappointment is that although this is one of his more popular books, he only wrote the first chapter. The others are authored by followers and colleagues of his who explore different applications of his ideas. It was no surprise that the first chapter is the best in what can be best described as a muddled read. The chapter on symbolism in art was one of the worst for me as I have basic knowledge in art history and found this a second rate walkthrough of familiar turf.

The writing style is an odd kind of academic writing. Ideas are framed in complicated ways and hinge heavily on anonymous accounts of patient’s dreams and their interpretations. While I concede there is much to learn from dreams, and people who study them professionally are better at analyzing them than others, the hand picked cases and their analysis was rarely convincing. It felt like science by unverifiable anecdote, which is fine if the writer admits this, but no such admissions are found here.

The highlights of the book are the general observations of the disconnect in modern life between our unconscious thoughts and our rational, logical lives. The book points out how primitive societies did a better job of balancing expression of those unconscious feelings, through ritual, religion and the attention to dreams, while modern people, despite our mobile phones and streaming movies, are plagued with anxieties born from a lack of socially acceptable means to explore those energies. Dreams represent one opportunity for us to reconnect with these abandoned parts of ourselves, but there clearly are others.

I’m told Memories, Dreams, Reflections, which was Jung’s last book, is more approachable but my curiosity about his ideas has not recovered sufficiently to give him another try.

Here are some choice quotes from the book:

Most of us have consigned to the unconscious all the fantastic psychic associations that every object or idea possesses. The primitive, on the other hand, is still aware of these psychic properties; he endows animals, plants, or stones with powers that we find strange and unacceptable.

Because there are innumerable things beyond the range of human understanding, we constantly use symbolic terms to represent concepts that we cannot define or fully comprehend. This is one reason why all religions employ symbolic language or images. But this conscious use of symbols is only one aspect of a psychological fact of great importance: Man also produces symbols unconsciously and spontaneously, in the form of dreams.

self-control is a rare and remarkable virtue. We may think we have ourselves under control; yet a friend can easily tell us things about ourselves of which we have no knowledge.

A story told by the conscious mind has a beginning, a development, and an end, but the same is not true of a dream. Its dimensions in time and space are quite different; to understand it you must examine it from every aspect—just as you may take an unknown object in your hands and turn it over and over until you are familiar with every detail of its shape.

It is easy to understand why dreamers tend to ignore and even deny the message of their dreams. Consciousness naturally resists anything unconscious and unknown

How To Work With Stupid People

Posted on in Management, workby Scott Berkun

I wrote the popular essay How To Manage Smart People years ago, and often heard the feedback: “advice on smart people is easy. Tell us how to work with stupid people.” I hoped to get to it eventually, but Jason Crawford beat me to it. And he wrote about it in much the way I would have:

 Unless you’re a world-class genius (statistically unlikely), you are probably mis-diagnosing people as stupid.

His post is as a series of questions, almost a checklist, for challenging assumptions. If by chance the person you’re working with is a moron, walking through his post will show you how to think more clearly about whatever it is you’re working on and find a better way to deal with it.

Do you fully understand what they’re saying? Or are you talking past each other?
Are you answering the same question? Maybe each of you is answering a different angle on the question (e.g., “what’s our next step?” vs. “what’s the long-term solution?”)
Are you using terms in the same way? Sometimes disagreements come from differing definitions and terminology.
Are you talking completely in abstractions? Give examples, and ask them for examples, to get clear and concrete

Read the whole post. It’s worth reading once a year, and gift for new leaders and managers.

Inside Buckminster Fuller’s house (w/ photos)

Posted on in Generalby Scott Berkun

Epcot07Today is when noted inventor, designer and philosopher Buckminster Fuller was born in 1895. He’s most famous for the geodisic dome, which at the time was heralded as a revolutionary way to build homes and offices using less material. Geodisic means, loosely, forming a curve with straight lines. Spaceship earth at Epcot center is one of the largest and most famous examples. Domes were popular in the 70s, but like many of Fuller’s ideas they proved hard to build and harder to use. Circular buildings are striking to look at, but there are good reasons we build in rectangles,

He also designed the Dymaxion house, first created in 1929. His ambition was similar to the dome: to make construction simpler, while also improving the quality of living homes provide. I visited one of the few Dymaxions in the world at the Ford museum near Detroit. It was a thrill to get inside a manifestation of his ideas and have a walk around.

