Author: Scott Berkun

The Innovator’s SourceBook

Posted on in Books, Innovationby Scott Berkun

Dan Roberts is the author of an interesting little book called The Innovator’s Sourcebook. While it’s aimed more at entrepreneurs, his fresh, unassuming take on how to think about innovation is worth a look. Unlike many of the gurus and consultants out there with popular, but thin, business books, Dan’s ambitions aren’t to hook you to hire him, but to clarify and simplify how you think about using ideas in business in the book itself.

I’m only a few chapters in so far, but I took the time to interview Dan about the book.

SB: There are shelves full of books on innovation and entrepreneurship out there. What made you decide to write one yourself?

DR: Actually, having read those shelves worth of books is what pushed me to writing my own book.  As an aspiring entrepreneur, I wanted to know everything about generating compelling business ideas.  What I found from the books you mention is the idea stage is glossed over.  Most innovation and entrepreneurship books focus on describing “how to start a business,” rather than how to create innovative ideas.  Additionally, many books focus on topics tangential to creating ideas.  They cover topics such as; categorizing innovation, managing innovation, creating a culture of innovation, et cetera.  The books that did actually try to put some frameworks around idea generation were even more disappointing. The Innovator’s Sourcebook stemmed from my belief that there had to be a better way to approach this topic and provide entrepreneurs with substantive answers.

Now, I mentioned there are exceptions to the above.  I was able to gain valuable insights and partial answers from the following resources; Innovation and Entrepreneurship by Peter Drucker, The Innovator’s Dilemma series by Clayton Christensen, Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne and some of the writings of Joseph Schumpeter.  These resources are great, but each only tells part of the story.  In addition, these authors wrote with managers, economists and CEOs as their target audience.  So, my goal with The Innovator’s Sourcebook was to aggregate the insights that do exist, add to the conversation my own insights and then give everything a consistent point-of-view by writing specifically for the aspiring entrepreneur, starting from scratch.

One of your first chapters is about problem finding – why is this an important skill for people to develop? Isn’t solving problems more important than finding them?

First, by having a system for finding problems, the entrepreneur is able to shift from a waiting mode to a proactive search.  Instead of going through life hoping to randomly come across a problem worth solving, entrepreneurs can use the steps laid out to actively search out problems.  This is important because it reduces the reliance on randomness and gives entrepreneurs a source of recurring, focused inspiration.

The second reason has to do with probability.  If I am walking through my daily life looking for problems, what are the chances that the problems I find are things that I am passionate about solving?  The probability is low.  This approach is inherently random.  I find many problems in life I couldn’t care less about solving.  Unless a person is already in a job they are passionate about, it is going to be difficult for them to stumble upon a problem that they have the desire, or ability, to solve.  Having a system for problem finding allows them to specifically target problems in markets that they have an interest in from an entrepreneurial standpoint.

The third reason problem finding is an important skill is because it allows entrepreneurs to find a middle ground in idea generation.  Too often people are walking around trying to dream up the next big thing.  When such a grand idea does not strike, I find that they revert back to more established ideas.  They start looking at starting a consulting company, or opening a franchise.  Having a process for identifying problems allows them to find that middle ground.  It might not be a roadmap to the next big thing, but identifying interesting problems at least does not preclude that from happening.

What do you think the most common points of failure for people trying to create new products or ideas?

I think that depends on the context of the situation.  If you look at a startup company, the main point of failure is often execution.  Plenty of great ideas have failed due to poor execution.  Likewise, plenty of “bad ideas” have seen great success due to great execution. If you look at a corporate environment, the killers there are often bureaucracy and politics.  Many corporations espouse the virtues of innovation while having little appetite, or understanding, for what that really entails.

Finally, in the case of aspiring entrepreneurs who are still looking for their opportunity, the failure points usually arise from having a random system for opportunity recognition and the tendency to think of ideas on too grand of a scale.

Given your research how would you compare Apple, Google and Microsoft in their ability or approaches to innovation?

I think you actually have to address each firm’s approach to innovation and their ability to innovate separately.  For instance, you could say that Google’s approach to innovation is to change the bases of competition in a market (namely by making something free), have it become widely adopted and then funnel those eyeballs back to their core product; search advertising.  On the other hand, you could say that Google’s approach to innovation is really about the way they have structured their corporate culture and applied their famous 70-20-10 rule.  In that sense, their innovation approach is to allow ideas to bubble up from the individual level.

As far as ability to innovate, I think that Apple and Google are blowing Microsoft out of the water right now.  Microsoft has recently scrapped a few of their new product initiatives (Courier, Kin) and they seem to be playing catch-up at this point.  Their release of Internet Explorer 9 could be interesting because they will be the first browser utilizing the GPU for processing power.  However, I think what Microsoft lacks is a unifying vision for their innovation initiatives.  They have had innovative products to be sure (X-box live, Photosynth), but you would be hard pressed to identify a common vision that has lead to the creation of those products.  In contrast, you could look at Apple and broadly attribute their success to the use of design thinking and taking a platform, rather than a product approach.  Likewise, Google’s idea of “democratizing information” is something that unites their efforts across industries.  So, I think Microsoft’s problem is that they try to be everything to everyone and they end up with a lot of mediocre innovation efforts.

Apple and Google, on the other hand, have both proven that they have excellent ability to launch innovative products and services.  Of course, Apple is top of mind right now considering they just launched a new product category with the iPad and have since surpassed Microsoft in market cap.  Google launches so many products it is actually hard to keep up with them all.  At the end of the day, Apple is probably at the top of the heap in ability to innovate, but Google may be the more impressive firm here because they have only been in the game for twelve years.

—————————–

You can read four different chapters from Innovator’s Sourcebook here, and follow Dan on his Innovation blog.

How to fix a team

Posted on in Business, Managementby Scott Berkun

If you inherit a struggling team, or wake up one day to realize your team is in trouble, here’s the simplest playbook:

