Author: Scott Berkun

How to understand the media (Review of The Influencing Machine)

Posted on November 30, 2011December 4, 2015 in Culture, politicsby Scott Berkun

We often talk about “the media” as if it were as singular monolithic thing, which it isn’t. Any argument that includes the phrase “the media” should be challenged as it’s an oversimplification likely being used to make a self-serving point. Every political point of view now has their own blogs, videos and social media: the media you experience is in part defined by your choices.

This bias we have towards oversimplifying media is one of our greatest problems in trying to understand the world today. When you stop and avoid saying “the media is…” you’re forced to think more carefully about what you’re really upset about and what the real causes are.

A great way to elevate your thinking and get past your pet biases about mass media, is the book The Influencing Machine, by Brook Gladstone (of NPR).

It’s a graphic book, illustrated well by Josh Neufeld, which means it’s a combination of comic like panels, mixed with short essays. I like this style of book when it’s done well (this one is), but it’s not for everyone.

The strengths of the book are its telling of (U.S.) media history. It explores the problematic origins of journalism, how the early press in the U.S. developed (which is shockingly familiar to many who complain about modern journalism), and the inherent good and bad challenges it has wrought throughout our history. Some stories I knew, but others were launching points to research online. Gladstone takes the position that we are a large part of our sense of “media”, as we make choices about what we read, how we read it and the questions we choose to ask or not. She also explores the challenge of objectivity, and challenges the notions most people assume about the objectivity of what the read and hear.

The weaknesses of the book are twofold. First, if you’ve studied media theory and cognitive bias, you’ll be on familiar turf. Second, the last quarter of book switches into future thinking, and here Brookstone is on weaker ground. The book is stronger in its telling of history and Brookstone’s insightful view of how media has functioned, rather than her looking to the future. It’d also be easy to criticize the book for a having a mild liberal tilt, as some negative examples come at the expense of (in)famous Republicans/Conservatives.

The book lightly touches on social media’s impact, which is fine. But it is notable Brooke didn’t have a twitter account when the book released (she does now). However Josh Neufeld does.

It’s a fast read as most good graphic books are, and will definitely improve how you think about media in all its forms.

[Added Gladstone’s twitter account, plus edits for concision 12-4-15]

Mindfire day Dec 7th: can you help?

Posted on November 30, 2011 in Books, Mindfireby Scott Berkun

Behind the scenes I’ve been working hard to generate PR for Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds. We’re up to nearly 25 amazon.com reviews (thanks!) and lifehacker posted an excerpt. But as a self-published book, I need all the support I can find.

The groundwork is set and I’ve done what I can on my own: it’s time to ask for help.

On Wed Dec 7th, we’re going to see how high we can get the amazon.com ranking for the book to go. We’ll aim at 12pm PST, but any time during the day helps.

Each sale on the day contributes to lowering the ranking. Its been hovering around #13,000 for the last week. Can we break 8000? 2000? 1000?

If you have 60 seconds to help, here’s what you can do:

Leave a comment saying “I’ll help – Go Mindfire!” or something similiarly silly. By leaving a comment I can follow up with you via email to help organize. It will be very simple, I promise.
Mark your calendar for Wed Dec 7th. And plan to tweet, facebook, blog, or dance suggestively in public (if that’s your thing) about the book. (Click here to add a reminder to your calendar (.ical)).
Plan to buy the book as a holiday gift, or for your team, on Wed Dec 7th.

I’ll provide more details, including sample tweets, facebook and blog posts you can reuse if you like.

If you want to sample the goods before you’d help with something like this, your wish is my command: Preview of Mindfire (PDF).

Thanks for your help and support. I hope you’ll leave a comment.

Quote of the week

Posted on November 29, 2011 in Creative Thinking, movies, quote of the xby Scott Berkun

American Masters recently released a two part documentary about Woody Allen (available online in U.S.), which I highly recommend if you are interested in learning about the creative process. While I loved his early movies, I didn’t follow the rest of his career closely (although his recent Midnight in Paris was excellent). Regardless, this documentary is an excellent balance of direct commentary from Allen, choice clips from his films and insight from critics, co-workers, family and others.

