Author: Scott Berkun

Your Notebook Fundamentalism Is a Shame

Posted on in Generalby Scott Berkun

In a recent on HBR article titled Alexandra Samuel explains how she can tell instantly that someone is wasting her time:

I knew right away, when you walked in here with a paper notebook — a paper notebook! — I realized that this meeting was not going to be a good use of our time.

You’d make better use of your time if you took your notes in digital form, ideally in an access-anywhere digital notebook like Evernote that makes retrieval a snap. If you had that, I could shoot you the link of the book I want you to read, or the contact card of the person you want to meet. And if you planned to act any of the ideas or outcomes from this meeting, you would want to pop the follow-up tasks into your task management program.

Dear Alexandra:

I often use paper notebooks. I don’t care what other people use. The means are not the ends.

I judge coworkers on their results, not their tools. I recommend everyone does the same.

If I worked with someone who used smoke signals and carrier pigeons but did better work than their fully upgraded neural implanted cyborg peers, I’d make sure they had all the firewood and bird feed they needed.  And by the same token, if the cyborgs did better work, I’d offer cyborg implants to the rest of the team to try.  It’s only after I see what people produce that I’d consider commentary on the means they used.

Most meetings I’m in are about people’s ideas. We prioritize what goes on it the meeting over worrying about notes for who isn’t in the room. We pitch ideas at whiteboards, we sketch strategies, and we use every tool each of us thinks helps us get whatever task we’re doing at the moment. Sometimes the latest gadgets are involved. Often it’s just paper and pens. But we’re all open minded about how we work together, and I think you should be too.

I’ve yet to work in a place where taking notes was a major concern for meetings. I’ve never heard of a notes crisis, or had teams complain they were overwhelmed with the burdens of writing, transcribing and reading notes. Most notes in most meetings in most of the history of the world are never read. I have no data to support that claim, but perhaps I’ve avoided workplaces that have fueled their own paranoia about what might get missed.

When I first read your post I thought it was a joke. Maybe it was and I didn’t get it. But if I take it seriously I’d be afraid to work with you. I’d assume you’d judge me before I even had a chance to show you what I can do. And given how many people will read what you wrote, you should keep this in mind when you start your next meeting.

Signed,

-Scott

Liberals vs. Conservatives is a False Dichotomy

Posted on in politicsby Scott Berkun

Most things we commonly split into two piles fall apart if you think about them:

In the U.S. we divide people politically as Liberals and Conservatives, but the terms are so poorly defined it’s easy to find examples of people who have some liberal views and some conservative views.  There are other important alternatives for defining a person’s politics (what do you want to liberate? what do you want to conserve? how do you think it should be done?), but the convenience of the false dichotomy of liberal vs. conservative hides them from consideration. The convenience of binary logic blinds us from how poor a foundation for thought it can be.

All dichotomies can be sub-divided into smaller groups. This is rarely observed in debate, but if you believe you can divide anything in half, this applies recursively. You can have conservative liberals and liberal conservatives. And conservative liberal conservatives and liberal conservative liberals. If you stop to carefully examine anything polarizing, even when you’re certain you’re on the right side, you’ll discover nuance, contradiction and subtlety that will cause any wise mind to challenge the merits of the initial dichotomy.

An excerpt from the post The False Dichotomy of False Dichotomies.

How to get from an idea to a book

Posted on in Writing Wellby Scott Berkun

Success in the majority of circumstances depends on knowing how long it takes to succeed. » Montesquieu

I’m sure you have an amazing idea for a book. I’m proud of you. Now please put that idea aside and pay attention:

  1. Pick up any book
  2. Flip through its pages
  3. It took hundreds of hours to make that book (e.g. 10 hours x 50 weeks = 500 hours)
  4. The big question: Do you love your idea enough to put in 500 hours? 700? 1000? more?

If YES, skip to the next list.

If NO, stop obsessing about ideas for books. Having an idea is easy. If you, the person who came up with the idea, won’t put in the time, odds are no one else will. There are infinitely more good ideas for books, movies, companies and everything else than people willing to put in the effort. I think you should put in the time, but it’s up to you.

How an idea becomes a book

There are only two ways an idea becomes a book: time and money. Someone has to decide to put time and/or money into making a book. Self publishing is easier than ever today, but it means you will have to invest the time required to publish the book. Many writers prefer to partner with a publisher to trade royalties for doing some of the work, but to get a publisher requires effort of its own.

If you want a publisher to publish your book:

  1. Publishers put money up front, authors don’t. Publishers pay for everything:  the production costs, editorial costs, the author’s advance and more. They are investors and they look at books as possible investments. To ask a publisher to publish a book is to ask for an investor in your project.
  2. Publishers are businesses. They primarily care about profit. They don’t care about you or your idea and the judgements of your work are not personal.
  3. You are competing for a precious slot. Many people want to write books. Bring your A game to the process.
  4. Your idea will be evaluated on your book proposal. A book proposal is a 10-30 page pitch for the book (explained here).
  5. If you can’t write a decent book proposal, you can’t write a decent book. Seems fair.

If you are willing to publish the book yourself:

  1. You don’t need anyone’s permission. You have the power, right now, for very little money, to publish anything and sell it on Amazon or even in bookstores.  It’s really very easy to publish books today (getting people to buy them is another matter).
  2. All you need to do is the work of writing the book.

There are good books about writing book outlines and proposals. Go read one. This is the beginning of the many hours you must put in. O’Reilly Media has an excellent summary of what they expect in a proposal.

Planning A Book

There is no one way to plan the book itself. The simplest way is to make an outline. An idea for a book by itself is vague as there are an infinite number of ways to write a book based on the same idea. What sections will the book have? What are the chapters? What is the one page (or 5 page) synopsis of the plot or major points? It’s useful to do research for books similar to the one you want to write and study them. They will sharpen your focus on what form you want your idea to take, possibilities for how to structure your book and more. (See also How To Start Writing A book).

Common questions

Q: Can I skip writing a book proposal?