  1. Build a theory of what’s wrong. The superficial reasons a project is struggling are rarely the important ones. We notice symptoms first, low quality work or bad morale, not the causes. Racing to fix symptoms often just creates other symptoms (and cultures that stay in panic mode are prone to have dysfunctional teams). Instead, go into detective mode, which means you are an investigator, not a judge. for an afternoon or a day talk to individuals about how they’re feeling and what they think is going on. Take notes. Ask clarifying questions. Talk to in private, offer confidentiality, and listen. What are the common frustrations you hear? (If none of them involve you, you haven’t heard the whole truth yet).
  2. There are four major reasons: lack of trust, old wounds, conflicting priorities, or poorly defined goals. I’ve yet to encounter a struggling team that didn’t suffer from two or more of these issues.  As you talk to people one on one, let them help you translate their complaints into those reasons. If they don’t fit ask them to offer another bucket. Be patient. Pay attention to their language. Ask questions. Listen and look.
  3. The team leader may be the entire problem. The habits of a leader can create friction or help people thrive. Many in leadership roles don’t understand how their habits impact others. If the team doesn’t trust it’s leader it’s hard to trust anyone else. if you’re the leader you may have an existential crisis to examine: the problem may be you. Trust is grown slowly over time and if you are seen as incompetent, annoying or unreliable your teammates will hold back, weakening how the team works.
  4. Identify people interested in change, enlist their help (Assets). In talking to your team, you’ll learn who is most interested in helping change happen. They might be the angriest, most critical people at first – but once they’ve vented, are they most passionate and willing to invest energy in working differently? Among them, who has the most respect of their peers? These are the people you need to involve in reviewing your assessment of the situation. Make a list of the issues you’ve heard, and work with them to rank the issues in terms of severity.
  5. Identify people least likely to follow, and treat them with respect (Liabilities). Some people will resist change, even if they are miserable. This includes powerful people.  Despite their resistance they can be just as useful as the positive folks. Explain what you see as the problems, offer your strawman for fixing them, and ask for their feedback. See if there’s a way, even if the plan has to change,  to get them on board. If you can’t get their support, make sure to get their acknowledgment. “Ok Fred. I realize you don’t like this plan. And I understand your reservations. But I’m going forward, starting with those interested in change. But I want to make sure we continue talking about this as I go.”  Don’t fall into the trap of ignoring people who don’t agree with you: a great person, sufficiently upset, over enough miserable months, will be indistinguishable from a bad seed. They may come back around if the climate improves.
  6. Pick a small, easy thing to fix.  Morale and trust operate on momentum. If the team has been struggling for some time, it’s very hard to turn it around all at once. You need to identify one single point of pain that is small, but real and fixable. The first tiny shinny star, undeniable in it’s contrast to the dark night sky, can change people’s minds about what’s possible.  Let everyone know what you are going to solve first. Then ask them for their help in doing it. Once it has been fixed, report back. Ask for feedback? Is this better? If yes, you’ve now earned a small piece of trust that you can mortgage to solve the next problem. Go back and re-evaluate your assets and liabilities. Who is on board now? What feedback do they have?

Sometimes the right move is to take big action: reorganizing the team, stopping the project, or dramatically change the goals.  It’s true some problems can only be solved with big moves, but most aren’t this way. If you believe in the long term health of a team, you have to be willing to grow and build it over time, and resist the temptation for the mythical complete and easy fix.

Some organizations make big changes regularly (e.g. your standard bi-annual big company re-org), but they’re so confused as to what the problem was, or how it could be fixed, they never fix anything. They just keep making big changes, masking their ignorance of what’s wrong and why.

There are dozens of factors that might lead me to work outside this playbook. But all things equal, this is where I’d start.

(If you want more, read the free chapter on what to do when things go wrong from  Making Things Happen).

Is Cool a low bar?

Posted on in Culture, Philosophyby Scott Berkun

Many years ago, cool was rare. It was hard to find interesting things. You had to read lots of magazines, or find cool friends to hang out with who would show you their cool ways. Cool was cool in part becomes most things were uncool.

But the technology of modern times has made cool is easy.  Twitter is an endless stream of things people find cool. So are some of the most popular blogs like kottke.org and BoingBoing. We post on Facebook, we email, we tweet, all with excitement, as if it’s still a surprise to be able to find something cool. “Look at this cool video of dancing robots” or “here’s a cool article on Ninjas”. Cool has become a commodity.

I have this saying I think about sometimes – “Cool is a low bar”.

I’m not sure what it means.

I don’t think cool is bad. I like cool. Cool things are fun. Sometimes cool is provocative and inspiring, or earns a smile from a sad face.

But does something cool lead to anything else?

Would we say Buddha was cool? Or Martin Luther King? Are my favorite people and things in the world my favorites primarily because of their coolness? Would I marry a woman primarily because of how cool she was? What about the friend who understands me in the middle of the night, when I’m freaked out about an old fear – is his coolness, or lack their of, meaningful in any way?

There are other words, and other feelings, I think I’d assign to all of these people. Words and feelings that don’t translate as well on the web as cool things do.

If twitter and blogs are, in part, tools for cool. What are the tools for finding things we need, but would never be called cool?

Can you be a great man (or woman)?

Posted on in Culture, Philosophyby Scott Berkun

I was talking with friends last night over wine and the notion of being a great man came up. It was surprising at least two of us had thought about this at one time or another, yet I can’t recall the last time I’d seen a magazine, a TV show or essay explore the idea.

So we spent some time running through names of some potentially great men/women, and then settled on two more challenging questions.

1. Can you be a “great man” or “great woman” without being an asshole?

The easy definition of a great man/woman is based on external achievement. People who cure a disease, lead a nation, pioneer progress, earn great wealth, or inspire many others. And for a variety of reasons, I’ve read many biographies about people who qualify in various fields.

It turns out many of them were jerks. Talented and driven, but hard to like.

Some were estranged from their families (Woody Guthrie) , had difficult marriages (Martin Luther King. Jr, and too many others to count), behaved unethically (Any of the robber barons of the 19th, 20th or 21st centuries) and treated co-workers, partners or subordinates poorly. Edison ignored his kids. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were notorious for yelling at people who worked for them. Run through any list of greats and you’ll find many were quite mean, immature or depressive, despite their legendary success.

It raises the question: is being a jerk a necessary quality to achieve greatness?

It’s surprisingly hard to find people who

  1. Achieved great things for the world
  2. Were happy
  3. Treated people closest to them well

Can you think of people who meet even two of these criteria (1&2 or 1&3)?  Please leave a comment.

2. Are the truly great people the ones whose names we’ll never know?

For someone to be famous enough to be a household name in their lifetime, they’re likely fame seekers. Prolonged fame is unlikely to be accidental. This means the names we know of great people are ones who chose to put energy into being perceived as great, and the books and movies are slanted towards people egotistical enough to set out to be seen as great. These are people who focused on how the world sees them, perhaps at the expense of how their children, their partners, their neighbors, and their community sees them.

Perhaps true greatness, or a truly great person, is someone who does the right things for the right reasons without expecting grand external rewards. They don’t do things “to be the best” or “to be famous” or “to be a legend”. Instead they sacrifice those ambitions in favor of simply doing what the people around them most need. They want to be great only through being useful to those they care about most, regardless of how little acclaim they get from the whole wide world for it.

It might just be that the dedicated policeman, the passionate high school history teacher, the great Mom/Dad, the wonderful Uncle, are the people who are truly great, because they add real, honest, local value to the world for its own reason. They’re not blinded by ego, so they can more clearly see the simple, obvious, but critical  needs they can satisfy.

While someone else might be able to make a billion dollars, they know only they can raise this child, teach that student, support this community, or help that friend in times of need. And unlike the worldly kind of greatness, which is spread wide and thin across thousands of people, it might be only the other kind of greatness, the humble local kind, that has the potency to run deep into people’s hearts and memories, changing them for the better, forever.