Here are two gems:

“There are a lot of surprises that happen between writing it, doing it, and seeing it on the screen, most surprises are negative. Most surprises are that you thought something was good, or funny, and it’s not. I’ve made just about 40 films in my life and so few of them have really been worth anything. Because it’s not easy – if it’s easy it wouldn’t be fun, it wouldn’t be valuable.”

“By the time you get the thing together it’s such a mess, and you’re flitting around the editing room making all sorts of compromises, and saying well gee, if I put the last scene first, and the middle scene at the end of the picture, and get a narrator, and use dissolves, and use opticals, and put this in slow motion and use titles here, you’re struggling for survival. And I still screw up a lot of the time. So that’s why I’ve often said… the only thing standing between greatness is me. There is no excuse.”

-Woody Allen, American Masters Documentary

Take my course on Innovation, online, right now

Posted on November 28, 2011 in Innovation, Teaching/Trainingby Scott Berkun

A secret project I did with O’Reilly Media is now available online.

For years I’ve taught full day workshops around the world on how to manage breakthrough projects. Beyond all the hype, it’s all the practical advice and time-tested wisdom I’ve learned from my own career and dedicated research into how others have made great things.

The fine folks at O’Reilly Media recorded one version of the course, with a live audience, and has now made it available online. They edited it down to a lean 3 hours and 55 minutes. No fluff. No nonsense.

The course includes chapters on:

Practical Creative Thinking
Leading Creative teams
Psychology of Innovation
The wonders of incubation
Project Management for Breakthroughs
The Business side of new ideas
Balance / Bringing it all together

Unlike the Myths of Innovation, which emphasized history and understanding, the course is focused on pragmatics – overcoming challenges leaders and managers face when working on projects with the goals of innovation and breakthroughs.

The course’s regular price is $99, but for today, it’s available at a sizable discount (60% off).

Use discount code: CYBERMONDAY .

Head over here for all the details: you can even watch part of the class for free.

The fascinating history of Jelly Belly jelly beans (documentary)

Posted on November 23, 2011October 12, 2012 in moviesby Scott Berkun

Recently I watched a documentary about the history of the Jelly Belly company, called Candyman: The David Klein Story (Netflix streaming). I highly recommend it. It’s an unusually honest and simply told tale about one man with many ideas, who changed an industry, with mixed feelings about the results.

What’s most compelling about the documentary is the characters are so interesting. David Klein, the center of the documentary, is a charming and genuinely nice man, whose travails through the competitive world of candy manufacturing are captivating, fascinating and, and at times, provocative. It raises various questions to any viewer about how they might have done things differently, or if they even posses the inventiveness to enter those situations at all.

I highly recommend watching Candyman, as it’s an unusually fresh and unvarnished tale of ideas, entrepreneurship, business and ethics, all wrapped around a tiny little tasty invention.

It’d make for great viewing this holiday season as it’s a topic people of any age can relate to, and ask question about, leading to discussions about what you might have done differently. Perfect for the young inventor or entrepreneur in your extended family.

If you want to know what he’s up to now, he’s still inventing and selling all kinds of creative candies.

(Note: The original version of this post was lost to the angry muses of web development, and entirely re-written. If it seems different from how you remember, you’re right).

Innovation vs. mere improvement: how do you know what you have?

Posted on November 16, 2011April 3, 2014 in Creative Thinking, Innovation, Mindfireby Scott Berkun

As part of my gift to some of my kickstarter supporters for Mindfire, I offered to write a blog post on the topic of their choice. Here’s the first of many to come.

Dirk Haun asked:

Can you draw a line between what’s considered Innovation and what’s merely considered an Improvement?

I’ve ranted before about jargon in creativity. The fancy language we hear is not the language inventors use. Find the people who actually invented anything and you’ll find the language they use is very simple. Words like prototype, problem, experiment, design and solution. They have a problem in mind and they aim all their energy at solving it. The fancy words (breakthrough, innovation, disruptive, game-changing) mostly come from people who arrive well after the inventing and innovating is done, including innovation consultants. It’s worth asking anyone using the word innovation to define it as often they can’t, which begs the question why are they using it so much then?