No. Unless you are Lady Gaga, Bono or your Mom owns a book publishing company and she still likes you. Of course if you self publish you’re free to skip this step too (though writing it anyway is a great way to force yourself to think hard about what you’re getting into). A book proposal includes an outline for the entire book and writing an outline can be more difficult than writing the book itself. An outline forces you to think broadly about what will be in the book and what won’t. This takes time and thought.

Q: But won’t someone steal my amazing idea?

No. Ideas are cheap and editors/agents see hundreds of them every week. They have no motivation to steal your idea. Even if your idea is amazing someone still has to put in a year or more of effort, and as this essay explained at the beginning, that commitment is far harder to obtain than a great idea. Agents and editors rarely write books – that’s why they became agents and editors.

Q: What about self publishing?

Self publishing is awesome. I highly recommend it. If you really love your idea nothing can stop you from publishing. This is AMAZING. People buy books based on reviews, not because of the publisher’s name on the spine. The rub is you are on your own. A publisher can improve your book idea in many ways, and help you with every step of the process. If you self publish you must conceive, write, edit, design, market, proofread and promote the book all on your own, or be able to find and hire people to help you. This is liberating if you are willing to put in the additional time and like to learn. It’s a nightmare if your network is small, you’re not a good project manager and you fear the unknown.

Q: Is the proposal a formality? [new question]

Book proposals help the author tremendously. They force the author to get out of their dreamy stupor about their idea and think hard about the many elements that make an actual book. What are the chapters? What research do you need to do? What books are out there that are in the same category? How will yours be better? Many authors find writing the proposal a harder challenge than writing the book, since after writing a solid proposal many of the hard decisions have already been made.     

Q: Do I need to write the book first?

No, unless you are writing fiction. This is a surprise to most. The majority of non-fiction book deals are signed based on 3 things: a proposal, an outline and a sample chapter. Publishers of non-fiction believe if you can do those three things well, you can write a decent book. The vast majority of people with book ideas fail at those three simple tasks.

Q: Do I need to write an outline? 

Yes. If you can’t think of a list of chapters ideas that fills two pages, what makes you insane enough to think you can come up with a 250 page book’s worth of material?  One trick is to start an outline, as sparse as it is, and add to it whenever you get another idea. Little by little you may just build something awesome. Or you might just realize the idea for the book is better than the reality of the book (haven’t you read books like this?).

Q: Do I need to write a sample chapter?

Hell yes. Books are made of chapters. Have you written a chapter before? It’s wise to try it out before you sign on the dotted line to write 10 or 50 of them.

Q: I’ve tried writing, but I get stuck. Is there a trick?

No. Here’s why you are failing at writing.

Q: Shouldn’t I just get an agent?

The first thing an agent will ask is “send me your proposal.” There is no escape! Agents are busy people: you will get one shot at their interest. Contact them when you are ready, not before. Have the finished, polished proposal before you start looking around.

An agent will take 10-20% of your possible revenue for a book. In return they will guide you through the process, they will pitch your book to their network of editors and publishers, and help you negotiate for the best deal. If these services are worth 10-20% of the financial reward of the book to you, then hire one. If you think you can do those things well yourself and you have the time to do it, then don’t.

Q: How do I make sure I don’t get screwed?

Writing a book is entrepreneurial. Working with a publisher is a business deal. All business deals have risks. Working with an agent increases how much experience is on your side, but even an agent can let you down. But most of the horror stories I hear are from authors who didn’t carefully read the contracts, didn’t do the legwork to pitch the book to multiple publishers and allowed their hubris to get in their way.

The Authors Guild, which I recommend joining, is an advocacy group for writers. They offer this excellent advice on book contracts and how to negotiate them.

Q: When the proposal is finished what do I do with it?

 If your book is about something you are an expert in, start with your network. Ask colleagues who have published books to pass your proposal on to their editors. Look at books similar to the one you are proposing and read the acknowledgements. You’ll always find mention of the agent and editor who worked on the book. Some research will reveal how to get in touch with them. Many smaller, industry specific publishers have proposal submission details on their websites.

Q: What about fiction?

Fiction is harder to find a publisher for than non-fiction. A non-fiction book is marketed largely on your credentials. If you are an accountant writing about tax tricks, a publisher knows they can market you as an expert on the topic. Fiction has no experts. The market for novels is more competitive and marketing is more difficult. Most fiction agents and publishers demand a complete manuscript, and a short synopsis, before they’ll talk to you, for good reason.

Questions? Leave a comment.

[Note: edited estimate of hours in first numbered list 2/20/2014]

The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: Book Review

Posted on in Book reviews, General, historyby Scott Berkun

greatbig

This book, The Great Big Book of Horrible Things, by Matthew White, is a masterpiece.

We think thing are rough in the world today, but wow, we are so far ahead of our history. It seems counterintuitive to read about horrible things when you think the world today is horrible, but I promise it will give you relief. Read a few chapters and you’ll put today’s bad world news in an entirely new, and optimistic context.

This is a tour de force of world history, using warfare and atrocity as the thread running through the history of civilization. He winds his way through every major conflict with insight, wit, theory and more, avoiding all of the traps historians make of confusing the esoteric with the interesting. White manages to take the most complex events of human history and deftly explain the causes, sequences and affects, giving readers memorable insights into the history of civilization. As a non-historian I cannot vouch for the historical accuracy of everything in the book, but on the grand scale he tied together so many different parts of world history that I never understood before.

As the title suggests the anchor of these stories is warfare, from fratricide, to genocide, which should not be taken lightly. But it does make for a compelling narrative force: how do you compare the worst events in human history, and evaluate the (horrible?) people behind them?

The spine of the book are various lists about the most horrible events, the worst leaders, and the people who killed the most in history. He run through his list of the top 100 atrocities of all time, spending more or less time on each as he feels is relevant to understanding the broader history. The last 50 pages of the book list his sources and methods for the historians out there that want to follow his trail (the references are online too).

Here are some choice quotes:

“People have been killing each other ever since they came down from the trees, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find bodies stashed up in the branches as well.”