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Many of the design decisions, including the round shape, were to achieve an autonomous building, or a building that didn’t depend on the power grid or water system. One advantage of the circle was wraparound windows, something possible because of the centrally supported ceiling. But the curved walls make interior design challenging. There are fewer ways to use the space. As you can see from the photos, the rooms are, weird. Unlike Hundertwasser’s work, Fuller’s mixture of curves and straight lines makes for some awkward aesthetics.

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The building featured dozens of clever design ideas. The refridgerator and air conditioner were powered by the exhaust from other systems in the house. Everything was reused and recycled. Runoff water was used in the toilets and (in theory) to water gardens.

Some of the shelves rotated when a button is pressed,  maximizing storage space and minimizing the need to bend or reach inside. As with much of his work, this had a branded name (Ovolving shelves).

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Since they left many of the style choices (love that green) from when the house was built, it felt like a strange combination of the past and the future, similar to have steampunk stories feel. For example, the floorboards had ventilations shafts that would collect dust, reducing the need to sweep or vacuum.

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I’ve read some of his books and am familiar with his inventions, but it powerful to experience one first hand. If you’re in the Detroit area and interested in design and engineering, I recommended checking out the Ford museum for the Dymaxion house alone.

NYC/Boston: Book tour venues wanted

Posted on in On Tourby Scott Berkun

To promote my upcoming book The Year Without Pants I’ll be touring the NYC/Boston area 10/15 thru 10/28.

Just as in the past I’ll use my network to fill the schedule, but this time I wanted to let you folks in NYC/Boston help, if you’re interested.  If you’re not interested in doing some legwork to get to see me speak in person, no worries – but stop reading now.

Here’s how it works:

  • The goal is attention for the book (surprise)
  • I seek the biggest crowds I can find
  • Preference given to book buying audiences (corporations & universities are excellent)
  • Preference given to venues willing to bulk order books
  • I’ll speak about themes from the new book, but do long Q&As where anything goes
  • I’m thrilled when organizations open events to the public

Know an organizer that would host me? Perhaps:

  • Your corporation
  • A college
  • A well attended speaker series
  • A large community group that has regular meetings
  • A popular bookstore
  • Your living room (If I have open slots, I’ll fill them any way I can)

If yes, do this:

  • If you are the organizer, check the schedule below and get in touch
  • If you’re not the organizer but know them, here’s early praise for the book and my bio to help pitch them

You can contact me this way.

Tentative NYC/Boston tour Schedule:

  • NYC – Tue Oct 15th to Oct 18th
  • Boston:  Tue Oct 22nd to Oct. 28th

Why is Our Civilization Dying?

Posted on in ask berkun, Philosophyby Scott Berkun

Each week I take the top voted question from readers and answer it.  With 49 votes, this week’s winner was “Why is Our Civilization Dying?”:

Why is Our Civilization Dying? Why are we not moving science forward anymore, but instead get fascinated by ridiculous things like new iPhone model or Facebook or Instagram or 3D printers for that matter? Why no one cares about space exploration, biological research, prolonging human life?

Why one would see things of medieval stupidity now, in the XXI century? Like adult people believing in ghosts, angels, fairies, vampires, what not? Why “rights” of all kinds of morons and perverts are becoming more important than the common good of the human kind? Is this just a natural decline of a civilization, or someone is driving us there?

Before I answer this entertainingly overloaded question directly, I need to set the stage with some supporting arguments.

1. We suffer from projecting false uniformity to support theories. It’s hard to measure trends on the scale of entire civilizations and we sloppily assume uniformity when it’s convenient for our arguments. This isn’t to say there aren’t trends or that we’re incapable of spotting them, it’s just we’re bad at objectively evaluating wide measures in the past, much less the present. Broad strokes are a magnet for the worst acts of confirmation bias and oversimplification. In this case the planet is big enough to support many different civilizations simultaneously, yet the question assumes there is only one and that it’s shared, an assumption challenged by the number of wars and conflicts around the globe.