Second, deciding what is incremental and what is revolutionary is subjective. There is no universal measurement. From Swan’s perspective, Edison made some minor tweaks to light bulb design. To anyone who was ignorant of Swan’s work, Edison seemed Promethean. To pre-revolution Americans, democracy seemed brilliant and new. To anyone who’d studied the Greeks, they’d think the U.S. was ripping them off (down to the way we styled our monuments in D.C.). To measure an idea, you need to define who it’s being aimed at, as where you aim will change the value of the idea.

Third, small changes can have disproportionately large effects. See Does Size Matter for ideas? (HBR). You don’t necessarily need a big idea to have big changes on an industry or a product. Some very small ideas can have surprising leverage for change.

To directly answer the question, Innovation is largely a word used to describe the scale of the effect on an idea, rather than the idea itself. And since no inventor controls the effect their idea has on the world, innovation is frequently a term than lands on ideas/products after they’re been released into the world, rather than before.

From the widest perspective, all ideas are incremental. Every new idea, no matter how radical, is comprised of previous ideas and concepts, albeit perhaps combined in novel ways. Is the Prius a radical idea? Depends how much you know about the history of automobiles. Different power sources were a big part of the early days of car design, when steam and electricity were contenders.

The most sensible way to evaluate an idea is its potential impact on who it’s specifically being designed for, and what problem it solves for them. If you save someone’s life with an incremental idea, they’ll be just as happy as if you used an innovative one. They don’t care about the label, they care about the effect. As the tragic counterpoint: if you fail to solve their problem with an innovative idea, they’ll be very angry, and then they’ll be very dead.

An incremental change can have a huge effect on a particular customer. If someone only speaks Spanish, and you add support for that language (an incremental improvement) it can have huge positive impact. And by the same token, a radical change to a product can have negative or no effect at all on customers. The mere fact that a new idea introduces change for users, and relearning, may mean the learning costs outweigh any of the benefits provided by the new idea.

Can you say much in 500 Words? Essays vs. Blogs

Posted on November 10, 2011 in Writing Wellby Scott Berkun

At the book launch party last week for Mindfire, I gave a short talk. Someone asked about the new book, and essays, and I explained how it is my favorite form.

My friend Laura wrote up a good post riffing on this idea:

What I think he was getting at – and this is not confirmed by the time of posting – is that many bloggers write and ramble. They toss their ideas out there online and add to the content overload that we experience every time we log into Facebook or check our stream on Twitter. And the process of writing an essay requires restraint. It requires you to think and process and prove what you want to say before you throw it out there.

And the 500-word limit means you need to get to your point. Fast. It’s a reflection of the 140-character, enlighten us, but make it quick, world that we live in. If you can’t get to your point right away, then you shouldn’t even bother.

She makes some other excellent points, so you should read her full post.

For a long time I believed an essay was rigidly defined as what I was taught in college. I’ve learned since an essay is whatever I as a writer say it is. Form is just a bag to put things in. If you can find people who keep reading what you’re writing, don’t worry much about form. It’s mostly English majors who are struggling to write much themselves who argue much about form. And if you want to be all factual about it, the history of the essay points back to Montaigne, who followed none of the standard instructions English professors (many of whom can’t write their way out of a paper bag) pretend are universal law.

The rub is that good writing must be concise without being shallow. Much of what passes as brevity (twitter, facebook and the web) is definitely short, but also empty. Just because you use few words doesn’t guarantee you have anything interesting to say, nor that you are saying it well.

500 or 1000 words is an intellectual sprint. The challenge of effectively taking on a big topic in such a short space demands thinking, editing, style and courage, all of which I need to practice as a writer. Good blog posts are indistinguishable to me from a good essay. Once the writer has brought me happily into their world, form fades away.