What do you think? What does it mean to be a great person?

In Defense of PowerPoint

Posted on in Public Speaking, rantby Scott Berkun

Every few months there’s another article on the evils of PowerPoint, but it’s a poor craftsman that blames their tools. If you can’t think of a decent sentence to write, would you blame your pen? If you seem to habitually crash cars, would you blame the shape of the steering wheel? Regardless of how good or bad your pens and cars are, the burden of writing and driving is placed squarely between your ears. Speaking is no different. What kind of person insists on claiming otherwise?

Presentation tools are a distraction from the real issue: fools get lost with great tools all the time. PowerPoint is fine for what it does, which is put images on a screen. It’s better than the slide and overhead projectors it was designed to replace. But that’s just the point: slides are rarely the hard part of communicating anything. Slides are props. They support the ideas and points the speaker is making. For thousands of years great leaders and orators did their thing without a single slide. If the speaker is an idiot, or renders themselves virtually idiotic by their own hubris, forgetting why the audience is there, or gets distracted by animations and fonts, the fault is theirs, regardless of the tool. I prefer Keynote, but most criticisms of Powerpoint apply to it as well. All speakers have the option of speaking without any slides. which is how its been done for most of human history.

In every organization that’s ridiculed for “PowerPoint stupidity” (Such as the U.S. government in this NYT article), I blame the leaders of the culture, not the tool. In these articles there is rarely any evidence the use of Keynote, Prezi, or any other presentation tool in the same culture wouldn’t result in the same intellectual misery. In fact it doesn’t even appear the image so ridiculed by the NYTimes was made in PowerPoint. It was likely made in Illustrator or some other graphic design tool. If your boss demands you have 100 slides, with 50 arrows, and 30 different fonts, the problem is not the software.

The better question is: Why do some cultures reward poor communication skills? Why do they confuse charts, spreadsheets and animations with clear thinking? (perhaps its a data death spiral). Environments like these ruin the power of any tool, and eventually any mind. Any leader who confuses volume with clarity, and density with wisdom, has set up the entire organization to fail, independent of what tools they do or do not use. And when a culture is in trouble, look to the leaders as the leader’s behavior defines the culture.

The next time you find yourself victimized by a bad presentation, don’t just blame the presenter or their software. Instead blame whoever is in charge. Ask the following:

  • Who invited this speaker and chose to give them the floor?
  • Does the majority of the audience find the speaker effective?
  • If not, what is the leader doing to improve this?
  • What communication example did the leader set? Is this speaker simply emulating him/her?
  • What constructively critical feedback will the leader give the speaker so the speaker is better next time?

Blaming tools can be a copout for people who should be held responsible, from conference organizers, to department heads, to the speaker themselves.  Event organizers often do nothing to train, coach or reward good speakers they invite. Same for bosses and their staff. The feedback loops are broken and poor communication skills are, by default, reinforced. Training people to use PowerPoint isn’t speaker training, just as teaching someone how to use a hammer isn’t architecture.

Edward Tufte is fond of criticizing PowerPoint (See PowerPoint is evil, Wired). And I agree with his critique, but not his target. If you see him present his famous workshop, he shows images on a big screen behind him. He seems proud not to be using a tool as crude as PowerPoint, but the functional distinction is trivial. Regardless of how, he shows images on a big projection screen. While he is wise in not centering his lectures on his slides (often turning the screen behind him to black) he could very well use PowerPoint to do all these things and no one would know the difference.  The key distinction is not the tools, but his choices as a speaker for how he uses the tools. Hit B any time in PowerPoint, and you get a black screen.

Word Processors, email programs, and now blogging software have all been criticized for lowering various bars of quality and distorting people’s focus away from good thinking. But this is what popular tools tend to do and always will do. When you democratize a kind of power, you enable people to use that power in new ways. This enables the creation of great, as well as awful, things, as people without training or discipline now have  great power without earning it. With fresh blood innovations can be made, but also trash.

In the end, most “X is evil” type rants contain a logical fallacy, which is this: you can do stupid things with any tool. Most tools are indifferent. A chainsaw works just as well on your foot as on a log. The more powerful the tool, the larger the problem or solution you can create.

As someone who understands design, I recognize ways to make PowerPoint better. A good chainsaw could have a foot proximity detector, and try to minimize the odds you’ll do stupid things. And in turn, PowerPoint should help you think about what you want to say before you make any slides at all. But thinking takes time, and in many cultures thinking is made to seem like a waste of time.  Since all slide tools inherently worship slides, and all tool lovers inherently worship the tools, many people tend to jump in to making slides well before they know what they want to say. Apple’s Keynote will never tell you when you’d be better off using fewer slides, or demand you practice your talk, two things most experts agree are big and easy wins for better presentations. But both require acts of thoughtful patience, something no tool yet designed can grant us.

As a final example, Carolyn wrote about why lazy professors who abuse PowerPoint suck. And I agree, but I think the professors carry the balance of the burden. A lazy professor would be nearly as lazy with other tools. Years ago, in the age before computers in the classroom, I had courses where professors copied their own crusty, aging notes onto huge chalkboards for an hour, so I could copy the same fucking notes down in my own book. This was complete mass-scale idiocy masquerading as learning. Did anyone say chalk-boards were evil? slide-transparencies were evil? The reuse of lecture notes? Do we really expect a piece of software to redefine human nature? The professor gets paid a salary to be accountable for how they use whatever tools they choose. And same for any speaker.

In summary, of course there are ways to make PowerPoint better, but that’s not the real problem to solve.

When someone finds a gun that fires anti-lazy/anti-stupidity rays at people in power, I’ll be the first to buy. But until then, lets for once put some blame on the users of tools, not just their creators. When you step up to the microphone, you are responsible for everything you present. If you put up a slide and stand in front of it, it is your show: you have no one to blame but yourself. If you are a leader, part of what you are responsible for, like it or not, is how well the people who work for you communicate with each other. If you don’t like what you see, do something about it.

Also see: Why I hate Prezi

Help wanted: Editor/Curator for my next book

Posted on in Booksby Scott Berkun

I’m looking to hire someone to play a unique role in my next book.

(UPDATE: Position FILLED – Please do not apply)

The plan is to self-publish a collection of my best writings to date, from essays, to blog posts, to magazine articles. But the goal is to avoid the traps of most “blog posts in a bundle” books – which usually stink. They’re not edited or curated well enough to work as a book. We will do much better than this.

My plan: I’m hiring an editor who will act as a both a project leader and collaborator. Which essays to use? How should it be organized? How can 1200 articles and essays be hand-picked and sculpted down to make for a fantastic read? This is a rare opportunity for a kick-ass editor to do more than be an editing slave. You will both help craft the themes of the book, suggest some new content, and then passionately drive it through the publishing process, from copyedits, to reviews, all the way to fruition, with no bureaucracy: it’s just me, you and a few other hand-picked people we choose.