2. Progress can happen inside regress. It’s possible for a small group of people in one generation to make great progress despite the majority of people at that time being backward, confused, uncivilized or a thousand other disappointing things. There is a reasonable claim that sometimes progress only happens when things are the worst: only then is there enough motivation for people to act. Stated another way, as bad as thing are sometimes they must get worse before they can get better.

3. Progress is led by minorities. All progress is change and only a minority of people have all three of the necessary qualities:  1) being willing to make sacrifices to make change happen 2) having the superior ideas to pursue and 3) the execution skills required to deliver the idea to the masses.

4. There is an illusion of golden times in the past. When judging the present we often fall victim to comparing it against a mythological golden era that never existed.  Before even trying to answer the original question, it’s helpful to ask another question first: When was our civilization most alive? In America we romanticize the Romans and the Greeks, but both civilizations, despite their achievements, had systematic brutality and inequality. As critical as I am of our species, I agree with Penn Jillette:

Two things have always been true about human beings. One, the world is always getting better. Two, the people living at that time think it`s getting worse.

Given #1 it’s hard to prove this since so much of these observations is subjective, but whenever I step back from my complaints about modern times to carefully review the grand scale of human history, the present always looks far better.

civilization and its discontentsThe question, as written, has some easily refutable claims. To say “Why no one cares about space exploration, biological research, prolonging human life?” is at best sloppy thinking. Clearly some people in the world seriously care about all of those things. And given #3 above, I bet the % of people who care about those things is as high or higher than in the past. I’m certain most people have serious interest in living longer, the question is how much of their or their government’s time are invested in pursuing those ideas, which is a different problem (fee free to ask me a follow up question: Why are our governments dying?)

The general fascination with ridiculous and trivial things is hardly new. We have a long and well documented history with being easily obsessed by worthless things. As much as I criticize our technological consumerism, it might also be an indicator of the general health of a civilization. If people are mostly worried about trivial things it means the fundamentals of civilization aren’t daily concerns (food, shelter, employment, etc). Of course when the focus on the trivial could be a denial of real problems that need attention, but interest in Instagram and Angry Birds alone says little.

Freud’s answer to this entire question was to doubt the utility of civilization in the first place. He argued that we traded our sanity for safety on the day we took up permanent shelter with each other, pointing to how our natural psychologies struggle in the systems required to make large scale civilizations work . Some of Jared Diamond’s ideas in The World Until Yesterday run on a similar theme of doubting that civilization itself has progressed us in all the ways we assume it has.

To summarize my answer:

  • I don’t think civilization is dying.
  • In many important ways this is the best time to be alive.
  • I agree there are major problems. We can learn much from the 18th century and other centuries too.
  • Things will have to get worse before they get better.
  • Related: Why Is Innovation Slowing Down?

Help Wanted: Marketing / research assistant

Posted on in Generalby Scott Berkun

I’m hiring a marketing assistant to help with the upcoming launch of The Year Without Pants.

I’m hoping one of you smart readers who has skills in marketing and research would dig the chance to work directly with me on a few tasks. Perhaps you’re a college student, or need a part time job, or simply have the right skills and think it would be fun to work with me on something.

Tasks include:

  • Researching to build a lists of bloggers/media who might be interested in the new book
  • Planning and executing on outreach to fans and previous reviewers
  • Finding trade groups and events interested in remote work
  • Brainstorming with me on fun marketing ideas for the book launch in September

Skills needed:

  • Excellent Google and web research skills
  • Master of writing short, clever emails and blog posts
  • Possession of a wit sharp enough to shave with
  • Unafraid of mail-merge, mailing lists and large email inboxes
  • Experience marketing something successfully (be creative if needed)

How you’ll be paid / How much work:

  • I can pay $25 an hour
  • 5 to 10 hours of work weekly for the next two months
  • You can work wherever and whenever fits your schedule

How to apply:

To apply I’m asking you do a simple task in line with the job. It should take 20-45 minutes to put together a decent submission. If you’re hired I’ll pay you for this time as well.

