Author: Scott Berkun

Wants vs. Beliefs

Posted on in Philosophy, Uncategorizedby Scott Berkun

A funny thing about the human mind is we tend to believe what we want to believe. We are prone to allowing what we want to have happen distort our reasoning on how likely it is to happen.

My recent post on the future of UI will be boring has disappointed some. They think I want the future to boring because I predict it will be so.

This is wrong. I’d love new and better things as much as anyone.

However, having studied the history of change and progress I know how many factors are involved for change of this kind to happen, and how many of those factors have nothing to do with how much better a particular new idea is. My prediction is based on what I think will happen, independent of whether I want it to happen or not.

If you strip away what you want or don’t want for a moment, your odds of seeing things clearly go up. I’m not saying I’m right about the future, only that there is a distinction in my mind between things I want to have happen and I things I think will happen. It’s a very useful distinction to be able to make.

It should be possible to:

  • Believe in something you hope doesn’t happen (e.g. death)
  • Want something even if it’s improbable (developing superpowers as you age)
  • Accept that things happen regardless of whether you believe in them or not
  • Work for something you want despite the odds (changing the world for the better)

The future of UI will be boring

Posted on in designby Scott Berkun

In an interesting post on daring fireball, Gruber rhetorically asks:

Our desktop computers human interfaces haven’t fundamentally changed since 1984  keyboard and mouse/trackpad for input, overlapping draggable resizable windows on-screen, and a hierarchical file system where you create and manage document files.

Have you ever sat back, scratched your chin, and wondered when the computer industry will break free of these current interfaces  which can be a hassle even for experts, and downright confusing (e.g. click vs. double-click) for the non-experts? Surely no one expects the computer interfaces of, say, 50 years hence to be based on these same metaphors and input methods. What’s the next step?

I believe the future of UI will be boring. Here are my counterarguments for Gruber and all who have faith that the future holds brilliant revolutions in human computer interaction. It’s a minor point in his essay, but I will happily run away with it, go much too far and beat it to death while its back is turned.

The good, but simple counterargument: the core metaphors computer interfaces are based on haven’t changed much in 300 years: text and numbers. We have wide keyboards to fit all the numbers and characters (including vestigial, emoticon fodder like ; and ^) we use when we type. This is true whether it’s Twitter or a master’s thesis or whatever it is we’ll be doing in 2150. Language is goofy. If you have goofy language you get goofy UI. When we learn to think in binary, the door for cool UI flies wide open, until then we have a large burden of old interactivity to design for.

A more sophisticated counterargument: look at other machine interfaces. Cars have had steering wheels for 100 years.  Doors around the world have had knobs for decades and probably will for our grandchildren. Your umbrella and your gym bag have handles and probably always will. Just because time passes and new alternatives surface has surprisingly little bearing on change. Your umbrella might some day have a multi-touch interface on it, or work telepathically, but in the universe of all things, radical interface changes are rare. Interfaces in general are boring. Most interfaces in the world have a low bar: they need to not suck. It’s mostly only the interface designers that think the world will be saved by improving user interfaces. Sometimes we’re right. Often we’re not. The idea of a door itself is a kind of human interface. I’m sure there is a door design group somewhere angrily ranting about the lack of progress in door design.

The fancy argument is that dominant design repels most attacks. There are lots of bad ideas that were adopted first, became dominant, and have been impossible to shake. The DVORAK vs. QWERTY keyboard debate is a canonical example. It doesn’t matter if DVORAK is actually 5x better that QWERTY, the cost of relearning is perceived to be prohibitive, so most people never have the motivation to try, and there are huge reinforcements of the status quo (e.g. people who teach typing classes). Metric system vs. English in the U.S. is another good example. A particularly retarded example of dominant design is electric plugs. Studying why the world has 50 different plugs and voltages explains much about resistance factors against innovation. Or world peace.

The scariest argument is that big change often does not happen for logical reasons. From all my studies of actual paradigm shifts for the Myths of Innovation, often big change comes from the blind side, not some sense of orderly progress. It’s when things get truly disrupted, someone goes out of business, a war starts, or perhaps an alien spaceship with working UI intact crash lands in Silicon Valley, that there is enough momentum to sweep away the old thing. To be all cliche about it, black swans are a consistent source of revolution, more common that we like to admit. It’s entirely possible the key technology that replaces GUI will not be something invented by UI Designers: it may very well come out of the left field of some other industry, brain implants or something, where they didn’t know about all of this UI stuff we’ve worried about for years, and we watch as they clumsily sweep everything we know into the dustbin.

It would likely take something like Voice Recognition, if it actually worked, which would free us from backward compatibility, no keys and no mice, small learning curve, providing enough momentum to allow big change.

This is scary because with the new wave, new bad assumptions are made (like QWERTY) that were minor at the time, but then as efficiency becomes important people (especially designers) see the oversights and the holes, but holes too late to fix. There will be some stupid set of conventions with Voice Recognition, or whatever comes next, that the next wave of designers will blame us for not catching before it was too late.