Things I miss

Posted on November 10, 2011 in personalby Scott Berkun

Some things I miss:

Having a diner a block away that serves breakfast until 4am
A nearby playground where there’s always a good game of basketball
Meeting my friends early at school to play Salugi in the park
Running to the pizza place near my elementary school, for lunch, where you’d get a slice and a soda for $1
The undeniable sense life is unimaginably long
The freak show of White Castle on Northern Blvd and Bell, at 2am on a Friday
The convenience store that sold us 15 year olds all the beer we wanted
Talking to close friends for hours without an excuse for why
Playing football in the streets
Crusing Franny Lew, just to make fun of other people who cruised Franny Lew
The ethereal sense of abundant undivided time
Watching summer thunderstorms at dusk, raging on the horizon, above the street on my parents porch

How do you get wise? The story of Mindfire

Posted on November 10, 2011 in Mindfireby Scott Berkun

I’m sneaky.

While I write about business and creativity things, every 4th or 5th post here for years has contained a dose of philosophy. I’d never call it that of course, since nothing makes people stop having fun faster than mentioning the P word. But posts like How to be a freethinker, Simplifiers vs. Complexifiers, Hating vs. Loving and even How to detect BS all poke at wisdom, albeit from very different directions.

The goal in my new book, Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds, was to compile my best provocative essays (including those listed above) into one easy to read volume. To stop being sneaky, and frame a book on the theme of intelligent provocation of wisdom. If you want to think hard and have fun, this book can do that for you.

Between the lines of the book is how I’ve learned whatever it is I know. The process I’ve used all along to write these essays is something like this:

I read and listen
I think
I come up with a hypothesis
I write it down
I share it
People respond and I read
I’m right, but also wrong
I patiently sort out which is which
I learn from where I’m wrong and think about it more
I refine where I’m right, and think about it more
Repeat

In the book, you benefit from over a decade of me learning how to be wise, from writing. I write often, if you haven’t noticed. And I know not all of it’s great. But I can promise the best writing I’ve done in the pursuit of wisdom is in Mindfire. And I hope you’ll pick up a copy for that reason alone.

And when you do, please write a review. Let me know what you think. Even if you hate it, you’ll be helping me write the next thing and the next. If you think I have more wisdom to share than you found, this will ensure there’s more to come.

In defense of flubs (and Rick Perry)

Posted on November 10, 2011 in politics, Public Speakingby Scott Berkun

It is foolish to confuse a moment of forgetting with stupidity. All people who speak make mistakes. We forget things. We confuse words. We lose our train of thought. And if you listen to a recording of yourself for even an hour in your daily life you’ll notice all sorts of gaffs, odd pauses, and long moments of complete inability to remember facts you are certain that you know.

Taken in context of everything else you say, these moments are easily overlooked by your coworkers and family. But taken out of context, and shown in isolation, its easy to make you look downright stupid. Even though all those who think you are stupid based on a small sample, make the same mistakes in their own lives every day.

Presidential debates are shows. They mislead us into thinking speaking on TV is the primary function presidents have, and better speakers will make for better presidents, which is sketchy logic at best. A candidate can claim whatever they like at the lectern, but doing the job requires a very different set of skills.

In the case of Rick Perry, I won’t say much about his merit as a presidential candidate. It’s safe to say I’m not a fan. But I can say that a flub, on its own, is a poor basis for evaluating anyone’s ability to do anything. He could have handled his forgetting (and his campaign) with much more poise, but the mistake itself is almost noise.

A week ago, a 4 minute video, often titled with suggestions Perry was drunk when he spoke, made the rounds. It was excerpted from a 20 minute speech, and it is informative for anyone who only watches the highlights to watch both.

It would have been nice to see discussion of the merit (or not) of his ideas drive how we evaluate him, but that would involve more effort from us than watching entertaining video clips that gives us the illusion of feeling smart.

Why give a book away for free?

Posted on November 7, 2011March 21, 2013 in Essays, Mindfire, Writing Wellby Scott Berkun

Last week I decided to give away my new book, Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds, for free from my website, for 48 hours. Some have asked me why I would do this, as I’ve been a popular author and my previous books have sold well.