Here are the responsibilities:

  • Drive the curation and organization of the book
  • Be the main leader for the self-publishing process: you are the PM
  • Suggest and provoke me to write new material if needed
  • Partner with a graphic/book designer on the cover, and interior design
  • Use the readers of scottberkun.com to help drive some choices
  • lead a team of volunteer copy-editors / indexers / etc.

Here are the rewards:

  • I’d pay you a flat fee. Won’t be much, but it will be something.
  • You’ll get your name on the cover of the book – a super-duper credit for your resume
  • If you’re a fan, you’ll get a unique opportunity to define one of my books
  • More influence over a book then you will ever have

Requirements:

  • You have experience editing books, from copy-editing to production
  • You’ve always wanted to contribute to a beautiful, well-crafted, book that defies convention in favor of smart, clever ideas for book design
  • You are really fucking smart
  • You are really fucking funny/sarcastic
  • You are not offended by the word fuck
  • You are organized, self-directed, and can lead a project with many parts
  • You are psyched about this for reasons other than money
  • Bonus points for being a fan, or being familiar with my writings

FAQ

1. Why aren’t you (Scott) working with O’Reilly Media again?

The main reason is to do an experiment – what happens if I/we have control over the entire process? I’m sure I’ll learn things about writing books I couldn’t learn any other way. What would happen if I/we didn’t need anyone’s approval for anything? I want to find out.

2. How will you self-publish it?

There are great options these days that make self-publishing transparent to readers – fans can buy the book via amazon or kindle and never know. Details TBD by the editor/curator.

3. When does this start?

The project starts as soon as I find you. The plan would be to publish the book either late this fall, or early next spring.

To Apply:

  1. Email me: info at scottberkun dot com
  2. With the subject: I kick ass
  3. Please include: Your editing resume, your favorite cocktail, and who in the world you’d most like to anonymously poke in the eye

The end of performance reviews?

Posted on in Managementby Scott Berkun

NPR has a story on a new book called Get Rid of the Performance Review, by Larry Rout. The book is based on a popular WSJ article from 2008. The NYT picked up the story in May of this year.

My favorite comment in all of these articles is from the always wise Bob Sutton, who says in the NYT article, “In the typical case, it’s done so badly it’s better not to do it at all.”

And perhaps that’s the problem. Almost no one in the entire chain of events required to perform performance reviews believes in them enough to either a) do them well b) fight for change in the process c) propose an alternative.

When I worked at Microsoft, reviews were a formality with good managers. We’d agree on the minimum we needed to do early on, and that’s all their was. If I wasn’t doing well, I knew about it early, and we’d talk about it at least once a month. The actual review meeting never held surprises. With bad managers, reviews became a legal battleground, where positions were established, and claims were made, in an ever-escalating and desperate attempt to make up for something fundamentally broken in how the relationship was working.

In my years since, and my many travels to many corporations, I’ve discovered how ridiculously similiar the review process is in most major corporations. There is almost no innovation here among the Fortune 500. Yet every HR department will proudly proclaim how unique and special what they do is. That somehow their magic “evaluation criteria” are superior and less porous than any of their competitors. When someone takes great pride in the construction of a form, beware for your soul.

The surprise to most employees who have never been a manager is how little relevance what they write in the review has on their rewards or bonuses. Often the decision for promotions, or raises, is made weeks or months before the evaluations are due. Which might be fine, if this were transparent: but it rarely is.

Have you seen a performance review process in action that worked well? Or can imagine one of your own invention? I’d love to hear about it. Links welcome.

Should programmers run for Congress?

Posted on in politicsby Scott Berkun

Clay Johnson has an interesting post suggesting programmers would make excellent Senators. I like the spirit of his argument, but have trouble with some details.

I agree in some cases they certainly couldn’t be worse, but I know many programmers. All the ones I can think of who might be good Senators would find the process of becoming elected, and the day to day tasks so abhorrent, that they’d recuse themselves from consideration. There is a general trap in politics: the people best suited to have the job are the people least likely to want to run.

It’s not a surprise Clay is a programmer himself, and the article largely explains why programmers are super cool. I’m not saying he’s wrong – some programmers are super-cool.  But he falls into the class of people he’s applauding,which encouraged me to take a spin through his list.

Lets take his points one at at time:

1. They’re under-represented as a profession.

Indeed, they are, and he offers facts. There are 1.3 million programmers to ~740,000 lawyers, yet lawyers are 40% of Congress. It’s a good point. But there are also 6.2 million teachers in the U.S. And one could make an argument teachers, who can explain things well and think about the future, should be better represented too. In fact I bet there are tons of professions that should be “better represented”. This is a good point, but it’s not specific to programmers.

2. Government’s problems are becoming increasingly technical… check out the first piece of legislation this Congress passed: The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 isn’t just a 1000+ page bill that’s now a law, it’s also a technical specification for recovery.gov written by people who don’t know how to write specifications.

There are two skills bundled up together in here. In rough terms first Congress figures out policy and then figures out how to implement the policy. I agree, programmers might be better at writing specifications, but they have no real qualifications for either figuring out policy, nor for collaborating with other congressmen on both policy and implementation.  Congress is insanely collaborative, almost painfully so, and collaboration, over slow timelines, with lots of meetings and committees, isn’t a kind of collaboration mamy many programmers would say they are good at, much less, can tolerate.

3. Third, great developers are systems fixers and systems hackers. There is no system more ripe for elegant process hacks than the United States House of Representatives… They’ll build systems to make it so they can hear from their constituents better. Just as Ted Kennedy had his staff make the first Congressional website, a developer in Congress will seek to use new technology to make their job easier. That’s what hackers do.

I’ve always thought policy is a kind of design – systems design. There are many professions that think in terms of systems: architects, interaction designers, plumbers – seriously. They think about goals, constraints, alternatives, etc. and it’s design thinking that seems most lacking in policy.

But assuming I concede programmers are best suited to design systems – any senator who pushed for change would need to manage the side-effects. Old systems do not like change, and defenders of old systems really hate leaders who push for change. How would the rest of Congress react to being ‘hacked’? Unless the person doing the hacking is smooth, charismatic and political enough to make their hacks seem like concessions, or to build coalitions around their changes, they’re unlikely to get far, as they’ll be seen as threats rather than progressions.

Any ability to fix the system, or to hack a system, has to be done in a way that is palatable to allies, and this is a set of skills separate from coding skills.

4. Web-native developers hire other developers. A developer who is elected a member of Congress that’s a true developer will likely be smart and hire a developer or two as staff. . a few of them working inside Congress — with a Member of Congress who is also a developer — can start bridging the gap between citizens and their government in new ways.