The rookie trap designers and technologists fall for is confusing cool with useful. Or cool with good. 3D user interfaces, gestures and VR or Minority report style UIs, generally suffer from what’s called gorilla arm – our bodies are simply not built to work this way. Yet these ideas get kicked around for decades are rarely show tangible usability advantages compared to conventional designs. They may have clear niche wins, and will be great for special case problems, but that’s not a revolution. There are reliable ways to study claims and shed light onto the value of these ideas, yet each generation seems to ignore them, fueled by a romantic idea of what the future should look like.

The ego trap is the obsession with the new. We get bored so easily. If things aren’t changing we worry something is wrong. But we overlook how most of the world doesn’t change quickly at all. Most technology doesn’t change much. The wiring that powers your home, the plumbing that brings you water, the roads you go to and from work on, work in mostly the same way they always have. This is OK. Lack of upgrade is not a sign of failure.

Your genetic code is hundreds of thousands of years old, and seems to be working quite well if you’re reading this. It might just be more important to consider how the tech in question will make your dreams, or someone else’s, come true. If you worry more about then ends, rather than the means, revolution in UI is less important than you suspect it is. I mean, I’m a writer. If a quill pen was good enough for Shakespeare, what do I really have to complain about?

And the kicker is: I haven’t checked recently, but I bet the huge percentage of desktop computing time is still spent reading, typing or futzing with a mouse. If I’m right, and if you’re sitting, human ergonomics dictates some limits to range of motion and form factors to reduce repetitive stress. As long as these facts are true, well designed keyboards and mice are hard to beat, and even if they aren’t, they’ll still be around for a long long time anyway.

Updates:

Book review: The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

Posted on in Booksby Scott Berkun

The purpose of a story is to be an axe that breaks up the ice within us

-Franz Kafka

I have a hard time reading fiction because often writers try way too hard to make their fiction seem real, or love their words so much they get in the way of telling the story.

I’m more of a Hemingway fan (particularly Old Man and The Sea) than, say, Updike.  I prefer Beckett to Neil Simon. I find empowerment in dark tales, because when things are really dark, it’s easier to appreciate the little blessings of light in the world. The Seventh Seal is one of my favorite movies and it’s about the plague.

And when it comes to stories I’m with Kafka. Real literature shakes me up. And although sometimes I read to be entertained, often I want an experience that will make me see the world differently when I finish, and change something in me that can not be undone.

The Road would make Kafka proud. It shook me up more than any book I’ve read this decade.

The story (A spoiler free summary): At its heart, The Road is a simple story told well. It’s about a father and son who are trying to survive in tough times, possibly the end of the world. The book never explains what happened. it could be a nuclear war, an asteroid, an act of god (if there is one in the world of the book), its unclear and this is for the better. If you were starving, struggling to find food and safety, you’d think little about history or politics too. And that’s why the book works so well. In a sense we all believe we have important things to worry about or fear today, but that sense has been so far removed from real survival we understand much less of what it is to be alive.

In all survival stories I’ve read, and I’ve read many, from Shackleton’s Endurance, to McCandless in Into The Wild, the heroes are in exceptional circumstances that are much more dangerous than the rest of the world. In The Road, it’s the opposite, the danger has come to everyone. There is no safety, and this context changes everything. The father and son leave their home in search of survival because they know their chance for survival if they stay is zero. How long would I stay and wait? How would I decide when to take to the Road and bet there is something better elsewhere?

These are not adventurers. These are people just trying to live, just like us.The power of The Road is how, through the telling of a simple and captivating story (I read it in two sittings), I couldn’t help but ask myself deep questions about my identity. How unbearable would life have to be before I killed myself? Or my child? And by contrast, how far from that unbearable line of thinking has my entire life, and the life of everyone I’ve ever known, been? And why do we seem not to notice the wonder and good fortune of this gap?

The questions: Do I believe people are inherently good or bad, and how much of my own well being would I ever, or have I ever, put at stake in faith of that belief? What can I know about my beliefs if they have never been tested? And perhaps most of all, if I were stripped away from all of the distracting trappings of modern life, the gadgets, the entertainments, what would I have left? And if I don’t have much left, how do I feel about that? The list of things I felt are too long too list here.McCarthy achieves all this with subtlety and craft. Beyond the philosophical introspections the book provoked in me, it’s a surprising, horrific, surprising, dramatic and riveting tale. It compels you to keep reading which is the highest praise I can offer any book of any kind.

He writes simply and well and lets the narrative and situations lead you to your own conclusions, which is what the masters of writing throughout history have always done.Thanks to Bryan Zug (@BryanZug) for recommending the book to me: The Road, by Cormac McCarthy.

Need a graphic designer for small project

Posted on in this siteby Scott Berkun

I have a big, chart heavy report on research I did into how people prepare to give presentations. Problem is the charts are auto-generated and ugly. I mean hit by every ugly stick imaginable ugly.

I need a designer to grab the jpegs of the charts and basically de-uglify them. Given my lame Photoshop skills, it would take me a few hours to do, but an experienced designer could probably do it in half an hour.

Update: This job was filled.

I’m happy to pay $100 for someone to do it.

You’ll also get nice exposure here on the site when I post the report.

And I have small design projects like this for the site from time to time.

If you’re interested, do this:

  • I need to see your portfolio. So have a link to it.
  • I need this done by 1/26.
  • There are about 1o or 12 simple bar charts. That’s it.
  • Send me email with 1) a link to your portfolio, and 2) your favorite flavor of ice-cream

How to create great work environments

Posted on in Creative Thinking, Management, reader's choiceby Scott Berkun

(Note: In a series of posts, now called readers choice, I’ll write about whatever people submit and vote for. If you dig this, let me know if the comments, and submit your ideas and votes).

The actual question submitted was:

How to create environments that encourage people to make mistakes and learn from them?

This is easy. It goes on every day in every decent classroom around the world.

What this question is really asking is how can the person in charge create an atmosphere where learning is rewarded.  Nearly every manager or leader talks about this, but rarely is it true.

There are four things people get wrong that makes this seem harder than it is.

  1. The person in power defines the culture through their behavior. If the bossman fires people for making a small mistake, people will hide mistakes and obsess about avoiding them, making creativity and innovation unlikely. If the bossman instead sees failures as learning moments, and takes time to teach solutions, or asks the mistake maker what they learned and how it can be avoided next time, people will feel there is room for them to learn. Many people in power are not self-aware enough to see the gap between what they say, and what they do, despite the fact people respond only to the latter. Most managers are more punitive and risk-averse than they think they are.
  2. Everyone must understand the different kinds of mistakes.  The word mistake is loaded. We’re taught to believe mistakes are bad, and people who make them are evil and horrible. But if you are asked to solve a challenging problem you won’t solve it on the first try. Or second. Or maybe even your 50th. Your first few attempts will naturally fail. This is a kind of mistake, or failure, but a necessary one, and one no customer will see. This is useful failure. It represents an opportunity to learn, or eliminate a reasonable possibility others would eventually try. The person in power has to communicate the difference between interesting or necessary mistakes, and useless ones, and their responses have to be appropriate (See How to learn from your mistakes).
  3. The person in power has to care about employees long term. If I expect to manage you for 30 years, I want you to learn. I want you to grow. I want you to be as potent as possible in the long run, and I’d be willing to make short term sacrifices to make that possible (Paying for training, for books, coaching you, pushing to get you interesting assignments with the VP, etc.) If I don’t expect you to work for me for long, or see zero potential for you, then I’d never be willing to make that sacrifice. I’d always think you were already at 100% of what you are capable of, and have ZERO new to learn. Part of what defines the culture around a leader is their answer to this question: how good do I think the people I manage can possibly be? And how much do I care about getting them there? If they behave with long term care, odds go up everyone will teach, and care for, each other as well.
  4. Everyone needs proper expectations. An easy question I ask as a consultant, when people tell me of a problem they’ve having with someone at work, is this: Have you talked to them about it? 60-70% of the time they say no. If you feel your boss doesn’t let you learn from your mistakes, it’s up to you to ask for more space, making the argument you’ll be more productive/smarter/creative or whatever he wants from you if he treats you differently. And promise to prove it. Perhaps you can negotiate for only certain tasks to be freer than others. But if you never give the feedback, or never explicitly state what you want, odds are slim you’ll ever get it. If your manager is unwilling to ever give you what you want, then accept it or move on.

If nothing else, remember back to the best learning experiences you had, in school or in work. What were those environments like, and what did the teachers or bosses do that others didn’t? Leave it the comments – I’d like to learn about them :)

Also see:

On God, Integrity and Sports

Posted on in ethics, Philosophyby Scott Berkun

When I was a kid I watched my NY Giants, hold on to a short lead late in Superbowl XXV in 1991. They were up by 1 point, and with 8 seconds left the Bills had a chance to win the game by kicking a field goal. It’s awful to have your fate, or your team’s, clearly in the hands of your competitor. Those long waiting moments were stressful, but something made it much worse.

In the seconds before the Bills kicked the ball, the TV showed the Giants sidelines. A circle of players huddled together in prayer. Praying for what? I wondered. For the kicker to miss? Yes, indeed. At the time, I found this troubling. What kind of god would honor a prayer not only as selfish as this, but clearly at the expense of someone else?

To be hated forever for losing a game (e.g. Bill Buckner) which the kicker would be if he missed, is much worse than anything the Giant’s would feel, watching from the sidelines, as he kicked in the winning points and sealed their fate. And I wondered while waiting for the kick, what would happen if a similar number of equally faithful Bill’s players were praying just as piously on the other side of the field. Can you out pray someone? Is that really how prayer works? Or how an intelligent, attentive, loving god would make decisions about our fates? By counting prayers? And wouldn’t you have to consider, if this is prayer warfare, about what the other team’s prayer strategy was before kneeling down to pray for yours? A drop of logic makes all of this fade away into foolishness, as the machinery by which these specific acts effects life defies any reasonable person’s imagination.

As it turned out, Norwood, the Bill’s kicker, missed the kick. And as predicted, despite a great career he is best known for one kick that he missed. My Giants won the Superbowl. I was happy, for sure, but as much as I’d wanted this outcome all season, I felt there was something wrong. A win is not quite the same as the other team losing. Sometimes I’d rather have a solid loss than a rotten tasting win. But I’m weird – and Giant’s fans everywhere may disown me (watch this video of the missed kick to see what I mean). This game makes highlight reels as an amazing game, but it’s not for me. I put myself in the kicker’s shoes ever time. I don’t have a major problem with the idea of God, or some kinds of faith in God. I have an open mind and am open to many different kinds of ideas. But I do have a problem where the name of God is used to justify behavior that runs against ordinary natural human integrity.

Take for instance, the Golden Rule. I like the Golden Rule. It’s a core idea in nearly every religion, nation, culture or tribe, and I see it as a kind of integrity and basic ethics. I will treat others in the same way I wish to be treated (or as they wish to be treated). Many of the ten commandments and similiar moral codes in other cultures are specific implementations of the core theme of the Golden Rule. But to pray for victory, without considering that the people on the other side might also be fans of your flavor of god, or even if not fans of your flavor they are still people worthy of your respect, can not be a high integrity act. No one would want a competitor with God’s ear to ask for their failure. The whole idea makes God a possession – MY GOD. A god who is listening to help me and my needs. Rather than shared, OUR GOD. A god that has the collective interest of all life, or human life, in mind.

I know from history when anyone starts claiming sole dominion over spiritual territory and believes in VIP access to the deities the only place it’s sure to send us all is straight to hell (metaphoric or literal depending on what you believe). The only high integrity prayer, or act, I can imagine is to hope that the team that plays best, wins. To wish that everyone plays well. And that no one gets hurt. And like the Klingons and their wish for a noble death that in the end everyone can walk off the field proud that they played well, and hard, and gave it their best. That even if they lost they feel there’s nothing else they could have done – there is nobility in that. That to me, as a competitor, is the most noble outcome of all: everyone played well and was at their best.

A part of me would rather play well and lose, than embarrass myself with incompetence, and win anyway. To put the game winning shot in the hands of your opponent is, strictly speaking, a failure on it’s own. I have similiar questions of integrity when I see an athlete or award winning star point up the sky when they win, or score a touchdown. What exactly is this intended to mean? I’m a big fan of humility, and giving thanks to people, life, the universe at large, or anything really, but it’s not clear at all to me this is what’s happening. Would they point to the sky if they lost? Isn’t god, or whatever they’re pointing to, up there in all cases, regardless of the outcome? If they catch a winning touchdown pass, shouldn’t they point at least a little bit to the guy who threw them the ball? Or the coach who put them on the field? It seems a better demonstration of devotion, or faith, or humility, is what you do when there is no spotlight on you.

Or, as is often in life, you are not the center of attention for a big reward, and instead are in the muck with the rest of us, with plenty around you worth complaining and feeling disappointed about. What do you choose to do then? Who do you point to and what does that pointing mean? Or more precisely, how generous and humble are you in your treatment of others in and below your station then? It’s out of the spotlights and the glory where the real essence of people, whether you call it their spirit, soul or integrity, is found, and that’s the only place worth looking for it. When I’m able to remember this I can find heroes and saints worthy of emulation without needing someone else to point them out for me, or draw attention to themselves by pointing up to the sky.

Related:

When visualizations go wrong, part 2

Posted on in design, usabilityby Scott Berkun

Here’s part 2 of my continuing series of visualizations gone wrong (part 1 was about a viz on web browser market share).

The idea of metaphor is a good one. It’s one of the oldest communication tools we have. It’s clever and wise to use something people understand to help explain something they don’t.

There’s even a good argument to be made that much of all learning is done through some kind of metaphor.

But using any metaphor at all, or a well known one from a context that is unknown or feared in another, doesn’t help. It’s bad news all around if you choose an obscure, complex unfondly remembered one such as the Periodic table, as these folks did.

They replaced the elements with, ironically enough, visualization methods.

The Perioidic table itself is just plain weird. Is it any wonder so few people understand, or care to understand, chemistry? I’ve had people explain to me why it’s organized the way it is, and there is a logic to it, but it must be one of the least visually elegant and hardest to learn or memorize tables I know of.

The fact that this thing was made, or at least promoted, by a site called Visual Literacy challenges the limits of oxymorons.

And if that weren’t enough, there’s more. Mouse over any of the elements and you get the visual wonderment that is the unexpected pop-up window:

One of the fundamental questions of all visualizations is this: How is this better than a flat, two or three column alphabetical list?

It’s surprisingly rare that in any expected kind of usage any visualization performs better on any task, from ease of discovery, to ease of use, to retention, that a flat alphabetical list.

In this case, a list of all methods, with a description and a picture, all appearing in the same table, on the same page, requiring no magic mouse-overs or comprehension of high school chemistry would be a big and easy win.

Of course, some people have tried to make improved versions of the periodic table, but going circular, as we talked about last time, has its problems.

Also see this version designed for kids (PDF) – has some advantages over the others.

Live chat at UW, next Friday 12pm PST

Posted on in On Tourby Scott Berkun

My friend Kathy Gill, who hosts a regular live web show at the University of Washington Digital Media department, is having me on next Friday at 12pm PST. Here are the details:

Emerging with Scott Berkun

Friday, January 15, 2010 at 12:00 PM, PST

In the third installment of our Emerging series, MCDM’s own Kathy Gill will talk with Scott Berkun about technology and public speaking, the challenges of Twitter for speakers, and how clear thinking and communication is at the heart of today’s economy.

Scott Berkun is the best selling author of The Myths of Innovation and Making Things Happen. He worked at Microsoft from 1994 to 2003 in the early days of the web; his work as a full time writer and speaker have appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Wired Magazine, Fast Company, Forbes Magazine, The Wall Street Journal and other media. He taught a course in creative thinking for the MCDM and has been a regular commentator on CNBC, MSNBC and National Public Radio.

To watch:

Why do big companies suck?

Posted on in Management, reader's choiceby Scott Berkun

Many small companies aren’t that good and medium ones too.  The real question then is why, if at all, do big companies suck more than smaller ones. I’m not sure they do, certainly not when I put my selfish consumer hat on. I own a Honda Civic, an Apple iPod and a Black & Decker cordless drill, three good products made by three very large corporations. These products are relatively cheap, well made, and part of what I’m buying is faith the company will be around in five years if I need repairs or support for these things. A smaller company probably couldn’t provide low cost, high quality, products and promise they’d be around in the future.

And when I fly I’m glad my airplane is made by Boeing or Airbus, and not some local startup company run by people working from their garage. But there are some things that tend to happen when companies get big that are problematic for independent, creative people – and that’s what I’ll explore in the list below. Why big companies suck:

  1. The soul has left the building – All big companies start as small companies. But by the time a company has 500, 1000 or 50,000 employees, many of the people who made the small company successful have left and their spirit went with them. You can have a financially successful company that is mostly banking on the ideas and successes of people who left years ago, but whose middle-managers take credit for what was mostly inherited the day they were hired. When things go bad, none of the ‘leadership’ has any of the tools required to fix, rebuild, or recreate the pattern of success that started it all.
  2. Obsessive Optimization – When you have 5,000 employees, or $500 million in revenue, fractions become significant. A .5%  increase in revenue is not a small thing, it’s a big thing. It can be bigger than many companies’ entire revenue. And as companies age the culture looks to optimize and refine, eventually to a point where the good things that led to all the success have been whittled away. Managers at big companies often have more incentives to minimize costs, than to find new business or develop new ideas since minimize costs or optimizing an existing process are cheaper wins that show results in the short term. In an optimization centric culture, the myopic love of short term wins can make long term improvements which often require short term sacrifices hard to achieve.
  3. Addicted to bureaucracy –  I travel often and visit with companies of many sizes. It’s fascinating to visit places where there are 20 people doing work I know is done by 3 or 4 at one of their competitors, often with better results. It’s strange to see smart, senior people who have forgotten it’s possible in this universe to make things happen without talking to a committee, filling out forms, or doing extensive market research. The bigger a company gets the more dependencies there are between decisions, which makes it natural for committees and approvals to grow in number.  But it’s easier to add processes than to remove them. Over time bigger companies accumulate process, it gets inherited, and no one can even imagine a simpler more autonomous workforce. Big companies should have dedicated process simplifiers, senior people who just run around, point our areas that can be leaner or simpler, or where line level employees should be more autonomous, to keep this tendency in check. Or once a year every manager should be forced to work on a small project (like a website), where 3 to 5 people are responsible for everything. It’d refresh their sense of how little process is actually necessary.
  4. They believe their own bullshit – Any large group of people functions because of shared beliefs, but their are both positive and negative kinds of belief. The negative kinds are the ones that involve lies, distortions of truth, and a lack of perspective.  Company all-hands meetings can feel like political rallies, where  a reality distortion field prevents any valid questions of the company from being mentioned, and all bad news or mistakes are whitewashed away. When you’re banned from using competitors products, even when they’re better, or not allowed to critique and criticize decisions even when they’re dumb and bad, it gets harder and harder for good ideas to rise because real thinking is prevented. When the party line is BS, the wise start to keep their mouth shut, and look for other jobs.
  5. The Peter Principle – When you have several layers of management it’s entirely possible the manager isn’t contributing much, and the line level employees are mostly self-sustaining. If a manager inherits a successful team, a team self motivated to improve, and it does under his management, he may very well be promoted for simply being around at the right time.  There are many bad reasons people get promoted, and it’s more likely to happen in bigger companies, where there is more ambiguity about who is contributing what.
  6. It’s hard to fire people – Big companies get sued more often because they have more money. And on the day a small company gets it’s first law suit for wrongful termination, or discrimination, everyone runs the numbers and concludes it’s cheaper, on paper, to prolong the process for firing people and increase the amount of paperwork about employees managers must create, than it is to lose lawsuits.  Performance evaluations, mid-year reviews, and all of that are heavily (but of course not entirely) motivated by lawsuit prevention and defense.
  7. Corporations can be psychopaths – In 1886 the U.S. Surpreme court ruled that corporations were entitled to the same protections as people. This was a big deal. It made it possible for executives to make decisions on behalf of a corporation that were illegal, or ethically questionable, without being directly liable for them, and gave constitutional rights to entities that were not people.  Combined with the motive for profit, there are lines big corporations are lead to cross that no indivudal ever would, since the entity of the corporation is held responsible, and not necessarily the individual leaders.
  8. Status quo / Follower mentality – The bigger a company gets, the more it’s main attractive power for new employees is job security, rather than opportunity to grow, learn or take risks. The Innovator’s dilemma is real, and leaders who have big sucess are often the last to recognize when it’s time to move on. For anyone interested in progress, risk taking, change or growth potential, a large company is incredibly frustrating, as the dominant psychology is one of play it safe and political correctness. A running joke at Microsoft used to be that the best way to get a product idea to ship at Microsoft was to have a competitor do it first.

The list can go on I’m sure (but there could also be an equivalent list of why big companies are great to work for). What did I miss on this list? Leave a comment.

What should I write about? You decide!

Posted on in this site, Writing Wellby Scott Berkun

If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been writing about a wider and wider range of things. This is no accident. My ambitions with books and the blog are wide. I’ll always be writing about pm, design and innovation things, but will always be writing about wider things too.

But I’ve failed to involve you guys in the process as much as I’d like, which I’m fixing now.

I put together a list of old requests from blog comments and emails, and found a little tool called slinkset that lets anyone vote, and submit new topics.

My promise: I’ll grab a topic every week and write about it. Anything goes. Whatever, and I mean whatever, makes it to the top of the list, I’ll write about on the blog.

Here’s what to do:

  1. View and vote on the list here (click on the up arrow to vote)
  2. or add your own topics.

It’s that easy. No registration required.

If you guys use it, I’ll find a way to integrate something like this into scottberkun.com (perhaps there’s a WordPress plugin that approximates slinkset).

Give it a spin – let me know what you think.

The Secret About Innovation Secrets

Posted on in Innovationby Scott Berkun

The word secret runs rampant not only in business magazines, but also in self-help books. To our general disappointment, often the tips and advice described aren’t secrets, and never were, as no one, not even the people mentioned in the articles, ever really tried to keep these facts ‘secret’ from anyone.

The word secret makes the boring sound fun. Doing laundry isn’t something most people look forward to, but secret laundry almost sounds interesting. The word secret promises short-cuts, tricks, or things people don’t want us to know, which all connote ways to get one up on others. This little semantic trick works on the insecure and the inexperienced, since they’re prone to believing there is just one insight that will solve all their problems.

After going around the block a few times, we’re all disappointed to learn that secret sauces are rarely all that secret. As a kid, I remember being amazed by honey/mustard as sauce at McDonald’s – I somehow never realized I could make the same thing in 12 seconds in any American kitchen. Certainly McDonald’s would be the last to inform me I was already in possession of honey mustard sauce in my very own home.

Innovation has similiar (ab)use, as sticking it on front of things can bring new life to the ultra-dull. I once saw a laundromat with a neon sign that said Innovative dry-cleaning, but I couldn’t figure out what the innovation was, as they couldn’t get a small tomato sauce stain out of my shirt pocket.

It should be no surprise these days that the two words, secret and innovation, often appear together. They make quite a pair.

In this recent article on CNN, called learn the 5 secrets of Innovation, we hear this yarn:

One of the men behind the study, Insead’s Hal Gregersen, told CNN, “What the innovators have in common is that they can put together ideas and information in unique combinations that nobody else has quite put together before.”

Ok. So you have to be unique and special, or have unique and special ideas. I don’ t agree, but it turns out neither does Gregersen, as a paragraph later he’s quoted as saying:

“The way they act is to observe actively, like an anthropologist, and they talk to incredibly diverse people with different world views, who can challenge their assumptions,” Gregersen told CNN.

Anthropology has been a field of study for over 100 years. And was practiced long before it was ever called anthropology. Hard to call that a secret. For the sake of argument, before calling anything about innovation or invention NEW, it’s worth taking a quick pass at the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution to see if they did similiar things then. Much of what we get so excited about today (e.g. progress/invention/business), has been done many times, and often better in some respect, before.

To be fair, I highly doubt Gregersen asked CNN to put the word secret in the article – he’s just the expert they’re quoting and he’s along for their ride. And he does offer some excellent advice – hard work:

To improve your questioning skills, Gregersen recommends identifying a problem and writing nothing but questions about it for 10 minutes a day for 30 days. He says that over that period the questions will change, and so will your understanding and approach to the problem.

This is good advice. But it’s advice few want to hear. What he describes is work. At least it looks and smells like work. The work is called thinking, which is very rarely mentioned in lists of secrets. People who think harder about a problem, and work at it longer, are more likely to be successful. End of story.

Over at Harvard Business the same study is examined again, and Gregersen offers more solid advice:

You might summarize all of the skills we’ve noted in one word: “inquisitiveness.” I spent 20 years studying great global leaders, and that was the big common denominator. It’s the same kind of inquisitiveness you see in small children.

Small children get mentioned often in business articles about creativity, yet somehow the Fortune 500 hasn’t sponsored any kindergarden meet and greets just yet.

In part that’s because the most misleading thing in much research on “how to innovate”, and certainly in much business writing about such research, is the focus on creativity as the bottleneck. Inquisitiveness, sparks of insight, and creative talent is the focus of much writing on innovation, and it’s far from the whole story. The point about children, and any good book on creative thinking, is that ideas are cheap. It’s finding successful people who are willing to bet on different ideas, and people with ideas who are willing to do the legwork to convince others of the merits of something that doesn’t exist yet (and prevent them from killing their ideas), that’s the challenge.

If there’s any secret to be derived from Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, or any of the dozens of people who often have the name innovator next to their names, is the diversity of talents they had to posses, or acquire, to overcome the wide range of challenges in converting their ideas into successful businesses.

The big ideas were just part of the story, and arguably a small part. Kindle was not the first digital book reader. The i-pod and i-phone where not the first music players or cellular phones. Google was far from being the first search engine that sold ads. Amazon was not the first on-line bookstore. The ideas, at least the big ideas involved, were not new or original, at least not in high level concept. The story of all these companies and ideas has more to do with how they elevated and improved upon what already existed, or took it in new, simpler, smarter, more useful, more profitable directions.

This story is much less sexy. It’s not as dramatic and nowhere near as romantic. But I’m convinced it’s way more accurate and more useful to people who want to do interesting things with their own lives.

Most important, the story of moving an idea into a product, and then into a successful business (the definition of innovation suggested by these CNN and HBD’s articles) involves these progressions of challenges:

  • Studying a field / business
  • Finding opportunities to attack
  • Developing rough ideas
  • Successfully pitching the ideas to others (to investors, to customers, to partners)
  • Making smart contracts and business relationships
  • Developing the ideas into a prototype
  • Developing the prototype into a high quality product (can take years)
  • Marketing the product successfully to customers
  • Abandoning most of your free time and sanity to pursue your vision
  • Hiring good people and convincing them to stay
  • Convincing those people their vision matches yours (or bending your vision to include theirs)
  • Balancing short term tactics with long term strategy
  • Getting lucky – your competitors do stupid things
  • (note: A similiar list appears in The Myths of Innovation, Chapter 3)

And the list goes on. How many of these challenges are overcome primarily by inquisitiveness? Or creativity? Not many. Good thinking is required all along, but no special creativity technique or magic insight is a key link in the chain. The role of ideas and creative thinking in innovation is always overstated because the other stuff is hard to romanticize, hard to sell and hard to get ordinary people excited about.

To be an entrepreneur, an inventor, a researcher or even an artist, is to take a bet that you can overcome a hundred different kinds of challenges that no person could ever entirely prepare for. It’s to realize, or simply pretend to ignore, that you will face challenges that slice across a dozen fields of study and degrees, in the same way that life and the universe does.

The closest thing to a real secret is this: In my years studying and teaching all things innovation, there’s one fact that’s the hardest for people to swallow and it goes as follows – To invent or create is to take a bet against the unknown. No matter what you do, you are still betting you can do well in the face of many things that are out of your control. Don’t like that? Don’t want uncertainty? Then do something else. Comfort with risk and uncertainty is the real secret. Or at least acceptance of the fact you can work your ass off for uncertain rewards. Anyone who wants to create something new is placing a bet that their view of the future is better than everyone elses’, or at least their competitors. It’s no surprise many of the elite CEOs/Innovators/Inventors have supremely large egos – they likely had these character traits well before they became famous.

The study I want to see is to compare 20 smart inventors/entrepreneurs who failed, with 20 who succeeded, and see if a researcher can find any identifiable traits or tactics that distinguish them. My suspicion is that the difference between them will be very narrow. Just as the differences between the top 10 athletes in any sport in the world, and the top 50, are thin indeed. Once you get beyond strong basic competence, it’s small factors that make a difference. And when it comes to the history of business innovation, the factors are often very small, and often beyond the control of the players involved, facts CEOs and business writers rarely profit from admitting.

Best things of 2009

Posted on in Booksby Scott Berkun

Went through my list of stuff acquired this year. Turns out I read a lot of books.

Here’s the best (purchasable) things I found in 2009:

Thoughtless acts, by Jane Fulton Suri – This is a great book for any design, or creative thinkers out there. Published in 2005, I read it back then, put it a stack of books, and only rediscovered it this year. It’s a collection of photos of objects redesigned by ordinary people to serve purposes beyond what the designer expected. (Nice article with many photo examples here)

Brain Rules – I’ve read many of the ‘neuroscience for general audience’ books out there, and this is hands down the strongest, best written, most applicable and best supported of the bunch. This book was a strong influence on Confessions, as the book emphasizes learning, improving brain function, and how our bodies and brains work best in harmony with each other, all points made in various ways in Confessions.

LogicComix – I have a degree in Logic, which is practically worthless, but studying logic had all sorts of hugely important side effects, including discovering the work of Bertrand Russell, who is likely my favorite philosopher of all time. This unusual telling of his life story in comic book form sounds like a bizzare idea for a book, and it is, but it makes for a surprsingly entertaining and moving read.

The Book of Genesis by Crumb – R. Crumb is a legend of comics, known for his odd and disturbing images. Who better than to take a crack at the bible? He illustrates the entire book of Genesis in all its strange and odd glory.

Everything is a project (even this post)

Posted on in Making things happen, Managementby Scott Berkun

When I meet people at a party and they ask what I do, I tell them I write books. They ask what kind of books, and when I mention I wrote a book about project management they often roll their eyes, half joking, and say with a smile why would you write a book about something as boring as project management?

To which, I answer. Everything is a project.

And they say, what?

And I say, again, Everything is a project.

How did you get to this party? I ask. Well, that’s a project. How did you plan and deliver the last party you threw for others? That was a project too. The making of your home, the delivery of electricity and water to it, and the earning of wages to pay for all these things are all various forms of projects, or consist of activities roughly comparable to any definition of a project.

Then I say the kicker, project management is only as boring as the thing being managed.

On a good day, they  look at me for a long moment, their faces frozen with that lost in thought look we all make when someone surprises us with something interesting to say. And then they say “Huh”, in a way that implies their brain is doing actual thinking. To fill the void, I often ask where they are from, or if they’re having fun, successfully completing the project of changing the conversation with a stranger at a party. Often they decide to return to talk of projects, proving  it’s possible to make it not so boring after all.

On a bad day, they conclude I’m  more boring than they thought, and despite their full Martini in hand, excuse themselves to the bar to get a drink.

I wrote earlier about why project managers get no respect, and that’s because people who make a big deal out of the project-manageryness of their work, as opposed to the domain of the things they make (homes, software, films, cookies) come off as a kind of weenie, a pm-weenie if you will. They appear to be people who are more interested in schedules, budgets and methods than the results those tools help achieve, which is kind of weird. It’s like the director of a bad movie who talks only about his fancy zoom lenses, or that the film came in under budget. They miss the point.

But the best project managers, including those people who do lead or manage things yet never use the pm title, somehow know instinctively that everything is a project. They know there needs to be a driving force of thinking, a constant source of social energy, a list or a table or a spreadsheet, that makes it easier for everyone to push their own small decisions forward, increasing the odds with every single effort that the results will be good. Good project managers aren’t even necessarily very organized, they know many ways to drive people forward and hold them to commitments, even without a GTD brain implant.

There are many ways to look at all that we do, but the project-centric view is potent. Everything in work, and many things in life, has a goal, a set of constraints, some design challenges, a schedule, a few dependencies, some key relationships, etc. And it’s hard to be good at managing, leading, teaching, creating, making or building just about anything if you have absolutely zero skills at project management. To me, anyone who is a writer, a VP, a salesman, a film-maker, a teacher or an athlete does project management of a sort nearly all the time.

When I get stuck, at work or in personal life matters, or I see someone else who is blocked, I say, out loud, everything is a project. If I’m blocked, what are my goals? What are my assets? What are my liabilities? How can I divide this big thing I’m stuck on into smaller pieces, one of which I might be able to tackle? And sometimes just realizing there is a simple easy way to re-frame anything into the form of a project is enough to get things moving again.