  1. Assignment: create a spreadsheet of everyone who  reviewed Making Things Happen
  2. Include fields for source (amazon? Slashdot? Lifehacker? CNN?), reviewer, contact info, and rank of influence
  3. Write a brief summary of how you compiled the list
  4. Include the words “lamiaceous” and “lenocinant” somewhere in your summary
  5. Add a brief statement about your background and why you want the job
  6. Email the above to me at info at scottberkun.com

Want an early copy of The Year Without Pants? (exclusive)

Posted on in Year Without Pantsby Scott Berkun

YWP COVER FINALThe Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work is just a few weeks away from releasing. It’s already earned endorsements from Tim Ferriss, Guy Kawaskai, Tony Hsieh and more.

What happens now is my publisher sends out copies of the book, called gallies, to journalists, magazines and other media so they can review the book when it comes out.

Are you a:

  • journalist?
  • magazine editor?
  • prominent book reviewer?
  • active blogger?
  • someone who blogs for a prominent blog?
  • host of a major TV talk show or owner of a media empire :)

And want a galley? If yes, contact me directly or leave a comment.

I can’t promise you’ll all get one, but it can’t hurt to leave your name.

Some early praise:

“The Year Without Pants is one of the most original and important books about what work is really like, and what it takes to do it well, that has ever been written.”
—Robert Sutton, professor, Stanford University, and author, New York Times bestsellers The No Asshole Rule and Good Boss, Bad Boss

“WordPress.com has discovered a better way to work, and The Year Without Pants allows the reader to learn from the organization’s fun and entertaining story.”
—Tony Hsieh, author, New York Times best seller Delivering Happiness, and CEO, Zappos.com, Inc.

“The underlying concept—an ‘expert’ putting himself on the line as an employee—is just fantastic. And then the book gets better from there! I wish I had the balls to do this.”
—Guy Kawasaki, author, APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur, and former chief evangelist, Apple

“If you want to think differently about entrepreneurship, management, or life in general, read this book.”
—Tim Ferriss, author, New York Times best seller The 4-Hour Workweek

Book review: Your First 1000 copies – a guide to marketing books

Posted on in Book reviews, Writing Wellby Scott Berkun

1000 copies coverLast night I read Your First 1000 copies: The step by step guide to marketing your book by Tim Grahl of Out:Think. He has done book marketing for Dan Pink and other high profile authors, and the book outlines some of the methods he’s used and why you should use them. It’s a good book and I recommend it.

I’ve read several books on book marketing and this is the first one that was a pleasure to read. Grahl writes well, makes his points directly and unlike the majority of books written by marketers about marketing is calm, clear, hype-free and honest. Although short, the book doesn’t read as a tease to hire his company (which many books do). He justifies the use of tactics that aren’t sexy or the easiest to try, but the ones that have been the most effective. And most surprising of all (for a marketing book), all of his approaches are founded on treating potential readers with respect.

As far as methods: the central tactic he believes in is email, yes email, and how all his data points to its superiority for authors in maintaining connections with readers and leading to eventual sales. He explains why and  how and the book provides many links to his site with his latest answers for the best tools to use for everything he advises (a nicely done win/win for garnering traffic to his site). He offers a sane framing of twitter, Facebook and social media. Minor coverage is provided to blogging, speaking and other common methods.

I was also happy to see his charts that dismiss the singular drive to make bestseller lists, as many books with shallow marketing hit those lists once, and then have sales that plummet, as the marketing wasn’t built to be sustainable. It’s a rarely discussed fact that many books on the bestseller lists are outsold in the long run by books that never come close to having a bestselling week.

Grahl has been heaviliy influenced by Seth Godin, and if you’re familiar with his Tribes ideas, some of Your First 1000 copies will be familiar in philosophy. To market a book you need to build a group of people interested in your work, and the ideas you represent, and the book is simply part of that system of exchange you have with followers. Grahl does detail how to do this, and does it with more precision for authors than you’ve probably seen before. But there’s no gimmick or trick here. This is an authentic  permission based marketing approach to marketing books.