“War kills more civilians than soldiers. In fact, the army is usually the safest place to be during a war. Soldiers are protected by thousands of armed men, and they get the first choice of food and medical care. Meanwhile, even if civilians are not systematically massacred, they are usually robbed, evicted, or left to starve; however, their stories are usually left untold. Most military histories skim lightly over the massive suffering of the ordinary, unarmed civilians caught in the middle, even though theirs is the most common experience of war.”

“Civilization before the Enlightenment was rather flexible when it came to historic accuracy, and ancient historians never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”

“Why Did Rome Fall? The best way to understand the fall of Rome is to skip the first half of any book on the subject. Yes, background and long-term trends are important, but some historians go so far back looking for the cause that they make it sound like Rome was tumbling toward its inevitable fall right from the start.”

“If we categorize the entries in this list according to which religions came into conflict, we get this simplified breakdown: Christian vs. Christian: 9 Muslim vs. Christian: 3 Christian vs. Jewish: 3 Eastern vs. Christian: 3 Jewish vs. pagan: 2 Muslim vs. Chinese: 2 Muslim vs. Muslim: 2 Human sacrifice in India: 2 Human sacrifice in Mexico: 1 Ritual killing in Rome: 1 Muslim vs. Hindu: 1 Manichaean vs. Taoist: 1 We can probably go even farther and group them into four larger categories: indigenous human sacrifice (4), monotheistic religions fighting each other (17), heathens fighting monotheistic religions (8), and heathens stirring up trouble all by themselves (1). In early history, the majority of religious killings involved sacrificing people to bribe and placate the dangerous forces of the universe. Then, Judaism and its offshoots, Christianity and Islam, devised a worldview where a single all-powerful god required a strict, uncompromising belief rather than tangible offerings.”

Thanks to Rob Lefferts (of the Lefferts law) for the recommendation.

Is a college degree worth it?

Posted on in Philosophy, reader's choiceby Scott Berkun

Many of the posts I write are inspired by reader questions and requests. Smaranda Calin, one of my awesome fans, asked: what’s the role of a university education in this day and age since so much is changing?

Every generation believes they’re exceptional for the same stupid reason: they know nothing about any other generation. They might be right but if they are its by accident. We all suffer from chronocentricism, the assumption the present is special or the most important time in history. This is charmingly narcissistic when you realize every generation in history thought the same thing.

Certainly many things change quickly today, but we confuse speed with scale. The first generation to have electricity in their homes, or to switch from horses to cars dealt with a scale of change much greater than anything in the last 20 years. We still type on QWERTY keyboards and mail things to each other using mostly text, which has been true for 100 years. Upgrading from a Blackberry to an iPhone 5 certainly represents tremendous technological progress, but it’s not much of a cultural leap for most people to follow. Speed and scale are not the same thing.

The value then of a college degree comes down to two questions:

  1. What important things change slowly that are worth learning?
  2. Can a college degree give them to you?

Things you always need in life

There is a long list of things people hope to get from college. Most of them are things you need no matter what era you are born into.

  • To learn how to ask good questions
  • To learn how to find or develop good answers
  • An understanding of what happened before you were born
  • To develop a skill, craft or discipline
  • Learning to manage your time and work vs. life
  • Chances to build nurturing relationships with people who know more than you
  • Chances to build good relationships with friends for now and later
  • A path towards a profession
  • Opportunities to figure out who the hell you are

Good college experiences provide many of these. But of course there are other ways to get them.

Most attempts to measure the worth of college focus on the financials. 86% of U.S. college graduates say its worth it, but they’re biased of course since they’ve just invested more in college than anything else in their lives.

A better answer depends on how many of the things listed above you can get without college. Maybe you see clear ways to get these things through other means. Or perhaps you recognize you have no idea how to get these things. Or that you’ve lived a sheltered, protected life so far and very much need to immerse yourself in an intensely new environment  perhaps geographically distant from your hometown. If that is important to you and you can’t get it any other way, college might be worth it no matter how much it costs.

Most high school students make blind choices about college because they’re too young to understand what they really want from it. They’re told “you should go” so they follow along like the good robots they’ve been in going from elementary school to high school. Or they decide, at 19, “I want to be a doctor” as if they have any clue what that means beyond TV shows and that it makes their Mom happy when they say it. A gap year is a fantastic idea and I’d bet it improves the odds people who choose to go to college get what they need. They have a clearer picture of who they are, what the world might be like when they graduate and what they want from life, all of which makes choices about college easier to make.

It depends

Like all investments, college is a bet. Depending on who you are, what you want, where you choose to go, and what choices you make while there (this never gets enough emphasis as college is four years worth of daily decisions), it may pay off and it may not. Some people go to a great school and have an awesome experience, but find it doesn’t help much seeking employment. But if they’d chosen a more practical major, they might not have had that awesome experience they did. Who knows. There are many variables beyond going to college or not going. Other people are miserable in college but stick it out anyway, and then spend their lives regretting their ‘wasted years’. College is an investment, not a guarantee.

I graduated from Carnegie Mellon University. It was a fantastic place to be if you knew exactly what career you wanted to have. If you weren’t sure, it was a miserable place. It wasn’t designed to support exploration in the way a school like Evergreen University is. Before Carnegie Mellon University I had a very rough ride. I stumbled my way through two other colleges, Drew University and Queens College spending most of my first two years making big mistakes. Those mistakes helped me sort out what I wanted and why and I was lucky to turn it around. But even so I made even more mistakes before I finished. If I were to do it again I’d interact with my professors very differently: I was paying them and I should never have feared them the way I did.

In the broadest strokes big decisions like these depend on many factors. If forced I’d say it’s worth it to go for everyone. A student can always drop out if they realize it’s not for them and that realization will help them understand what it is they should do instead. But if you never go you deny yourself the chance of discovering something clearly valued by the vast majority who have done it. I firmly believe in erring on the side of doing, rather than not doing.