This is where things get shaky – wouldn’t it be better to simply have a young Senator who is tech savvy and gets the value of technology (arguably most under 40 getsthe transformative power of technology and its powers much better than those over 60), who hires an amazing set of developers to work for him? Then you get a politician who can do politics, and who take advantage of all the attributes he describes without the liabilities of trying to make the politician and the technologist the same person?

5. Developers are great digital communicators. They’re great at using the medium to connect directly with people in ways that others cannot. They can build their own tools to connect with people, too. With a Developer who understands the guts of the web in a leadership spot inside Congress, Congress can start communicating more effectively online. And as this developer becomes more successful, the rest of Congress may very well follow suit.

Some developers are great digital communicators, but many developers are entirely awful. They pick fights, they troll, and they are passive-aggressive. And besides, most of what senators do is not online. There are meetings, committees, not to mention the entire election process, the details of which most programmers would find abhorrent (including wearing lots of suits and ties).

6. Paul Graham comes to mind as the ideal archetype. He’d be a great member of Congress. He’s generally interested in performance, able to make tough decisions, and has a rational mind that’s been conditioned (through reading thousands of investment applications at ycombinator) able to see through a lot of nonsense — even the kind that Washington produces. But Graham is just one of 1.3 million people I’d consider qualified for the job.

I think Clay made a mistake here. I’ve met Paul and I like him. I like his writing too. But he’s demonstrated a clear and respectable skill in speaking his mind, well aware he’s likely to offend people (See his essays, including this entirely relevant one on why nerds aren’t popular). This is intellectually noble, but certain to ruffle feathers and make him difficult for the established ranks to rally for his support. I’d say the same for many smart people whose writing I respect.

The archetype would have to been someone who has managed their perceptions and politics as well as their code. Tim O’Reilly should always get first mention here, and Stewart Brand also comes to mind – but it’d be interesting to ask them, or other would-be candidates why they haven’t done this already. Their answers would be the place to start for this entire line of thinking.

The creativity crisis (Newsweek)

Posted on in Creative Thinkingby Scott Berkun

In a recent article on America’s declining ability to be creative, the author, Po Bronson, tries to explain why American children have declining abilities to be creative.

In one story, he explains how focusing on project work dramatically helps students learn creativity skills.

Along the way, kids demonstrated the very definition of creativity: alternating between divergent and convergent thinking, they arrived at original and useful ideas. And they’d unwittingly mastered Ohio’s required fifth-grade curriculum—from understanding sound waves to per-unit cost calculations to the art of persuasive writing. “You never see our kids saying, ‘I’ll never use this so I don’t need to learn it,’ ” says school administrator Maryann Wolowiec. “Instead, kids ask, ‘Do we have to leave school now?’ ” Two weeks ago, when the school received its results on the state’s achievement test, principal Traci Buckner was moved to tears. The raw scores indicate that, in its first year, the school has already become one of the top three schools in Akron, despite having open enrollment by lottery and 42 percent of its students living in poverty.

With as much as three fourths of each day spent in project-based learning, principal Buckner and her team actually work through required curricula, carefully figuring out how kids can learn it through the steps of Treffinger’s Creative Problem-Solving method and other creativity pedagogies. “The creative problem-solving program has the highest success in increasing children’s creativity,” observed William & Mary’s Kim.

It’s an anecdote, but I buy the premise. Projects are open ended by design, and force the students to engage with the challenge in ways rote memorization and fact recall never do.

But the thing the article doesn’t get at is why project based learning is rare at most levels of education. Here’s why:

  • It takes more effort for teachers to plan projects
  • They have to be more involved with their students
  • Teachers become coaches and mentors, not dictators
  • It’s harder to grade projects that tests
  • Teachers have to understand, and manage the student’s within-team dynamics and conflicts
  • Teachers have to put students in control

Until teachers are rewarded and trained differently, it’s very difficult to do what the Ohio school above did.

How ideas escape their prisons

Posted on in Innovation, Management, reader's choiceby Scott Berkun

In a series of posts, called readers choice, I write on whatever topics people submit.

This week: Helping great ideas escape your prison (e.g. research lab)

Any time you think of where you work as a prison, for you or your ideas, you’re in big trouble. Prisons are hard places for anything to escape from – that’s why they’re called prisons.

But the comparison is apt – if you were actually trying to escape from a prison, you’d start getting very smart about how the place works. You’d study the behavior of the guards, their bosses, and the prisoners who might be in a position to help you, until you understood how they work better than they do. Only then will you see the opportunities for getting out. Every prison has a black market, and that market is driven by people smart and motivated enough to out-think the system they’re in.

Questions to ask:

Have any ideas escaped at all? A research lab, in theory, has the goal of bringing ideas to someone. It could be to the VPs of other parts of a company, or to a government, to other organizations. The first question to ask is – is this true? What is the last ideas that ‘escaped’? Was it a product? a feature? A research paper? A prototype? How did they do it? Whose help did they get? Follow their trail and pick their brains for advice. If no idea has ever escaped, you have very big problems, as you might truly work in an idea prison. If so, why not go to a place more friendly to ideas, even if it pays less or has less prestige?

In the end every prison, real or metaphoric, is a series of doors, and people with keys to those doors. What are the doors and who has the keys? It is possible the doors and the keys are already yours.

Who else is interested in escaping? Go watch The Great Escape (even if it’s the 24th time). The only way these prisoners of war could escape a Nazi prison involved dozens of people working together with a shared goal. Who else do you know that wants their idea(s) to escape? Partner with them. Share notes. Conspire together to use your collective assets, improving your odds of success.

Don’t expect to be rewarded. If you think the system you are in doesn’t reward good work, and you want to do good work, why on earth would you expect to be rewarded for it? The value system you are in is the opposite of yours. It will be hard work to get a idea of yours out there, but when it happens, it’d be silly to expect everyone you just had to work around to be thrilled about it. The old quote “It’s amazing what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit.” Perhaps the only ideas that thrive are the ones your boss thinks is hers. Or for an idea to thrive it you will have to take a bad review, or give up a raise. The long history of people with good ideas often involves others not accepting them until after they’ve seen the ideas in use. You might need to sacrifice the next six months or a year, to get the idea going, placing a bet once it’s in use your superiors will reward you then.

Fail more often. There are many creative cliches around failure. “Fail faster” people say, forgetting how not fun failure is. But the spirit of this is sound. Each time you try to get an idea to escape, you have the opportunity to learn something about your research lab you didn’t know before. If you pitch a brilliant idea in front of the senior staff, and are soundly rejected, there might just be one person in the room who comes up to you after and offers to help. He’d never find you if you hadn’t ‘failed’.

Book Review: Moby Dick

Posted on in Book reviews, Booksby Scott Berkun

Years ago, when I decided to become a writer, I decided I should read the classics I’d managed to dodge in school. While Heraclitus said it’s impossible to step into the same river twice, as a river is always changing, with books, they stay the same and we change. Reading books again helps me sort out how I’ve changed and why.