The primary weakness of the book, which perhaps isn’t one at all, is the book requires lead time to be of use. It takes time to build a following, time an author whose book comes out in a few weeks will struggle to do. His methods, like most good marketing for books, make the most sense for authors who believe they’ll write more than one book. Marketing books is hard. It’s an extremely competitive landscape.  It requires a long term commitment, a commitment most one time authors are unlikely to want to make (or can’t make as all of their available energy goes into the book itself). This is a minor criticism since this is simply a fundamental truth.

The book is short and an easy read. I read the whole thing in an hour. It was a pleasure and was worth the time and money.

 

New site feature: Control My Mind (Ask Berkun)

Posted on in reader's choice, this siteby Scott Berkun

I’ve been working with the folks at FreshMuse on a new feature: Mind Control.

I’ve always enjoyed Q&A with you folks (see reader’s choice) – now I have a way to ensure this happens all the time.

We’ve built a beta version of Ask Berkun. You get to control my mind and pick what I write about each week.

You can:

  • Submit a question you want me to write about
  • Vote on other submissions
  • You get 30 votes a month (for now)

I will:

  • Pick the top voted question each week and write about it

It’s a BETA version. You may find bugs. If you do, please report them here as a comment.

Have fun.

https://scottberkun.com/ask/

Movie review: Tales From The Script (The business of writing films)

Posted on in moviesby Scott Berkun

tales_from_the_scriptScreenwriting is hard, but what’s harder is selling a screenplay and getting a film made. The best documentary I’ve seen about the business of screenwriting is Tales From The Script, currently streaming on Netflix.

The movie is a series of interviews of the screenwriters behind many famous films of the last decade:

  • William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid)
  • Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver)
  • John Carpenter (Halloween)
  • Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption)
  • David Ward (Sleepless in Seattle)
  • David Hayter (X-Men)
  • Ron Shelton (Bull Durham)
  • and many more

They each tell brutally honest stories of how they got started, what meeting with film executives is like, the surprising trajectory of their careers, and more. Plenty of lessons for writers of all kinds.

In many ways the film is an endorsement for the DIY movement, as I couldn’t help thing all throughout the film “Why would I bother with the system when I could just do the whole thing myself?”

How Do You Build a Culture of Healthy Debate?

Posted on in ask berkun, Managementby Scott Berkun

From Monday’s pile of questions reader Ev Larsen asked:

Assumptions have an unnerving way of becoming facts and received wisdom over time. How do you build some functional assumption-checking into a project team, a process that generates useful feedback and moves the team effort forward?

The best answer to questions of culture is you hire for it. Culture change is slow, much slower than technological change. This mystifies technocrats, as it should. People are much more challenging and powerful than machines will ever be.

Want more creative teams? Hire creative people. Want more risk-taking? Hire for it. No single act defines an organization’s culture more than who is hired and why. If you want to shift a culture the most effective way to do it is to change who you hire. Yes, you can try to lead your current staff in a new direction, but if you’ve hired people in the past primarily for being polite and staying in their lane, the shift to preferring debate and challenging assumptions won’t be an easy one.

The reason is simple: people are stubborn. By the time we’re 25 many of our personality traits, desires and habits are well defined and unlikely to change (it’s certainly possible but odds are against it). The primary point of leverage then is who a manager hires (and fires) and why. It’s far easier to hire for traits you need than to try to transform a person who doesn’t have them into someone that does. Even if transformation is the goal, we are social creatures and learn best from the examples around us. The more people in an organization that successfully demonstrate a trait, the easier it is for others to emulate and adopt it.