The three things you always have

Posted on in Philosophyby Scott Berkun

You always have three things. The three things are your answers to these questions:

  1. What happened?
  2. How you feel about it?
  3. What are you’re going to do next?

It’s common to confuse #2 with #3. Some people get stuck on the feelings for the past and never move on.

Feelings are important as that’s how we know who we are. Venting, dwelling or celebrating serve the purpose of being present with how we feel. But after a day, a week, or a month, you have to recognize feelings aren’t actions. Only if a feeling is converted into a decision, even if it’s just the decision to share the feeling with someone, can it impact the future. Even if your situation is ‘life is awesome’, the answer to #3 might be ‘figure out how to keep this going’ or ‘tell my friend who wants me to be happy how happy I am’.

For example, lets pretend I was attacked by a gang of wild terrorist bears:

  1. What happened: I was attacked by wild terrorist bears.
  2. How you feel about it: sad, scared and angry. And somewhat dead.
  3. What you’re going to do next: stop running naked in a suit made of beef hot dogs, which terrorist bears are known to love to eat, at the terrorist bear exhibit at the zoo.

There you go. #3 leads to an action that leads to a new set of three things. That is of course if you’re not dead. If you’re dead you have precisely zero things. Be glad you have at least three more things than dead people do.

And to conclude, here’s my three things:

  1. What happened: I wrote this post.
  2. How do you feel: Glad someone is still reading this.
  3. What are you going to do next: Wait to see if you leave a comment. I’ll give you a suit of hot-dogs if you do.

Next book to be published by Wiley / Jossey-Bass (with FAQ)

Posted on in Books, Writing Well, Year Without Pantsby Scott Berkun

My upcoming book on my year at WordPress.com will be published with Jossey-Bass. I signed with agent David Fugate, who helped negotiate a fine deal with them. We had a few offers, but after talking with editors Genoveva Llosa and Susan Williams at JB I was convinced they’d be great partners to work with on this book.

Jossey-Bass is the business imprint for Wiley: they’ve been responsible for 13 of the top 25 business books last year (as well as other classics like Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team).

Frequently asked questions:

  1.  Why didn’t you self-publish? I considered it. If I could I preferred to find to a publisher that could help bring the book to a wider business audience than I could alone. I’m hoping I can connect directly with the WordPress community and my own audience about why they’ll want to read the book. But for the truly general business audience, beyond just the tech sector, my reach is limited. Jossey-Bass’s track record can help there. Working with a publisher again is also a chance to learn some new tricks.
  2. Why did you get an agent? I’d looked for agents before, but never found one that I liked and who was interested in the book I was working on. Both of those things changed when I talked with David. I managed to get offers on the book myself but he helped look for others, advised me on the book proposal, and took over negotiation and contract details, which I was happy not to have to do myself for once.
  3. Why didn’t you go with O’Reilly? I did talk with them, but for the same reasons in #1 they weren’t the ideal choice for the book, as their reach, while much greater than mine, hits the same tech-business crowd I can reach myself. I think they’re an excellent publisher and I bet I work with them again.

More on the book soon. I’m on the homestretch of the first draft and hope to be finished within the next two weeks.

If you have other questions, leave a comment.

Best of Berkun

Posted on in Generalby Scott Berkun

I’ve written 1400+ posts, and eight books, on many topics over the 16 years this website has existed. If you’re new to my work, here are my most popular posts, including those featured in other websites or magazines. I’ve worked the hardest on the books, so that’s my best writing, but I’ve published many gems as posts and essays and they’re listed below.

In 2011 I published Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds, a collection of my best essays, which you pick up here. If you like what you see, follow me by email or on twitter. Thanks for reading.

Compiled from 2003-2015.

Free Chapters from the books

Creativity

Philosophy of Life

Innovation

Public Speaking

Writing

Working Life

Interface Design / Making Software

Project Management

Posts marked with * appear in Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds.

Did I miss a post you think belongs here? Leave a comment.

Good Beats Innovative Nearly Every Time

Posted on in Innovationby Scott Berkun

[This post originally published on Bloomberg / BusinessWeek, February, 2010]

One troubling phenomenon is the push for everyone to be innovators. I suspect more books have been sold with the word innovation in their title in the last 10 years than in the previous 50, including, I confess, one of my own. And while much has changed, it’s hard to say the quality of things in the world has improved as fast. Keen-eyed consumers bemoan the low quality of many of the things we buy and try to use. Web sites divide short articles across 25 ad-filled pages. Gadgets quickly run out of power. Smartphones have anemic reception or fragile screens. Many things we buy and use never work in the way we’re promised, which suggests there are opportunities in merely being good: Much of what’s made falls short of that mark.

From my studies of the history of business innovation, I’m convinced you can beat competitors and even dominate markets without fancy tricks. All you need is the ability to make things that are good consistently, since few companies do.

While we’re fond of trumpeting the praises of Apple, whose iPod revolutionized music, we forget how dismal the competition was. It was not a field of masterpieces; it was a motley crew of ugly, clunky, painfully hard-to-use devices. Apple applied basic design sense to an immature field at a time when the world was ready for something better. Firefox, which rekindled innovation in Web browsing, arose from Microsoft‘s near abandonment of its Internet Explorer browser after the browser war with Netscape ended. Their version 6.0 release was a major step backward, opening the door for someone to win by merely providing something good, which Firefox did in 2004. Google was launched a decade after the invention of search engines; Amazon was not the first online bookstore. But they were both the first to do a good job at selling their good services for a good profit. In retrospect, their successes seem amazing, but at the time, the goals were simple and the objective humble and clear: Be good, or at least better than the other guys. For they knew that alone was hard enough.

Loose Usage

The word “innovation” is used to mean many different things, which is part of the problem. Executives and consultants throw it around like magic dust, hoping to cover their ignorance of why products and companies have done well or failed. But it’s clear most companies fail not because of their lack of inventiveness; it’s their lack of basic competence. Most leaders fail to prevent bureaucracy, hubris, and too many cooks from killing good ideas before they ever get a chance to make it out the door, resulting in the mediocrity we know too well.