I’ve discovered some classics do not age well (I found Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe impenetrable), but others kept their powers for me (Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby). It’s easy to forget there are both bad and good reasons for a classic to remain a classic, sometimes it’s not much more than cumulative advantage.

6 years ago I picked up a copy a Moby Dick in a used book store, read the first page and thought it quite inviting. Since then I’ve traveled with Moby Dick a dozen times, never finding the courage to dig in. I’d see it on my bookshelf, or on my desk, and it would gnaw at me: the book had become, all on it’s own, my private little white whale. And so last week, on vacation in Mexico it came along yet again. And I finally read the whole damn thing.

I did enjoy it Moby Dick, but not in a way I’d recommend to most people I know. I was reading it more as a writer than a reader, if that makes any sense. Writers do this. We want to understand how books work.

(Actual review starts here) – The problem with the book (or its brilliance if you are patient enough) is that Melville is a tease. The first 80 pages presents itself as a charming, funny, intriguing tale of life in whaling. He writes very well, and has some brilliant prose and pacing. But he slowly unwinds the book into wider and wider circles of pedantry, indulgence, and esoteric ramblings that more than try your patience. Ahab, the most well-known character from the book, can’t be mentioned on more than 80 of the 544 pages of the edition I read.

This means in one sense the majority of the book is a whaling manual of sorts, with encyclopedia-like entries and opinion essays on various aspects of whales, whaling, and seafaring culture. Melville also shifts narrative form wildly in the book, sometimes he’s Ishmael, sometimes he’s Melville, sometimes he’s a sort of movie-style narrator (approximating Shakespearean stage direction). And Melville loves his references: my edition had 300 endnotes, half of which are sailing terms, the rest are biblical or literary references critical to understanding his sentences. The movie version with Gregory Peck (screenplay by Ray Bradbury) provides the experience many people would expect in the book, a well paced tale of adventure, but it’s a good example of what can be lost which switching from written forms to visual ones.

I diligently read every page, resisting the urge to skim and skip, exploring if I could resist the temptations of my attention. And in so doing I learned how much wider the idea of a novel is than I’d thought it could be.  He successfully (at least in terms of posthumous readership, the book didn’t sell that well in his lifetime) manages to twist the concept of a novel into various odd shapes, with strange and unwieldy corners – it made me rethink the notion of what a book, fiction or non-fiction, can be like. As a writer, I’m glad I read the whole thing.

The best possible take on the book is that Melville desired to give the reader a similar obsession about the white whale to the one Ahab has. The longer the book went on, the stronger the sense of craving, and then obsession, I had for the core narrative to continue. As Ahab hunts the whale, so does the reader hunt the story of Ahab and the whale in the book. A minority of the non-narrative chapters are exceptional essays (The Hyena (49), The Monkey-Rope (72), Fast-Fish & Loose-Fish, and the chapter on the concept of white) that I marked well and might reread. A dozen or so passages in the book, often about Ahab or philosophy, are exceptional. But for a book of this length, I had a fairly low number of passages marked to return to and reread.

My edition (Wordsworth 2001) included a 15-page introduction by David Herd that bordered on worship. Thankfully I read it after I finished the book, as it would have ruined the reading (as introductions of classics often do). He grants every possible benefit of the doubt to Melville, often without much real evidence of Melville’s intentions. Apparently, Melville had reservations, stating “It will be a strange sort of book, tho’, I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho’ you might get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree”.

And I’m compelled to say for no particular reason, Melville’s Bartleby the Scribner remains one of my favorite short stories. It’s quite the opposite reading experience from reading Moby Dick.

The fallacy of quick answers

Posted on in Philosophyby Scott Berkun

Sometimes you have to hear a new idea several times before real thinking starts.

We get so used to trying to dispatch questions quickly (and ideas often ride the backs of good questions) we forget the most important part of a question – the  part where you stop and think before you answer.

It’s amazing how many people answer important questions instantly. If their answer is right, it’s not because they thought hard about the answer to the question in the moment. Maybe they thought about it when they heard the question years ago, but perhaps something has changed? And if it’s their first time with a big question, how can they be confident in their first answer?

I’ve learned I sometimes need to hear a question a few times before I deeply understand what is being asked, and why there isn’t an easy answer, despite how much I’d like one of my old answers to work for the new question. For that reason, although they can be annoying, I know there is value in people who keep asking me the same important questions. If I’m getting wiser, shouldn’t I keep finding better answers? Or notice when I’ve had the same answer for years?

I also know when someone says to me “are you ok?”, no matter what is going on, I have almost never in my life said No, even when I was not OK. I didn’t stop to think, as I was afraid thinking would lead to feeling and I didn’t want to think or feel in that moment. I suspect the same thing happens for may of us, on a smaller scale, for all sorts of questions all the time.

In some situations the first, second or even third answer isn’t going to be the most honest, or the most useful. It might take someone hitting you with that question many times before you truly start to think about it. Same for new ideas or frames of thinking of any kind.

I used to respect people who were masters of the quick answer. But as I get older it seems the masters of quick  answers are often just masters of facts. Trivia. Other people’s theories. Now I think when it comes to matters of importance, these are people to fear. I agree there is definitely a time for fast thinking, but when I look around it seems slow thinking is the path to many of the things we claim we want.

Contest: Most worn out book wins $100 prize

Posted on in Booksby Scott Berkun

There is something depressing about seeing one of my books high on an office shelf, in perfect condition, covered in a layer of dust . I’m thrilled they were purchased of course, but there’s sadness there too.

Some people keep their favorite books in great condition, and that’s awesome. It’s an act of great respect.

But I admit I love seeing one of books all dogeared, with tabs, post-it notes, or even coffee-stains all over the place (Photo on right by Mattias). That’s a book that has lived and has spent long hours in use. It’s been lent to many people, traveled in buses and planes, and read by many sets of eyes.

In this spirit, I’m running a little contest.

The person will the most worn out, well used copy of one of my books wins:

  • $100 (Amazon Gift certificate)
  • A signed copy of the latest edition of that book (or other book of mine of your choice)

To enter:

  1. Leave a comment including a picture of your worn out book inline
  2. Include a link to your photo  (inline images isn’t working at the moment)

Rules:

  1. It has to be a book I wrote
  2. You can’t go beat the crap out of an unused book simply to win
  3. Folded/marked/tabed/post-it noted pages count as much as wear
  4. Really, I’d just like to see how my books are being used. Photos of my books on your shelves are welcome too.

Let’s see what you got!

Quote of the week

Posted on in quote of the xby Scott Berkun

In looking for someone to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. But the most important is integrity, because if they don’t have that, the other two qualities, intelligence and energy, are going to kill you.   — Warren Buffett

Via here, posted by Michael Wilk

Site issues – need your help

Posted on in this siteby Scott Berkun

We’ve had some character set issues on the site – Weird characters showing up in posts.