One weakness of managers is their faith in the omnipotence of management.  There is the belief, reinforced by management consultants and business books, that simply by decreeing “be innovative” or “work smarter” magic forces that transcend the limits of sociology will transform conservative or stupid people into being otherwise on your behalf. The ability of a manager to achieve something depends heavily on whether the people on staff are even capable of doing that thing. You couldn’t convert the local bakery into a nuclear physics research lab simply by changing the manager or the management philosophy, but that doesn’t stop executives from trying. The current trend of organizations built for decades around core values of conservatism and rule-following magically transforming into entrepreneurial risk taking powerhouses simply because the CEO tells them to is a classic example of this hubris.

A related challenge is for a leader to embody the change in their own behavior. Anthropology teaches us that people respond best to leaders who model behavior, rather than those who simply dictate it. But this requires a leader who is self-aware enough of their own tendencies and who is willing to embody the shift they want in their organisation in their own behavior.

My broad ranting aside, to answer the specific question some people are instinctively better at challenging assumptions than others. They ask more questions, have more doubts, and are willing to act on them. I don’t know why they are this way, but I know these people exist. If you want more assumption checking, hire for it. If you don’t have the power to hire, provide a new way for them to make themselves visible. Then promote and reward people who exercise these traits, as that’s a way to signify to others what is valued and what is not.

These people are harder to manage since they naturally challenge authority, but if you want assumptions challenged that includes the assumption of hierarchy. Diversity is a natural way to bring more questions into an organization as people with different experiences naturally question each other when they get together to build something. Age difference is one of the most useful kinds of diversity as new graduates and old veterans have many different assumptions, and if healthy debate is encouraged the results will be the best synthesis of those perspectives.

The second part is how you as the manager respond to having your assumptions challenged. If you continually demonstrate that you, the person in charge, is comfortable being challenged, or yielding your idea to a superior one suggested by a colleague or subordinate, everyone who works for you will emulate that behavior. Alternatively, if you dismiss challenges, or yell at people who challenge you, the culture of fear your behavior creates will dominate no matter who you hire or how great you proclaim it is to challenge assumptions.

The platitude “there are no sacred cows” is very easy to say, but I’ve rarely heard it said by someone who didn’t really mean “only my sacred cows are sacred.” It takes great confidence as a leader to keep an open mind as the size of their empire grows.

The third part is behaving in ways that separate people from their ideas. Healthy debate is easy if no one is taking the results personally. Most heated debates involve people who have trouble separating their opinions from their identity (the lack of ability to find any humor in a debate is a good sign that someone is taking the issue too seriously). If I draw what turns out to be a bad idea on a whiteboard, in a healthy culture it’s reinforced that the idea is lame, but I’m not. I can still be smart and valuable. Perhaps my lame idea will help lead to a great one. This trust in coworkers is what allows ideas to be debated, attacked, torn down, twisted, reused and improved without any fear of offending anyone. Most successful creative cultures in history were based on this separation. It’s another set of behaviors that leaders must demonstrate regularly. Many talented organizations produce little of merit because of how sensitive people are of criticism, and the fear of offending people or being offended trumps everything else.

There are definitely techniques that encourage the challenge of assumptions but they only work if the above factors are true. My favorites include:

  • Postmortem / Debrief: after every project, a long conversation should take place where people review what happened, what assumptions were made, what went well and what could have gone better. If lead properly (and witch-hunts and finger pointing are avoided) these conversations are gold. They inject introspection and self-awareness into the culture.
  • Experimental attitude: The basic notion of an experiment is you have a hypothesis (which is really a set of assumptions) and you find a way to test it to see if it’s right. Most experiments fail, but the attitude is it’s the only way to learn. Leaders should always be running experiments of some kind with their teams. “Let’s try working this way for a week and see what happens.”  The continual exposure to the cycle of “assumption, test, learn, repeat” diminishes fear around asking questions and raises everyone’s comfort with making, challenging and testing assumptions.
  • Discuss books about thinking: many books address problem-solving, question asking, and challenging assumptions, and if read as a team provides a meta-example for exercising what the books try to teach (“e.g. what assumptions in this book about questioning assumptions should we question?)  Although it’s more about problem-solving, Are Your Lights On? is one my favorites for inspiring people to think more critically, and humorously, about everything.

What do you think? Are there other methods to encourage a culture of questioning assumptions?