Innovation, in the simplest definition, means new or novel, to take an approach others have not seen before. But by this definition, the iPod and Firefox barely qualify. Even the iPad is late in the game of tablet computers, as Microsoft’s Tablet PC and Amazon’s Kindle have been aiming at this market for years. In all cases, these are entrants into fields of established players. Their creators borrowed parts and ideas from other products and even from other companies. Their success or failure is driven less by revolutionary ideas or radical disruptive breakthrough thinking and more by a focus on making solid, reliable, simple, good products that solve real needs people have.

If your competitors are mediocre, the merely good can seem exceptional. All things being equal, in a battle between a good product and an innovative one, the good one will usually win. The makers of the good are less worried about abstract perceptions of how novel they are. Instead, they focus on results, caring less about whether the ideas involved are new, old, or recycled. Those obsessed with innovation contract the disease of hubris, ignoring many good ideas because they have been used before. They forget that an old idea cleverly reused, or borrowed from a different field, will be new to the world. Most projects aimed at innovation fail because creators become distracted by their egos from the true goal: to solve real problems for real people.

Solving a Problem

If you insist on doing something new, take this advice: Start with the important problems your customers, or your competitors’ customers, have and try to solve them. If conventional approaches fail, you’ll be forced to invent and be creative as a side effect of your goal. If you ask the creators of so-called breakthrough ideas, this is a common reason they found those breakthroughs in the first place. Their ambition wasn’t to be called an innovator. They weren’t planning to be disruptive or game changing. They merely had a tough problem to solve on their way to beating the competition in the forgotten practice of simply making better things.

Making better things is difficult enough. Learn to do that well, and when you’re done, and your customers and stockholders love you, the label “innovator” will magically land next to your name.

The Amazing Invention of Braille

Posted on in Creative Thinking, design, Design Makes The World, Innovationby Scott Berkun

While studying to write the Myths of Innovation I read hundreds of accounts of how world changing inventions were created. While many of those stories are in the book, there are countless more worthy of telling.

Today is the birthday of Louis Braille, one of the inventors for the amazingly clever system of writing for the blind.

DSC_4050-MR-Braille

We forget that languages have a design. Good ones are efficient, robust, precise, easy to learn and fast to use. Most languages emerge over centuries and are shaped by culture, which makes it all the more impressive when someone successfully creates a new one in just a few years.  (As an exercise: how you would you design a better language than English or your primary one? This was once an interview question my former boss Joe Belfiore used to use).

The story of the invention of Braille goes back to Napoleon and his desire to find a way for soldiers to safely communicate at night, silently, without light (as soldiers were spotted by snipers and killed when using lamps). A captain in the army named Barbier developed a system called night writing, but it was rejected as being too complex to learn and use. It required two values of 6, or 12 dots, to make a letter.

Louis Braille either met Barbier, or learned of his ideas, in 1821. In 1824, after years of work, Braille developed critical simplifications to the design, including moving from 12 dots to 6 per character. At first the system was used to literally translate each character, but as its use spread unique shorthands and contractions were added. Louis Braille was only a teenager when he finished the system, publishing it in 1829 and a revised, further simplified version in 1837.

His own school didn’t adopt his system until 1854, after his death. During this time many variants were tried, including some based on the tactile alphabet, with letter forms printed raised on the paper. Louis Braille learned a system like this as a child. A popular one was called Moon writing (published in 1845), shown here.

These systems take up more space, but have the advantage of requiring less training and finger precision. For various reasons systems like this never became dominant. Slowly Braille’s system gained adoption in Europe and America by 1916.

The invention of the typewriter has some connections to Braille, as Pierre Foucault, a former student at Braille’s school, had an early prototype for a typewriter that printed Braille in 1847.

Technically Braille is the first system of digital writing, since the letters are encoded and can be manufactured and stored or printed mechanically. It is not a universal language however, as the encodings typically translate letters, demanding the reader know the language they are written in (see International Braille, which explains how in 1878 they standardized some elements for Braille across languages).

With the rise of screen reading software the use of Braille is in decline. But it remains a stellar example of design and invention.

braille alphabet grey

[Minor edits and image improvements: 1/4/21 – all photos now creative commons from Wikipedia]

We Learn Nothing: Book Review

Posted on in Book reviews, Booksby Scott Berkun

WeLearnNothing-revisedI love books comprised of essays as they free writers to go in a wide range of directions and styles, unhinged from the burden of a single narrative theme. When I heard Nancy Pearl mention it offhand in her list of the year’s best books, I picked it up (its actually the first book I’ve purchased because of Pearl – I don’t listen to her regularly, and it just happened to be the first essay collection I’ve heard her mention).

The book We Learn Nothing, by cartoonist and essayist Tim Krieder, has some of the sharpest, most insightful writing about people, life and politics I’ve read in some time. I’m not familiar with his cartoons (the book explains he was a liberal critic of the G.W. Bush administration), but I did very much enjoy this book.

Many of the essays explore questions about life through the filter of his own, using his friends, his career, and his family as the landscape for asking and answering questions we all have. His writing is sharp, intellectually provocative, and at times funny, even charming. The format of the book lends itself to a certain egoism as he is a central character in many of the essays, and many of the cartoons (the book is mostly essays, with the occasional series of drawings).

Here are some choice quotes from the book:

On our deepest secrets and our friends:

Each of us has a Soul Toupee. The Soul Toupee is that thing about ourselves we are most deeply embarrassed by and like to think we have cunningly concealed from the world, but which is, in fact, pitifully obvious to everybody who knows us. Contemplating one’s own Soul Toupee is not an exercise for the fainthearted. Most of the time other people don’t even get why our Soul Toupee is any big deal or a cause of such evident deep shame to us but they can tell that it is because of our inept, transparent efforts to cover it up, which only call more attention to it and to our self-consciousness about it, and so they gently pretend not to notice it.

Meanwhile we’re standing there with our little rigid spongelike square of hair pasted on our heads thinking: Heh—got ’em all fooled! What’s so ironic and sad about this is that the very parts of ourselves that we’re most ashamed of and eager to conceal are not only obvious to everyone but are also, quite often, the parts of us they love best.

On the addictive nature of complaints:

It seems like most of the fragments of conversation you overhear in public consist of rehearsals for or reenactments of just such speeches: shrill, injured litanies of injustice, affronts to common sense and basic human decency almost too grotesque to be borne: “And she does this shit all the time! I’ve just had it!” You don’t even have to bother eavesdropping; just listen for that unmistakable high, whining tone of incredulous aggrievement. It sounds like we’re all telling ourselves the same story over and over: How They Tried to Fuck Me Over, sometimes with the happy denouement: But I Showed Them!

So many letters to the editor and comments on the Internet have this same tone of thrilled vindication: these are people who have been vigilantly on the lookout for something to be offended by, and found it. We tend to make up these stories in the same circumstances in which people come up with conspiracy theories: ignorance and powerlessness. And they share the same flawed premise as most conspiracy theories: that the world is way more well planned and organized than it really is. They ascribe a malevolent intentionality to what is more likely simple ineptitude or neglect.

Most people are just too self-absorbed, well-meaning, and lazy to bother orchestrating Machiavellian plans to slight or insult us. It’s more often a boring, complicated story of wrong assumptions, miscommunication, bad administration, and cover-ups—people trying, and mostly failing, to do the right thing, hurting each other not because that’s their intention but because it’s impossible to avoid. Obviously, some part of us loves feeling 1) right and 2) wronged.

But outrage is like a lot of other things that feel good but, over time, devour us from the inside out. Except it’s even more insidious than most vices because we don’t even consciously acknowledge that it’s a pleasure. We prefer to think of it as a disagreeable but fundamentally healthy reaction to negative stimuli, like pain or nausea, rather than admit that it’s a shameful kick we eagerly indulge again and again

On the sad commonalities of political parties:

The truth is, there are not two kinds of people. There’s only one: the kind that loves to divide up into gangs who hate each other’s guts. Both conservatives and liberals agree among themselves, on their respective message boards, in uncannily identical language, that their opponents lack any self-awareness or empathy, the ability to see the other side of an argument or to laugh at themselves. Which would seem to suggest that they’re both correct.

It was one of the best written books in terms of insight and style I’ve read in some time. Get the book here: We Learn Nothing.

 

Nexus: a sci-fi novel of a post-human future

Posted on in Booksby Scott Berkun

NexusMy friend Ramez Naam’s first novel, Nexus, just released and it’s getting great reviews. I haven’t read it yet, but here’s some of the feedback it has earned so far:

Wired says “Good. Scary good… stop reading now and have a great time reading a bleeding edge technical thriller that is full of surprises.”

The Wall Street Journal says “Provocative… A double-edged vision of the post-human.”

Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing says “Nexus is a superbly plotted high tension technothriller… full of delicious moral ambiguity… a hell of a read.”

Ars Technica says “Nexus is a lightning bolt of a novel… with a sense of awe missing from a lot of current fiction.”

You can read more about it at http://rameznaam.com/nexus or get it from amazon: http://amzn.to/WkHgbh

 

Great talk: Life on a Möbius Strip

Posted on in Public Speaking, storytellingby Scott Berkun

One reason I rarely get excited about TED talks, although I do enjoy many of them, is I’m drawn towards the personal. For years I’ve been a bigger fan of the MOTH podcast, which is an evening of stories told without notes in from of live audiences. Although these talks are generally well presented, the agenda is different. They’re not as shinny. They have rough edges. They’re human and humble and honest in a way people pitching ideas can’t quite match.

A recent gem of a talk in every way is this one by Janna Levin, theoretical physicist and author of How the Universe Got Its Spots.

The talk moves from astrophysics, to misguided love, and the consequences of taking big risks.

It’s called Life on a Möbius Strip – you can listen to the podcast here like I did, or you can watch it:

Mind over mind: book review

Posted on in Book reviewsby Scott Berkun

mind over mindWhy do great players sometimes choke in key games? How do scientists explain the placebo effect, where merely believing in something makes it real? These questions about our minds and how they help and hurt our ambitions are explored in Chris Berdik’s new book, Mind over Mind: the surprising power of expectations.

The good news is Berdik excels at summarizing research studies, and he keeps his aim sharp. He focuses on various ways our expectations of things impact the results, from performance in sports, to medical treatments, to addiction. The key element in our psychology is anticipation and being able to manipulate what we anticipate.

Some of the studies I’d read about before, but there were many inquiries into placebo and sports psychology that were new to me, and memorable. The long uncomfortable relationship between science and placebo has some entertaining origins, which Berdik explores early on, and returns to at the close of the book. He closely examines the wild word of wines, and the circular relationships between what we’re told about wine and what we experience when we drink them.

I read the book in two sittings, over several hours, which is in many ways the best review I can possibly give. Towards the middle the focus on reporting on research dragged thin, but the closing chapters were strong and returned to the core theme of examinations of placebo.

I’d recommend Mind over Mind it to anyone trying to better understand their own habits, and the latest scientific understanding of how our brains and psychology help and hurt us in trying to live the lives we desire. The book isn’t structured around how-to advice, but there are plenty of lessons in each chapter that clarify erroneous beliefs about how our beliefs work, which if nothing else will lead to great conversations with your doctors, trainers and partners.

Some choice quotes:

On the useless and pretensious vocabulary wine reviewers use:

“the economist Roman Weil gave everyday wine drinkers a triplicate test—three glasses but only two wines, with one repeated. He also gave them descriptions of both wines written by the same critic to see if they could match words with wine. About half of the subjects could tell the two wines apart, which is somewhat better than chance. But among these folks who presumably had the keenest palates, only half correctly matched the wines with the critic’s descriptions. They would have done just as well by flipping a coin.”

About a study examining if chimpanzes evaluate quality the same ways we do:

There may be a good evolutionary reason for some irrational consumer behaviors, but when it comes to inferring quality from price tags, that’s all us.