This issue has been fixed but a side-effect of the fix is some of the posts have been truncated. They just cut off or seem to be missing the last paragraph or more.

We’ve caught most of them, but there are likely still more out there.

If you notice this when reading pages, please leave a comment here or on the post/page itself and we’ll get it restored.

Thanks. Appreciate the help.

What I learned at FOO Camp ’10

Posted on in On Tour, Teaching/Trainingby Scott Berkun

I was invited back this year to O’Reilly’s FOO (Friends Of O’Reilly) camp, an unconference weekend event held at O’Reilly’s headquarters in Sebatapol, CA.  What is FOO? About 250 people are invited to camp out on the lawn at O’Reilly Media HQ and spend a long weekend together. Big schedule boards go up Friday, with room for 10 or 12 sessions to happen concurrently- anyone can organize one on anything. No restrictions. It’s that simple.

By 1) creating a great environment, 2) inviting great people, and 3) getting out of the way, amazing things happen. This sounds obvious but experiences with all 3 elements are rare. How many times in your life have you been somewhere with all three? For an entire weekend? I’m amazed, inspired and exhausted every time I get to go for this reason.

I’ve written up notes from past years and here’s what I wrote in my little Moleskine this year:

  • Jane McGonigal ran a session on being time rich – This was one of my favorites, in part because she’s a fantastic facilitator (more on this bel0w). The session was about becoming time rich, overcoming hurry sickness and re-framing how we use time.  I quit my job in 2003 largely with this goal, and it was great to be in a room full of people who were interested in the same thing. We talked about Rescue Time, and other tools to make us more self-aware of where our time goes. However most of the session was about attitude, self-awareness and things that transcend the tools. We agreed to hurt people who tell others “Looks like someone who has too much time on their hands” as it betrays the false belief that those who are busy deserve higher status than those who have free time (See the cult of busy). Watch the twitter tag #timerich for more.
  • Knowledge vs. Wisdom: I ran a session asking what wisdom was. I asked people to imagine the wisest person they knew (during a long moment of silence) and then report on what words they’d use to describe that person. Words included: calm, present, aware, joy, humble, available, listening and love. The idea that wisdom = context came up, which I liked very much. Whitney Hess told the story of the four sons from the Torah, and how admitting ignorance and asking questions are two big parts of being wise (echoed by Socrates core ideas). The irony of the session was that despite the interesting comments on self-awareness, being present, etc. some in the room weren’t listening much to what others were saying, which perhaps reflects the essential irony of talking about wisdom – talking is not doing. Can you be wise and have a big ego at the same time? I wish I had asked this question during the session – the results would have been fascinating.
  • How to get 1million views on YouTube. Tim Shey and June Cohen of TED talked about their lessons learned in popularizing video on the web. Some fundamentals were: build a community on youtube (it is its own huge and vibrant social network), make content your audience asks for, have great audio quality but don’t obsess about video, and make many videos. Most of the success stories Tim mentioned involved people who produce regular shows, rather than people who post one amazing video and have it work. And daisy-chaining, ending one video with links to related videos, or parts of a series, is an easy way to raise conversions from one view to two or more. As always, the way to get popularity involves work – sorry, no magic tricks.
  • The dictionary of theories: Sumana did a session on theories/frameworks, where we talked about different frameworks from different domains that try to frame or explain everything. We talked about Cargo Cults, Cognitive Bias, Metaphors we live by, Overton Window, and more. It reminded me of a book I picked up years ago called The Dictionary of Theories, which on any random page can set a curious mind off thinking about the world from a new point of view. It begged the question, is there a theory of theories?
  • The web and forgetting – Selena ran a session about privacy online and the right to have data of yours disappear. This was fascinating for many reasons, in part because of how wide the opinions were in the room. I found myself thinking about Technopoly – that the problems raised are real but they are non-solvable, as they’re the other edge of the sword of the potentials of the web and social networks (Making something digital means it absorbs all the good and bad of digital things). I also found it interesting how anecdote heavy the conversation was – Monika Lewinsky, The star wars kid, and a few other examples were often the primary arguments for why something was, or was not, problematic, but there was little discussion of how likely these experiences (e.g. not being able to get control of your identify back) are, if there is any evidence they will happen more often.  We rarely choose how culture develops – and much of the conversation was in the spirit of cultural criticism, which I enjoyed.

Randomly Interesting Quotes I heard

Most people I like don’t like other people

Shit flips all the time  (shit meaning “which things are winning, and which things are losing”)

ERBFDB – Emotionally Retarded Big Fat Douchebag

No one is ever going to really know about anyone

I will now disabuse you

The music of his personality

Meta – Observations

  • The elimination of pretense accelerates progress. A theory on why FOO works so well is that many who are invited are CEOs and alpha people in their worlds – they are used to being the center of attention. But by putting them in tents and in the camping vibe, where everything is shared, the default status becomes ‘we are equal’. And the quality of ideas and conversations rises with less ego in the way. There are no keynote sessions, no badges with ribbons, it’s all stripped away. If more executives, politicians and world leaders met this way, I think the results would be amazing.
  • Would FOO, or any great conference experience, be better if it were deliberately made less intense? Or paced based on learning theory? – The theory of retroactive interference, that suggests our brains learn best if they’re not crammed with an overloading of knowledge.  What are the limits for knowledge absorption at an event like FOO? Would it better if there were fewer sessions? More designated breaks between sessions? A recommended (but not-enforced) default break/nap/meditate time for people to go off alone for a half hour to digest, as the learning theory literature suggests, what they’ve already experienced? Being overwhelmed with wonder is an emotionally positive experience that is inspiring and helps makes bonds form (sharing ‘an experience’) , but the brain science suggests its not the best way to learn.
  • There was more ego this year (maybe?) or We need Facilitators! I left more sessions frustrated than past years because either the moderator or participants, made poor use of the wisdom and experience in the room. There were folks who spoke too often, and about themselves, especially on the first day. In one case the 3 experts on the subject (whom I know where experts) in the room never spoke, but people who knew very little spoke quite often. Sometimes the speaker just gave a lecture, despite the conversation sized numbers of people there. I likely had a bad draw this year – there must be ~120 ‘sessions’ over the weekend, and I dropped in on perhaps 20 – but facilitation at FOO, and in the world, is still an undervalued talent. If I’m back next  year it’d be great to see someone do “How to facilitate a FOO session” as the first slot on the schedule (There is how to run an unconference session, but it’s not nearly as good to read about facilitation than to learn about through  experiencing someone doing it well)
  • The trajectory of social fatigue. This hadn’t happened before, but by Sunday I avoided anyone I hadn’t already met, and even most of those I did. Combined with the sad ‘end of summer camp’ feeling of watching everyone take down their tents, it took me until I got home late that night to start feeling like myself again. Perhaps there should have been a session on “How to deal with social fatigue” Sunday morning – but I suppose no one would show :) If you introduced yourself to me and I was a jackass on Sunday, I’m sorry. Actually, if I was a jackass at any time, sorry for that too.