Here’s a list of reasons why:

Platform. I could have sold some books, but by giving it away for a period of time I got extra PR and reach I would have had to pay for otherwise. I tripled the size of my mailing list in just two days.
Interest. It’s a way to generate interest in the book, and the wave of interest will outlast the 48 hour free period (at least I hope so :) Sales are slow today, but I’m betting the free readers will like what they read, and create a second wave of interest.
The book is a collection of essays already online. I wanted to ensure my loyal readers didn’t pay for the book in digital form, since they’d read much of the book already. I wanted to avoid any fan saying “I didn’t realize and I paid for it – I feel like a sucker”. Instead I want them to feel enlisted to spread my work, and making a new book free empowers them to do that.
I’m a long-term author. I’m not worried about the sales of any particular book. I need to experiment and try different things to learn about how all this works so I’m smarter about how to create and market the work I do.
I’d like to broaden my reputation. Mindfire covers a wide range of challenging topics not in my other books, and it will expand people’s perceptions of my abilities. I’d gladly trade a pile of royalties (short-term) for an improved perception and wider fan base (long-term).
Giving it away generates interest from people who want to know why an established author would do this :). It’s another way to gain attention for positive reasons.

You can download a free preview of Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds (nearly 1/3rd of the content) right here.

The book is for sale on amazon.com (print / kindle), Barnes and Noble, Sony Nook and iBookstore.

Also see, Why I decided to self publish the book.

Answering Proust: a fun interview

Posted on November 3, 2011 in interviews, Philosophyby Scott Berkun

My friend Sara Peyton at O’Reilly Media interviewed me in ’08 using questions from the famous Proust questionaire. Recently I stumbled across it again.

What is your idea of perfect happiness?

An evening spent drunk as a loon, looking up at stars, sitting by a bonfire, laughing with friends.

What is your greatest fear?

Waiting to die with a mind full of regrets.

On what occasion do you lie?

This is the first lie I’ve ever told.

What is your favorite journey?

Wherever I’m going next that I haven’t been to before.

Which living person do you most despise?

It’s a tie between Bill O’Reilly and Dick Cheney.

Which words or phrases do you most overuse?

My friends would say its mother*****r. But I don’t think this word can be overused.

Which talent would you most like to have?

Mind-reading is hard to beat, but I’d settle for time-travel.

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

The willingness to let myself make more mistakes.

If you could change one thing about your family, what would it be?

Open their eyes.

If you were to die and come back as a person or thing, what would it be?

If a thing, the most perfect object in NYC: The Chrysler Building. Or maybe Central Park (is it cheating to call that one thing? I like to cheat). If a person, I’d like to be me again.

What do your consider your greatest achievement?

Writing every day. Ok, that’s a lie. I don’t write every day. But just trying to write every day is hard enough.

What is your most treasured possession?

My mind. I dont care much for material things. Besides, you never have to worry about someone breaking into your mansion and stealing your mind, you know? It’s the only thing than will always be only yours.

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

Watching someone innocent suffer for your own carelessness.

What is the quality you most like in a man?

Integrity.

What is the quality you most admire in a woman?

Curves.

What do you most value in your friends?

Brutal honesty, dark comedy, and trust under fire.

Who are your favorite writers?

George Orwell, Henry Miller, George Saunders, Raymond Carver, Bertrand Russell, Peter Drucker, Loren Eisley, John Gardner, Ray Bradbury, Hubert Selby Jr.

Who is your favorite hero of fiction?

How can you top Don Quixote? There’s no way.

Who are your heroes in real life?

Don Quixote isn’t real? Are you sure?

How would you like to die?

Drunk as a loon, looking up at stars, sitting by a bonfire, laughing with friends.

What is your motto?

Be amazed by everything.

Teaching Seattle How to Drive – in 5 minutes

Posted on November 3, 2011September 1, 2015 in Seattleby Scott Berkun

At the recent Ignite Seattle event I gave this carefully researched list of advice live in front of crowd of hundreds of Seattleites.

Feedback without frustration (video)

Posted on November 2, 2011March 21, 2017 in Creative Thinking, designby Scott Berkun

Last month I spoke at Hive, an event for developers and designers hosted by AIGA and Microsoft here in Seattle.

It was an exceptionally well planned event. They did smart things like keeping talk length down to 20 minutes, having a social room with a live-simulcast, and mixing in ignite talks for a change of pace. They also sent all the speakers a dossier on the attendees, with demographics on their background we could use to aim our talks at. It makes my job as a speaker so much easier when the organizers are committed to making the event a great experience.

Hive is releasing all the talks for free on youtube, which is why I’m posting. I spoke for 20 minutes about design critiques and how to give and receive feedback, which you can watch below:

The talk is loosely based on three posts (and inspired a chapter in the Dance of the Possible):

Let time work for you

Posted on November 2, 2011 in Philosophyby Scott Berkun

Yesterday, while running on a treadmill at the gym, I realized something: I do not like to run on treadmills. It’s repetitive and boring, and unlike true sports where there is someone playing defense to overcome, all I have is myself. I looked to my left and right and everyone else running on treadmills looked just as sad and bored as I felt. Not a smile among the 2 dozen people racing away, without moving anywhere, like hamsters in a row of hamster wheels.

But then I noticed something on the wall. A little digital clock, slowly counting away the seconds of my run. And as I watched the clock count away I realized as long as I continued, time was working for me. I just had to keep doing what I was doing and my goal of running 4 miles would take care of itself.

Left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot. As long as I didn’t think much at all, I’d achieve my goal. We don’t like the idea of not thinking being useful, but there is repetition in all important things. Sometimes, during some tasks, not thinking about it and letting time take over, can improve the odds you’ll make it to the finish line.

Studying for a college degree, practicing the piano, going for a daily run, these are all ways to let time work on our behalf, if we just give in. Passion and pleasure have their place, but sometimes that comes only after we’ve put in enough time at something for the payoff to come back out.

Woody Allen once said 80% of success is showing up. Perhaps that means 20% of success is showing up at the right thing and staying there?

Let time work for you is the mantra I’ve been playing with in my mind all week. Does it mean anything to you?

Now scottberkun.com has threaded comments

Posted on November 1, 2011 in this siteby Scott Berkun

It only took a zillion years, but scottberkun.com finally has fully threaded comments. Now you can disagree with someone, and have them disagree right back, with visual formatting that fully clarifies they are disagreeing with just you and your post, and not anyone else.

Jokes aside, it does make long comment threads easier to read. It also gives feedback to commenters on which new comments are in response to their previous ones.

Oddly enough, I work for WordPress.com on comments and other UI features, so it’s particularly embarrassing it’s taken me until this decade to finally getting around to adding this simple little feature. For good measure, there is also comments paging now, so posts with 50+ comments are faster to load.

If you have other feature requests for the site, now is the time as I’m on a roll.

How Microsoft kills cool projects

Posted on November 1, 2011 in Business, Microsoftby Scott Berkun

There’s a good article detailing the death of Microsoft Courier, a tablet device project from 2009/10 led by J. Allard, of XBOX fame. The core story rests on this observation:

Within a few weeks, Courier was cancelled because the product didn’t clearly align with the company’s Windows and Office franchises, according to sources. A few months after that, both Allard and Bach announced plans to leave Microsoft, though both executives have said their decisions to move on were unrelated to the Courier cancellation.

Most interesting products for today’s world can not easily align with business models created in 1995. I know many smart people who had great prototypes for new products while at Microsoft, who were saddened to learn the escape velocity of a project is, at minimum, greater than the gravity of its two largest businesses (Office & Windows). They’d watch with sad eyes as their well conceived plans were smashed to pieces against the massively successful, but ultimately boring, twin leviathans of Microsoft. The details of the Courier story, a well designed product, fully staffed with 100+ creative employees, is sad indeed. A very different future for Microsoft was ready to born, but never saw the light of day (photos and demos).

During the browser wars, a similar, but rarely told, story explains why IE4 was the pinnacle of browser innovation in 1997, and then took a right turn into stagnation.

Brad Silverberg, VP of internet things circa 1997, intended for the web to replace Windows. He wanted Microsoft to make the web a platform, and launched versions of IE on Mac and IE on Unix (to the dismay of the industry. It’s the only UNIX application Microsoft has released). The idea was to leave OS’es behind, and focus on the web as the core way people will interact with computers. A prophetically Googlean strategy.

But when it came time for Gates to make the call, Jim Alchin, the VP of Windows, won. Windows was more important. As a result, after IE4 (and the implosion of Netscape), plans for making the web the future platform for the company were shut down, in favor of protecting the Windows franchise.

Many lament these choices. It seems boring to continually protect the status quo. But when your status quo generates $60 billion annually, a rate of income only a handful of companies in history have achieved, few complainers would have the courage to act differently if they were in charge.

Mindfire: Free preview now available

Posted on November 1, 2011October 15, 2012 in Mindfireby Scott Berkun

For 52 hours, the entire book was available for free. But don’t worry. If you like free things, you are still in luck

You can download a free PDF preview of the book (nearly 1/3rd of the content), right now.

Click here to get it: free sample of Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds (PDF).

If you like what you find, I hope you’ll pay a few bucks for the rest.

The book is on sale now at amazon.com, in print and kindle editions, and on B&N and iBookstore.

The Jobsian fallacy

Posted on October 31, 2011March 25, 2021 in Innovationby Scott Berkun

I’m sad Steve Jobs is gone. I’m sadder still to see the shallow thinking that circles his name. There is a fallacy around “great” people, a notion we can learn best from their behavior for how we ourselves can achieve. But that’s only true if we study them with an honest eye. When writers are clouded by mythology and hero worship, they do more harm than good, as sloppy thinking is often the mortar used to put people on pedestals.

Before anyone takes Jobs as an example to emulate, consider the following:

1. You did not have the good fortune to meet a Wozniak.
2. You are not as smart as Steve Jobs was.
3. You do not have the talent to back up a Jobs sized ego.
4. You are not willing to take the same kinds of risks.
5. You do not work as hard as he did.
6. Do you believe in The Golden Rule?
7. Can you justify being cruel to people you claim to love to serve yourself?*

Using Jobs as an example without examining these facts makes you a fool.

We overstate how much can be learned from exceptional people. Their success is a product of circumstance, among other factors, but we dismiss those circumstances when we wishfully consider our own futures. You can’t copy and paste success. We learn of people like Jobs in retrospect, long after they’ve proven their value to the world, and most of what we learn of their lives is tainted by romance and dreams. We heartlessly ignore their personal failings and cruel behavior in favor of their financial success.

Articles with idiotic premises like Steve Jobs solved the Innovator’s Dilemma, or In Defense of Steve Jobs, would likely annoy Jobs to no end. He had a humble attitude about innovation theories and doubted the utility of thinking of work in such abstract terms. He was too busy working to formulate a ‘process’ or a ‘model’, much to the frustration of tech and business writers everywhere. He was asked once ‘How do you systematize innovation?’ and his answer was ‘You don’t’ (See BusinessWeek, 10/11/04). He was in some ways more humble and practical than writers who use his name as a puppet to make half-baked, poorly researched points, that help no one achieve anything.

We are fascinated by our giants and this fascination motivates us to learn. This is good. But we continually forget every story in this world is unique. We can’t cherry pick the convenient elements of one successful life and graft it into our own, expecting the same results. Had da Vinci or Ford been born today, they might have ended up janitors or car salesmen. And a school teacher or gardener from their times, born today, might have transformed the world. We don’t want to see success as fragile or circumstantial, but the slightest touch of chance in the lives of any great man or woman, and we’d never know their names.

The unspoken part of greatness is the courage to venture into the unknown. But if we look too closely at the great people of our past, and use our hindsight of their lives as a map, we end up seeing the world backwards. They had no map in front of them when they lived their lives. The flaw in studying a legend too closely is you will keep your eyes buried in the fantasy of repeating someone else’s past, instead of looking to horizons of your own making.

*added 10/1/2015

He [Bourdieu] extended Marxist theory about capital, whereby people’s capital is split into four kinds: Economic, Social, Cultural and Symbolic.