On the near miss phenomenon among gamblers:

“…gambling addicts are suckers for the “near-miss” illusion—a lotto number off by one digit or a slot machine jackpot spoiled by the final spinner. Instead of seeing these outcomes as losses and feeling the normal, discouraging sting, addicts interpret them as encouraging signs that they’re mastering the game, or that luck is turning their way. They bet even more. The gambler’s perverse pleasure in the near-miss is based in a hardwired cognitive reflex. Our future-oriented brains habitually seek out patterns, because they help predict what’s coming next. Finding a pattern is like solving a little puzzle. Aha! Now we know what to expect. Our reward system gets pumped.

Our brains are so pattern happy that they find patterns even when we know they don’t exist. When people in brain scanners are explicitly told they’ll be watching a randomly generated series of squares and circles, their prefrontal and reward centers still react to runs of several squares or circles in a row, or a long sequence of alternating square, circle, square, circle, square. The gambling addict’s brain takes this reflex to an extreme. In the mind of a compulsive gambler, chance has personality and purpose. Luck can be both wooed and mastered”

About a better framework for thinking about failure:

“Dweck has since made a lifelong study of how people deal with failure. She has found that having the right expectations about failure can be crucial to ultimate success. In her research, Dweck contrasts “entity theory,” which says success is largely determined by the extent of one’s natural talents, and “incremental theory,” which says people define their abilities and limitations through effort. For lay audiences, Dweck uses the friendlier terms, “fixed mindset” and “growth mindset.”

Get the book here: Mind over Mind: the surprising power of expectations.

 

Quote of the month: Steinbeck on writing

Posted on in quote of the x, Writing Wellby Scott Berkun

Steinbeck on writing:

Writing is a very silly business at best. There is a certain ridiculousness about putting down a picture of life. And to add to the joke – one must withdraw for a time from life in order to set down that picture. And third one must distort one’s own way of life in order in some sense to simulate the the normal in other lives. Having gone through all this nonsense what emerges may well be the palest of reflections. Oh! It’s a real horse’s ass business. The mountain labors and groans and strains and the tinniest of rodents comes out. And the greatest foolishness of all lies in the fact that to do it all, the writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true. If he does not, the work is not even worth what it might otherwise have been.

All this is a preface to the fear and uncertainties which clammer over a man so that in his silly work he thinks he must be crazy because he is so alone. If what he is doing is worth doing – why don’t more people do it? Such questions. But it does seem a desperately futile business and one which must be very humorous to watch. Intelligent people live their lives as nearly on a level as possible – try to be good, don’t worry if they aren’t, hold to such opinions as are comforting and reassuring and throw out those which are not. And in the fullness of their days they die with none of the tearing pain of failure because having tried nothing they have not failed. These people are much more intelligent than the fools who rip themselves to pieces on nonsense.

…but I believe the great ones, Plato, Lao Tze, Buddha, Christ, Paul and the great Hebrew prophets are not remembered for negation or denial. Not that it is necessary to be remembered but there is one purpose in writing I can see, beyond simply doing it interestingly. It is the duty of the writer to lift up, to extend, to encourage. If the written word has contributed anything at all to our developing species and our half developed culture, it is this: Great writing has been a staff to lean on, a mother to consult, a wisdom to pick up stumbling folly, a strength in weakness and a courage to support sick cowardice. And how any negative or despairing approach can pretend to be literature I do not know. It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would milleniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth, and a few remnants of fossilized jaw bones, a few teeth in strata of limestone would be the only mark our species would have left on the earth.

From Writers at Work, The Paris review interviews, 4th series.

Steinbeck’s advice on getting started

Posted on in Writing Wellby Scott Berkun

When I’m supposed to be writing but don’t quite have the nerve, I read. I have a special stack of books of interviews with famous writers about writing, and I read them and take notes when all else fails. I often type up those notes as a way to get the fingers moving, and soon I shift over to whatever writing project I was supposed to be doing in the first place. Today I found some good advice from John Steinbeck:

On Getting Started

Now let me give you the benefit of my experience facing 400 pages of blank stock – the appalling stuff that must be filled. I know that no one really wants the benefit of anyone’s experience which is why it’s so freely offered. But the following are some of the things I have had to do to keep from going nuts.

  1. Abandon the idea you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished you are always surprised.
  2. Write freely and rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.
  3. Forget your general audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person – a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.
  4. If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it – bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find the reason it gave you trouble was that it didn’t belong there.
  5. Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.
  6. If you are using dialog say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.

From Writers at Work, The Paris review interviews, 4th series.

How to Thank a Customer

Posted on in designby Scott Berkun

Some people just give good thanks. I bought a t-shirt online awhile ago from Sean McCabe, an artist who works in handdrawn forms. Apparently he now reads some of my blog. Yesterday I received a charming little package in the mail, with a handwritten note.

Inside was a print of the design of the shirt I’d purchased. The whole experience was filled with thoughtful touches.

If you like his work, check out his portfolio and his online store.

 

What I learned going back to UX school

Posted on in design, usabilityby Scott Berkun

Last week I was on an expert panel, giving feedback to final project presentations at the HCDE 518 User Centered Design course at the University of Washington, taught by Douglas Pyle (syllabus here). Its always fun to see what students are doing. They are the future after all.  My fellow experts were Matt Shobe, Larry Sisson and Marcos Nunes-Ueno.

7 teams each has 12 minutes to present. Our job was to ask tough questions and critique their presentations from a professional context.

The project was: Apply user research to a major cloud service and redesign it (Dropbox, SkyDrive, iCloud)

Things I learned:

  • Students have fresh eyes. While many of the students in the program are not undergraduates, because the project is in the school environment their take on things is different, and there are always surprises. It’s really enjoyable to listen to student projects talk about their assumptions, ideas and designs. I was supposed to be there providing “real world” commentary, and I did, but I learned a few things and heard quite a few surprises. If ever you get the chance to do something like this in your field, I recommend it.
  • Group presentations are hard. There were 7 teams, with 4 or 5 people each. Everyone was required to participate, and making a single, clear, coherent presentation when you have to divide it into 5 parts for 5 people is just hard. Part of the challenge of giving feedback was separating artifacts of the presentations from the research and designs themselves.
  • Generative vs. Evaluative. While I’ve known there are dozens of different methods, I’d never heard them divided into two piles: one for coming up with ideas (generative) and one for evaluating ideas (guess what that pile is called). Nice.
  • Technology moves in spirals. Many of the teams were ambitious, adding major new functionality. Being an old dog, I can recall when the web was often sold on the promise of simplicity and single purpose designs, a huge relief from the heavy all-in-one collaboration tools of Lotus Notes and SharePoint. But the cloud is maturing and, according to these students, the need for collaboration at work will push complexity back in. Setting up of course the next wave of simple tools to poke holes in it all over again.

Cool things I saw

Team 6, Matina Fresenius, Allan Luik, Ashley Saleeba, Don Wesley and Jessie Xue, focused on the challenges of sharing files through DropBox.

  • They surveyed DropBox users through Social Media and  Craigslist.
  • 73% used dropbox through the web portal
  • Wide range of content file types
  • 92% wanted preview before downloading shared files from others (it had been requested on dropbox forums in 2009)
  • They observed 11 real users and recorded the key places they struggled.
The result was a design that changed this:
To something like this (which Dropbox actually implemented before their file presentation):

Group 3 took on iCloud. They were one of the most ambitious redesigns, and had the bad luck of going last. Their good luck was picking iCloud, which no one else had taken. They were Sarah Emerson, Andrea LarsenBronwyn McNutt and Zulka Ramirez.

Among the research they did was a Wants & Needs analysis, where they work with users to prioritize possible improvements to the existing design.

Then they built a paper prototype (I so wish more people used this awesome and fast method), using a “Netflix style” view of all of your content.

Group 7 (Brian Espinosa, Royal Stuart, Lori Tompkins, Adrienne Trudeau, Dasha Valchonak) was one of the few teams that reported on before and after results for their redesign. In a briefing, it’s data like this that tells most of the story.

People throw around sayings like “Easy to Use” or “Intuitive” but without some data those are merely opinions. When it comes to measuring ease of use, there are well established things to track:

  1. Success rate: What percent of users can even do the thing its supposed to let them do. Often this is well below 100%.
  2. Time on task: how long does it  take users to do the thing it supposed to do. Better designs take users less time.
  3. Error rates: how many mistakes or confusions does the user have.
Team 7 did quite well in their redesign. However I’d have preferred they call it a usability study, not a test. A test assumes there are right answers and that you do it at the end. A study suggests is more about collecting data to make better decisions. Yes, it’s a pet peeve.

While many of the redesigns were ambitious (as Shobe said “making a bit tent”), one of my favorites focused sharply on one scenario: how to improve collaboration as simply as possible. This team was comprised of Ajay Alfred, Sue Boivin, Jeanie DuMont, Alicia Lee, & Pat Matrich. Based on research, they decided the most valuable feature to add to Dropbox was the ability to add comments to Dropbox files. This would allow someone updating a document to leave a short note about what the change was, or ask/answer a question without having to open the document. And they focused on the mobile design for the feature first, with a design that seemed simple and slick.

 Sloppy claims in User Research

I’m always cranky about how anyone in any field uses ‘research’ to justify things. Of course these were students and they were being graded primarily on their redesigns and presentations, not the details of their research. However I kept track of sayings and statements that had this been a professional situation, I would might have challenged.

Many people in the professional world BS their way through talking about research – particularly with the bias of “the research magically says the thing I wanted it to say before I started doing the research”. Everyone is guilty here. But if you call yourself a reseracher its fair to expect more in the way of research ethics. Its not hard not to be sloppy.  Sloppy sayings include things like:

  • “Our research said…” – research never ‘says’ anything
  • “Our study indicated people want X” (Couldn’t an evil person design a study to get people to say they want X or Y or Z?)
  • “We had compelling evidence…” What does compelling mean?
  • “Our findings proved…” – What does proof mean? Could it have been used to prove other conclusions?
  • “It was obvious…”
  • “The redesign had great success…” – by what standard? What metrics were used?
  • “Many..” – Is that 1 or 2, 3 of 5, 5 of 20?
  • “We found that users…” How many of them? All? 4 of 7? 2 of 7?
  • “Intuitive…”  – should be a banned word. Better off talking about tasks and usability measures.
  • “Most cited…” – maybe only one thing was cited.
  • Naming a percentage without mention of quantity  (e.g. 100% of 1 user doesn’t mean much)
  • “Users want… ” – this is always speculative data, as what users want and need are often different
  • Anecdotal vs. Substantive data (e.g. “What we heard in the usability study” – is that one person? More? What?)
  • “They wanted…”

Sloppy use of phrases like these sets off alarm bells for my BS detector. Even if there is nothing sketchy going on, its the researchers job to ensure there is no room for doubt. All researchers should assume they have to earn the trust of their audience. As a result, I have a list of questions I often ask people who claim their design decision is right based on research:

  • How many participants were there? Was that enough to have high confidence in the data?
  • How did you compensate for recruitment bias? (all participant recruiting has bias)
  • Do you have specific criteria for ‘success’? If not, how do you know it was better?
  • How do you know your questions and methods didn’t lead participants to the answers you wanted? (Did you counter-balance, etc.)
  • What questions can not be answered by your research?

It was unfair to poke hard at this in a student presentation – and I tried to clarify the point and not beat them up much about it. But here on the blog I can ramble on and on about it, assuming anyone is still reading.

The best recommendation was to have a couple of slides hidden at the end of the slide deck with detailed summaries of the research (# of participants, methods used, specific data on results, etc.) in reserve, to pull up if you have a hard-ass like me in the audience, which the more UX work you do, will happen sooner or later.

Thanks to Doug Pyle for inviting me, and all the students for letting me hear their presentations.