If you liked this, I’ve written summaries for past years as well.

Where does our best work come from?

Posted on in Management, reader's choiceby Scott Berkun

In a series of posts, called readers choice, I write on whatever topics people submit and vote for. This week’s reader’s choice post: Where does our best work come from?

I think four factors explain most kinds of performance.

  1. You are motivated
  2. You’re assigned a task you’re both confident in and challenged by
  3. You are well led and working for someone who respects you
  4. You are working with people you trust

The surprise is how rare in most people’s working lives are all four at the same time. Or even three of the four.

Personal motivation even by itself is tricky for most people to master. How to pick work that will be interesting day after day, or to stay focused on the long term payoffs even if the short term experience is difficult or frustrating. The real challenge of many things (including writing books), and the reason so many people fear them, has less to do with the work, than the fear of the commitment to the work.

Good leaders (#3) and working with people you trust (#4) are almost the same thing. A good leader will push out people who betray trust (See the No-asshole rule, and what Pixar’s Ed Catmull has to say). A good leader also puts trust in their team (delegation) and encourage people who have trust to offer to lend it to their peers.

Working alone, as I generally do, demands I take care of all 4 myself. Assuming I trust myself (#4), and treat myself with respect (#3), two things that can be surprisingly tricky, my performance is gated by picking the right projects and ensuring I have long term goals that motivate me.  The challenge of self-employment is making sure I provide all 4 factors – I have to be the employee and the leader all at the same time.

And if working with clients, you are in some sense picking your leader or source of respect (#3/#4).

These four items seem very simple, which is why they’re often overlooked. It’s unusual to experience all four at the same time. Great work can happen in spite of these factors, of course. And for some people the sense of overcoming a bad boss, or team, or situation, is a source of motivation – they have something to prove.

(Video) How to Call BS on Social Media Gurus

Posted on in On Tour, Web 2.0 / social softwareby Scott Berkun

Thanks to the folks at SMC Seattle, the video from last month’s talk is now up.

Some background and disclaimers:

  1. It was a rowdy venue, with an open bar at a circus themed hall (Hale’s Palladium room). I had a heckler of sorts at about the 8 minute mark, which I dealt with abruptly to prevent more of it from happening. Apologies if I come off as brash – the content is brash enough.
  2. A drinking game for my talk was announced during my introduction by Brian, my SMC host, right before the video starts. It wasn’t my idea, and I found out about it when the audience did.
  3. There is a some use of the word BS – very mildly NSFW.
  4. There is a typo in the opening credit, I’ve already let the SMC Seattle folks who produced the video know
  5. The slides and references for the talk can be found here.

SMC Seattle May Event: How to Call BS on a Social Media Guru from SMC Seattle on Vimeo.

Why You Are Not an Artist

Posted on in Creative Thinking, Culture, designby Scott Berkun

Picasso. Van Gogh. Beethoven. Hendrix. O’Keefe. Kurosawa. Kahlo. Kafka. Magritte. Bukowski.  These are people most agree are worthy of the title Artist.

But what if you met them before they were famous? In much of their own lives, certainly for Van Gogh, or Kafka, they didn’t have fame. And in the case of many Artists, including Magritte and Bukowski, their work wasn’t widely accepted until late in their careers. We’d need some other criteria than success to identify them for what they are.

My argument for most creative people reading this post, whatever criteria we’d invent for what an Artist is, few of us would meet that bar. The risks they were willing to take to achieve their artistic visions were well beyond ours. You can chose to be an artist, but if you’re employed as a “creative” you probably don’t.

To be an Artist requires a specific intent. An intent that nearly everyone with a full time job does not have while doing that job. You might be an artist in your spare time, but that’s something else entirely.

While you might have grand aesthetics in your work, or amazing skills that seem magical to others, that is artistry.  How you employ those talents determines whether you are an Artist or not. And sure, you might be the best in your field of designing websites or selling cars, but that’s mastery. The big question is this: your mastery of skill is used in service of what? A corporation? Some stockholders? Customer satisfaction goals? These might be honorable pursuits, perhaps noble in some sense, but that’s not enough to call it art.

Think of Guernica, The Seven Samurai, The Mona Lisa, or your favorite, most powerful work by your favorite Artist. What is it about their work that impacts you? It’s more than just talent.  It’s something to do with the aims they used their talent for. We wouldn’t put a box of laundry detergent (except perhaps for Warhol),or a piece of business software, however wonderfully designed they might be, in the same class of creative effort. We all know there is a distinction, however fuzzy or personal, between one kind of thing and another.

I think to call someone an Artist means they have a higher purpose beyond commerce. Not that they don’t profit from their work, or promote themselves, but that the work itself has spiritual, philosophical, emotional or experiential attributes as central goals. An artist’s work is about an idea, a feeling, or an exploration of a form, framed more by their own intuitions, than the checklists and protocols of bureaucracies and corporations.

In simple terms there are three points:

  1. An Artist is committed to their ideas in ways most people are not. An Artist will risk many things, wealth, convenience, popularity, fame or even friends and family to protect the integrity of their ideas. If you’re not risking anything, and mostly doing what you are told, you’re probably not an artist.
  2. This means anyone who constantly sacrifices their own ideals, and regularly makes major compromises to satisfy the inferior opinions of ‘superiors’ they do not respect, can not sincerely call their work art. And therefore, can not call themselves Artists.
  3. An Artist would be willing to sign their name on what they give to the world. Are you proud of what your company makes? Does it go out the door with even half the soul you put into your designs? If you ship things to the world that are beneath your own bar, can you call it art in the same way you would if it met that bar?

The definition game rarely leads anywhere. You can find many different definitions for the words art, artist and artistry to support any point of view, as it’s an active area of debate. But my favorite definition of artist is:

  1. A person who creates, by virtue of imagination, talent or skill, works of aesthetic value, especially, but not limited to, the fine arts.
  2. A person who creates art (even bad art) as an occupation

If you make paintings, movies, novels or similiar things, of course you’re an artist. Even if your work isn’t good (however we determine that since it’s subjective), and even if you do it part time, or have never been paid a dime for your art, you still qualify.

But if you work for clients/bosses in the making of things that you yourself would not consider art, or are beneath your own standard, or that you blame others you work with for ruining, you are not an Artist. You are an employee. You are being paid to give someone else authority over your creative decisions. This can involve inspiration, effort, sacrifice, passion, brilliance, and many other noble things, but it’s not the same as being an Artist.

As Charles Eames (see video below) said:

Artist is a title that you earn, and it’s a little embarrassing to hear people refer to themselves as an artist… it’s like referring to themselves as a genius.

Related: