Author: Scott Berkun

The Netflix Inc. guide to culture (Analysis)

Posted on in Innovation, Managementby Scott Berkun

Making the rounds this week is this slidedeck apparently put together by Netflix upper management about their culture. There is no reference or name, so can’t be sure it’s real, but I doubt someone would go through the trouble to create a 128 slide fake Netflix deck.

There’s plenty of good, some bad, and some downright weird.   Of course I have no idea what someone might say over these slides, or how much of this is actually practiced, but here goes.

The most important thing, as you’ll see, is Netflix has 414 employees 2000+ employees.  Some of the philosophies they advocate are not uncommon for highly successful tech start-up companies. When Microsoft or Google had 500 or 1000 employees some of these principles were at work – perhaps not by executive decree, but they do happen and are workable, perhaps preferable when you’re still a small corporation.

The goal of “few big products vs. many small ones” (Slide 25) is natural when you are a small company, with one or two profit streams that haven’t maxed out their growth potential. Things change when growth slows. But that is not Netflix’s problem yet.

Many of these concepts are much harder to apply at 1000, 5000 or 10,000 people.  But that’s not Netflix’s problem. At least not now.

The good:

  • They makes fun of similiar corp culture slide-decks (Slides 5 to 8). Many corporations have manuals and slidedecks like this one, but they serve the purpose of codifying the fantasy view of the company the HR department and executives want to pretend is real – Netflix makes fun of this by showing Enron’s value statements. Platitudes are cheap. But I have to ding them as their list of core values is pretty close to what I’ve seen at a dozen or so different companies (Courage, passion, judgment, etc.)
  • You are your rewards. They rightfully point out that instead of of what you say, your culture is what you do. “the real company values… are shown by who gets rewarded, promoted, or let go.” Rock on.
  • Effectiveness matters more than Effort (Slide 33).  This is gold, but hard in practice since effort (e.g. hours worked, who stays late) is much easier  to measure than effectiveness.
  • Increase freedom as we grow (Slides 39-52). This is the most interesting part of the deck, as they describe a variant of the innovator’s dilemma as it effects culture and how they intend to avoid the traps of growth and success. Their answer is to increase talent density faster than complexity, which is nice. The problem is, even if you sucessfully fire the less talented people, the talented people you keep, who often have egos to match their talents, protect their previous work as much as untalented people do.  As years go by they defend their old ideas.
  • Good processes vs. Bad processes (Slide 61)- This is solid. They offer that any process or rule should help talented people work faster. Bad processes protect and limit people’s behavior to prevent things from happening, often things that have low recovery costs (Approval chains, forms, endless interview loops, etc.).
  • No vacation or expense tracking (Slides 65 to 72). When I worked at Microsoft most of my managers practiced vague vacation tracking. They didn’t care what I put into the HR tool, as long as all my work kicked ass, and I negotiated time off with them. It worked perfectly and I practiced the same thing myself as a manager. Netflix apparently doesn’t bother with the pretense of the tool. It’s 100% up to your manager. The risk becomes, like at Microsoft, people who don’t take enough of their vacation to life healthy, happy, long lives.
  • They practice the Lefferts law (If you manage, it’s your fault).  They believe managers set context, and if a talented employee failed the manager failed to set the right context. People who can set the right context for plans, situations and decisions are more valuable than people who can only work (Slides 77-84).

The interesting or weird:

  • They pay top of market for all full time employees (Slides 93-107). Since they depend on high talent density, they expect to pay above market rates for employees. They assume this will retain talent as leaving the company guarantees a pay decrease. They also focus on salary and not other benefits, believing their employees should choose how to use their “income”.  No bonuses. No granted stock options. And they do not believe in tying pay to company performance.  I’ve honestly never heard of this before. I can’t see why you wouldn’t tie company performance in some way to rewards, especially for a small company, but I need to think more about this.
  • Highly aligned / Loosely coupled org. (Slides 85-91). This is the weakest part of the slide deck – very heavy in management consulting jargon (ad-hoc, cross-functional, blah blah).  They seem to say you set the right strategy and get buy in and don’t worry much about the rest.  They run with the motto “Big and Fast and Flexible” which doesn’t mean very much. I’ve yet to see a company say they’re trying to be “Big and slow and rigid”, but many are.

The bad:

  • The keeper test (slide 28).  They suggest managers ask “which of my people, if they told me they were leaving, would I fight hardest to keep at Netflix.” They suggest firing the rest with a nice severance package. Whoa. There’s a local factor involved here: your second best person might be much better than another manager’s best person. There’s also the all-star team effect, where you might need people with different talents, or a mix of talents, to make the team function. Zappos pay to quit approach makes more sense as it rewards unhappy people for leaving, regardless of talent.
  • My force powers sense a cuthroat vibe. It’s reading between thin lines, but there isn’t any real mention of teamwork, collaboration or even pride.  My biggest gripe about my Microsoft years was how the reward system paid no respect to teams. No overt rewards for people who learned to work well together as a unit. And since everyone knew reviews were done on curves there was often negative competitive energy. You end up with the NY Yankees, rather than the Boston Red Sox. This deck is a masculine, tech, analytical view of culture and I suspect there are things in their culture that they want to keep that are not well reflected in this deck.  Perhaps it’s just the sting of a CEO/VP being totally honest, with no HR filtering or fluff, but there was definitely something missing for me.

Have you seen any of above in practice before? Or would want to try if you were CEO?

Help me find photos for the new book

Posted on in Booksby Scott Berkun

The new book, Confessions of a public speaker, is wrapping up and one of the fun challenges remaining is figuring out what images to use for chapter openers.

It’s a fun, but slow, task and I figured I’d see what would happen if I opened this up. Can you crowdsource curation? Lets find out.

Chapter openers are the photos that help introduce each chapter or section of the book. Here is an example from The Myths of Innovation:

For the new book, the openers either need to be riffs vaguely related to public speaking, or something that plays off, or against, the chapter title.

It could be a teacher in front of a class. Or a guided tour of an art museum in progress. Maybe a great photo of a microphone, a lectern or an unusual lecture hall. It could be unexpected venues or places for lectures  like this photo below (taken by Steve Rhodes):

The tentative chapter titles for Confessions of a Public Speaker are:

  • Chapter 1 – I can’t see you naked
  • Chapter 2 – Attack of the Butterflies
  • Chapter 3 – The wonders of $30,000 an hour
  • Chapter 4 – How to work a tough room
  • Chapter 5 – Don’t eat the microphone
  • Chapter 6 – The science of not boring people
  • Chapter 7 – Lessons from my 15 minutes of fame
  • Chapter 8 – Things people say
  • Chapter 9 – The clutch is your friend
  • Chapter 10 – Confessions of a public speaker

How you can help:

  • Spend some time searching flickr or other photography sites.
  • If you’re a photographer, check your library to see what might fit the bill
  • If you’re a bored photographer, get out there and take some photos for me
  • Other themes that can work include: stage-fright, making mistakes, tough rooms, people sleeping in class, spotlights, learning and teaching.

I can’t offer to pay for photographs, but I can promise to give a copy of the book to anyone who finds a photo I end up using, as well as to the photographer who took it. And of course the photo will be credited it the book.

If you find candidates, leave them in the comments, preferably inline (set width to be <400).

Let the experiment begin!

Crap detection 101 and social media

Posted on in Philosophy, Web 2.0 / social softwareby Scott Berkun

Howard Rheingold wrote an interesting essay called Crap Detection 101, which provides both commentary on how to separate fact from fiction on the web as well as some practical advice. He wrote:

I got good strategy advice from John McManus, author of “Detecting Bull: How to Identify Bias and Junk Journalism in Print, Broadcast and on the Wild Web”, who told me “you have think like a detective.” Think of tools like search engines, the productivity index, hoax debunking sites like Snopes.com, and others I will mention later as forensic instruments, like Sherlock Holmes’ magnifying glass or the crime scene investigator’s fingerprint kit.

It’s a good essay and it made me realize one thing: the problem of how lazy we are. Most people know they should ask more questions, and take more time to verify sources, but that takes effort. And that effort, if spent well and results in the discovery of a unreliable source, it costs double. We’ve lost not only the time verifying something, but also the time spend finding that now unreliable source, and the kicker is you still don’t have a fact you can use.  Fact checking is a double-whammy against seeming productive to others. We have natural reasons to not want to check that source, even though we know we should. Part of us doesn’t want to know.

When people find a fact that supports their argument, regardless of where it comes from, its incredibly tempting to grab it and run, assuming whoever reads what you write, or listens to what you say, will be as lazy as you were. You can bluff your way into credibility because there’s no one depending on what you say enough to openly challenge what you’re saying.  Often online when people think you are full of shit, they’ll just click away. You have to care to take the time to challenge someone’s facts or sources. And even when people do criticize, they’re in such a rush to prove you wrong for something, it’s common to be criticized for things you didn’t actually say, or with claims that are not supported, sparking a dozen ratholes that have no possibility of convincing anyone of anything. Communication speed makes the downward spiral of miscommunication spin much faster.

I’ve written my own take on detecting bullshit, but the thing I don’t know how to tackle is what to do when our innate desire for efficiency works against us. Being  “productive” online in writing blog posts or frequent tweets, demands spending little time verifying anything, much less seeking out evidence for the opposing view and vetting them against each other in what old school folks used to called thinking. If there is anything I want to promote it’s thinking. Honest, open, generous amounts of critical thinking where people are just as willing to admit when they are wrong as they are to prove they are right.

My gripes about social media, and the future of technology in general, comes around to how we’re increasingly rewarded for volume online, or believe we will be rewarded for volume, rather than quality. Which is strange given how successful the web has been at making volume of information moot. We have more to read, watch and listen to than we can consume in a thousand lifetimes. Volume isn’t the problem. It’s the search for quality and the shortage of critical thinking that we need to solve and this includes the promotion of the kinds of questions Rheingold suggests everyone asks of things they read online.

Critical thinking will always require effort  – and if we’re overwhelmed and stressed by too much information, or feel we’re falling behind and running out of time, the feedback loop works against slowing down to ask good questions. That stress fuels making assumptions and jumping to misguided conclusions.

How do we fix this? Or is it even a problem at all? Let me know what you think.

How to design a conference – Interview with GEL host Mark Hurst

Posted on in conferencesby Scott Berkun

I’ve run a few events myself and a challenge many attendees never think about is how to arrange the day. When are the breaks? What order should the speakers go in? What topics should get the morning vs. the afternoon? There is a curation-like design challenge in figuring out how to make a great day.

One of my favorite conferences is Gel – Good Experience Live (it’s the place that let me run my NYC Sacred architecture tour), and I asked the organizer Mark Hurst his thoughts on doing this well.

SB: Speakers are the core of most conferences, yet the lectures and lecturers have earned a reputation for being boring. Gel has consistently had very high quality speakers. How you think your approach is different than other events?

MH: Invite your heroes. I learned that from Richard Saul Wurman, founder of TED, who originated the phrase.

That means, invite people who you are personally, genuinely interested in. Forget any other consideration and focus on: would YOU want to hear from them, if you were an audience member?

I’m not sure how this compares with other conferences – I can’t speak for them – but I’ll leave it to you to imagine the other not-so-good reasons why events might have people speak… rather than inviting them because they’re good for the attendees.

SB. Is there any coaching or training you do for your speakers? Do you think this is a meaningful practice for conference organizers to consider?

I run speakers in a 20-minute time slot, so there’s often some coaching around getting the message across in that short timeframe.  One thing I often say is to go light on, or skip over, all the normal introductory stuff, and just get right to the good stuff. In other words, start strong. And then try to tell a story, while still making the larger points. It’s a tricky balance.

Most conferences use 45,60 or even 90 minute sessions, yet yours are shorter, often 20 minutes. How do you decide the length, format and order of speakers for each Gel?

The length is easy – 20 minutes is the standard slot. Format is easy – the day is comprised of four groups of four, usually with a few shorter “special appearances” sprinkled inside.

The order of the speakers is the challenge – and that’s hard to describe, as it’s more of an art than a science. It’s a puzzle with lots of dimensions. You have to consider developing the theme of the day, and (possibly) a sub-theme for each individual session, and the blend and flow of the energy that each presentation is likely to transmit to the audience, and the timing of catering (coffee breaks and lunch), *and* occasionally there are constraints due to a speaker’s schedule. And it’s really tough to put the puzzle together unless you have the speaker list completely finalized… so I generally have to do this late in the process, not long before the event, and go through several revisions of speaker order, before I finalize it and send it to the printers.

How do you evaluate speakers, both before you choose them, but also how to you evaluate how well they did?

I listen to attendee comments at the event, and read all the emails that come in after the event, to get a sense of what people liked or not. I’m happy that Gel attendees are enthusiastic about sending feedback – positive and negative – about their experience, so I always have a pretty good idea of how the audience reacted to each speaker.  (And it’s often a mix – occasionally a speaker polarizes the audience with an extreme reaction in both directions.)

As for how I *choose* speakers, see answer to #1 above. That’s another one that’s more art than science – but generally I’m just trying to find a good mix of speakers that, together, will create the best possible experience for the attendees.

[Update: The next Gel event is Gel 2013]

You can watch videos of Gel talks from past years – several dozen are up there. Don’t miss Ira Glass,  Erin Mckean or Andrew.

How to watch a Michael Bay film

Posted on in moviesby Scott Berkun

To get out of the 101 degree heat here in Seattle, I decided to take the afternoon off yesterday and go see a film. Only thing playing at the right time was Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen.

I don’t hate Michael Bay films, but I rarely like them since I like movies that make sense. I admit Armageddon was fun, but I can’t say much for the others. Except for The Island which I thought was quite good – probably his best film. If not The Rock. Ok, fine. I guess I do like his films.  But if I do, it’s in part because I’ve learned how to prepare for them.

To prepare for Transformers 2, which I did enjoy, here’s what I did:

  • Don’t think of it as a movie – it’s a mega abstract conceptual art project at a bargain. I paid $7.50 to see a film that cost $150 million to make. There are few bargains this good. By not thinking of it as a movie the pressure to have it make sense went away, and the cheezy jokes, cardboard cutout characters,  or racial stereotypes didn’t bother me. Instead my mind was free to wonder how many people were in charge of Megan Fox’s lip gloss. Or the conversations the CGI folks must have had about how a functioning robot that walks and gets hit by grenades and tank shells could convert in seconds into a functioning jet. Not thinking of it is as movie, and considering it a conceptual art project involving lots of special effects, freed me to daydream, which is a good thing to do when nothing is exploding or being chased in a Bay film.
  • Sit as far back as possible. He loves cramming as much CGI violence and camera movement as possible into the frame and it’s unwatchable unless you’re in the back few rows. Avoid the temptation to get close. You will lose.
  • Turn off all plot seeking brain cells. They will be damaged. This is not Memento. This is not Shakespeare. Any positive effects disappear if you activate your higher brain.
  • Read all the non-spoiling bad reviews. I skimmed through metacritic which lists all the high profile, and often hi-brow, reviews, and many roasted him alive. Even the complimentary ones ripped him in some serious way. This helped set my expectations very low. So low I debated going in fact. Friends don’t let friends OD on metacritic.
  • Forget memories of preceding film in series or actual history.  I did see the first Transformers film, but deliberately avoided remembering any of it so I wouldn’t be disappointed by how much is repeated.
  • Imagine you are talking to a 12 year old boy. It does seem most of his movies are made for 12 year old boys, so it’s good to imagine you’re going to talk to one before sitting down in the theater. If the movie is based on a children’s toy you should know exactly what you’re in for in terms of sophistication. Transformers 2 is a finely made film for 12 year old boys, but if you’re not one yourself, you have some prep work to do.

It was a great way to get out of the heat and see some cool things blow up, including the now standard complement of various monuments and famous buildings.  And if the preview for 2012 was any indication, any buildings Bay hasn’t destroyed on film will be taken care of when that film hits the theaters.

Reference:

  • What is Bayhem Film Style?  (“we are really visually sophisticated, but totally visually illiterate” 7:26) [h/t Paul Mitchum]

 

The science of hunches?

Posted on in Creative Thinkingby Scott Berkun

Interesting article in the NYTimes about the significance of following hunches for U.S. Soldiers in Iraq. Among various stories of soldiers sensing danger and avoiding traps, are reports on various studies trying to understand how the better soldiers are able to detect these things, when ordinary soldiers do not.

But the kicker for me was this question, raised by one of the scientists regarding the ability for some to detect threats more accurately than others, near the end:

The big question is whether these differences perceiving threat are natural, or due to training, Dr. Paulus said.

This question is a much larger question than just for hunches – most things about behavior are vulnerable to the same nature vs. nurture debate and the answer is almost always both.

I wanted to ask this scientist how he decides what research to do, or how to design specific aspects of the study. Or even how did he decide that this was “the big question?” I’m sure he followed hunches to some degree in the decisions he made in doing his research. Most of what we do in life is hunch based, or at least not scientifically based. It’s uncommon we bother to do much more than follow what our gut feelings suggest we should do.

More interesting perhaps is there is evidence we often do things in opposite fashion. We have a feeling, mostly decide to follow it, and then our higher brains invent various seemingly logical reasons to support what is, essentially a hunch (note: there are studies suggesting this). In other words, we often trick ourselves into merely justifying our hunches, and claim we’ve thought rationally about our decision.

I’m not a brain science expert, but I’ve read much on the subject of decision making, and it seems something else missing from the article is discussion of false positives. We have hunches, certainly about danger, that are wrong all the time. It’s basic survival logic – if you have two creatures, one who is a little paranoid and worries about things that often don’t happen, and one that is totally carefree and fears nothing, the former has higher odds of survival.

I did agree with the article’s emphasis on the importance of emotion. But I’d go even further. Here’s a good quote from the article:

Not long ago people thought of emotions as old stuff, as just feelings, feelings that had little to do with rational decision making, or that got in the way of it,said Dr. Antonio Damasio, director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California. Now that position has reversed. We understand emotions as practical action programs that work to solve a problem, often before we’re conscious of it. These processes are at work continually, in pilots, leaders of expeditions, parents, all of us.

Emotions work faster than rational thought in the brain, and its reasonable to assume emotions are at the core of what the Army describes as good survival instincts.

Also see: Should you trust your gut?

Wednesday Linkfest

Posted on in linkfestby Scott Berkun

Here are this week’s good links:

  • 100 years of design manifestos –  I’ve always wanted to write a manifesto. How could it not be fun? And given how hamfisted many of these are, it seems there’s plenty of room for someone to write some good ones.
  • How the average American spends their paycheck – Well down visualization/graphic about how we spend our cash.
  • Google generation a myth? – A study in the UK shows there’s not a huge difference in how today’s kids use the web for research vs. adults. The actual study isn’t posted, but their claim, if I read it right, is we all suck at doing research regardless of age.
  • Mcluhan vs. Mailer – McLuhan and Mailer, two brilliant men with supersized egos, duke it out in a live debate that is fascinating even if you don’t care what they’re talking about. No conversation this complex and interesting would ever be on broadcast TV today.
  • Zoning out is good for you – Chapter 1 in The Myths of Innovation explores this notion, that our brains do lots of work, especially creative work, when our conscious minds are zoning out and relaxing.
  • Tornado vs. Train – This is exactly what you think it is and it’s awesome.

Lessons from 50+ books on public speaking

Posted on in lecture fixes, Public Speaking, the bookby Scott Berkun

My book Confessions of a Public Speaker is published and doing well – but to write it well I did much research. Here’s what I learned from reading more that 50 books on public speaking:

  • 50% or more of the advice is the same.  Dale Carnegie got much of it right 50 years ago in Public Speaking for Success (one of the best I read – I’m surprised too). And he hits the same points Aristotle and Cicero taught 2000 years before.  You can throw a dart at a stack of these books and get much the same advice.  It goes like this: know your audience, be concise and practice. The problem is this takes effort, more effort than buying books. Knowing and doing are not the same thing. Joining Toastmasters, where you practice, is likely one of the best things you can do.
  • You can’t learn a skill by reading alone. My book makes fun of this in several places as I do want you to be a better speaker. But public speaking is a skill and the only way you get better at any skill is to do it, not just read about it. You’d never expect to be a good guitar player just by reading about it, yet somehow for things that scare us that’s exactly why we buy and read books. We’re hoping to dodge a bullet. Books can help but only if you practice.
  • Rhetoric is boring. Many of these books have several chapters on rhetoric, or the construction of arguments. This is good stuff, but it’s oh so boring. Even chapters in these books about passion (ethos) are boring.  It’s the common academic trap of people writing for comprehensiveness rather than for pragmatics. Thank You For Arguing, by Heinrichs, was the best of the bunch in that respect.
  • Standard books might be the wrong way to learn this. As great as Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepare’s is (he’s the guy who originated Method Acting), can you be a great actor from reading it? Not unless you do a lot of acting after you read it. I’d say 30-40% of the books have nearly the same textbook structure of chapters and content. At least An Actor Prepare’s is an intimate personal read. Many books on speaking are shallow and stay on the surfaces of things, never touching on why people fail even after they’re read these books.
  • There are many fancy methods and tricks that play on people’s interests to make this seem simple. No surprise here, but books with titles like power speaking, magic presenting, instant persuasion, extreme lecturing, etc. mostly just rehash Carnegie’s advice, and do it poorly. Performing, which is what speaking always is, resists being boiled down.
  • Lecturing has been well researched it’s just no one knows about it.  There is so much misinformation about what works or doesn’t in public speaking. One magnificent gem is the book What’s the use of Lectures? In all my interviews and chats I haven’t found anyone who’s heard of this book despite how amazing it is. It’s on the dry side, but it’s a summary of all the research that has been done on lectures and what makes them work well or not. No myths. No voodoo. Just good advice based on actual research.
  • 20-30% of the books focus on one tool or specific type of speaking. There are piles of books just about PowerPoint, many about Keynote, and tons about pitching, or teaching, or doing seminars. And they mostly strike at the branches, rather than the roots. If you get the core dynamics of style, attention and making points, it’s not hard to move from one form to another. And books about software, in the guise of books about speaking mostly promote slideuments, something Garr Reynolds rightfully fights against.

So what am I doing What’s different in my book?

  • There is a real person here. It’s titled Confessions of a public speaker for a reason.  I’m completely honest with you. I have license, via the title, to call bullshit on myths, and legends that get in the way and to tell you useful things some are too polite to mention.  I can share the messed up things that happen backstage, what speakers really think of their audiences, etc.
  • I tell real stories. Many books take on a “I’m a perfect speaker” tone that doesn’t help people learn. I know I’m far from perfect, as my speaking experiences over the last 15 years, which include many embarrassing, comical, and occasionally criminal behavior. I learned the very hard way and I’d love for you to do better. I also have stories from other veteran speakers, teachers, and professors who were happy to share their honest thoughts about all this.
  • Like my other books, it’s fun, direct and honest.  I’m write books I wish someone had given me when I started.

You can read free samples of Confessions of a Public Speaker here:

Wednesday linkfest

Posted on in linkfestby Scott Berkun

Here are this week’s links:

Don’t be precious

Posted on in Creative Thinkingby Scott Berkun

Creativity is best studied creatively, and for me this means studying what the masters actually did. Not what we think they did, or what we’re told they said, but how they lived and worked everyday. And while I’m not an artist, I’ve spent a lot of time studying them including the one I’m married to.

So when I got a chance to chat with Teresa Brazen, who runs a podcast called Tea with Teresa, it was a thrill since she’s an artist (painter and filmmaker) and agreed to watch one of the coolest, and most obscure, films about creativity I know of: Picasso’s documentary, The Mysteries of Picasso (trailer here).

In this lively 20 minute conversation we explore what we both got from watching this crazy, mind-numbing and mind-blowing film, the importance of failure in art and life, how to apply ideas from the art world to everywhere else, and the challenges of creative work in the world and the workplace.

You can listen or dl the mp3 here at Don’t be precious – my chat with Teresa.

Don’t worry if you haven’t seen the film – I suspect you’ll track it down after though :)  All of the paintings Picasso make during the film were destroyed on purpose after the film was made.

The other myths of innovation?

Posted on in history, Innovation, Myths of Innovationby Scott Berkun

There’s been buzz around two recent articles listing myths of innovation, one from CIO Insight and another from CEOForum, and I didn’t write either of them, despite the title of my 2007 bestseller being The Myths of Innovation.

While I know very well how many people do (and do not :) read my books, you’d think perhaps the authors of articles might do a google search on their core idea to see what else is out there.

Of course I’m not the first to wander this path, as many of the good books in the Myths of Innovation’s annotated bibliography, like Farson’s The Innovation Paradox, are decades old.

However, it’s important to note a major goal for the book was to avoid simply listing things that are false. It’s fun but doesn’t teach much, and gets dull fast. Other people have done this well. And as it happens there are some mistakes in my book too.

Instead the goal was to use myths as the seed for exploring what we can learn from attempts at innovation that have already happened. Every chapter moves quickly away from myths and on to the truth, as best I could form it from extensive research.

You can find many lists of myths like the ones above. And they’re fine to read.  But within the limits of a blog post, where few demand many sources, or deep exploration of the significance and impact of the myths, they’re easy to discount.

Here are the ten myths from the book:

  1. The myth of epiphany
  2. We understand the history of innovation
  3. There is a method
  4. People love new ideas
  5. The lone inventor
  6. Good ideas are hard to find
  7. Your boss knows more about innovation than you
  8. The best ideas win
  9. Problems and solutions
  10. Innovation is always good

If you were interested in the aforementioned articles, and missed my book the first time around, I hope you’ll give it a spin.

You can read Chapter 4 online and free – PDF (3 MB) or watch my lecture at CMU on The Myths of Innovation.

Wednesday linkfest

Posted on in linkfestby Scott Berkun

Here’s this week’s links:

  • Great post about how experts cause more failures. Nice comparison between software and other processes, and how communication is often the main reason for failure, not how skilled or talented individual performers are.
  • Top 200 blogs for developers.  When I see these lists I’m reminded first how many blogs there are, and then how many I don’t know about.
  • Tools of Escape. In this case necessity is the mother of invention, as these ingenious tools were made by inmates in German prisons. These are AMAZING.
  • A brief history of social media. Nice graphic showing the history of digital social media from 1997 to 2007.

Calling bullshit on social media

Posted on in Innovation, politics, rant, Web 2.0 / social softwareby Scott Berkun

While I like and use Facebook and Twitter, there’s enough hype and abuse of words like innovation, transformation and revolution around all things social media that a critique is warranted. I hope this post is used whenever someone feels they’re being sold something phony or that makes little sense and wants a skeptical opinion to calibrate where the truth is.

For starters: social media is a shallow term. Is there any anti-social media out there? Of course not. All media, by definition, is social in some way. The term interactive media, a more accurate term for what’s going on, lived out its own rise / hype / boom cycle years ago and was smartly ignored this time around – first rule of PR is never re-use a dead buzzword, even if all that you have left are stupid ones. I’ve participated in stupid terms, from push-technology to parental-controls, so I should know when I see one.

That said, here’s some points not made often enough:

  1. We have always had social networks. Call them families, tribes, clubs, cliques or even towns, cities and nations. You could call throwing a party or telling stories by a fire “social media tools”. If anything has happened recently it’s not the birth of social networks, it’s the popularity of digital tools for social networks, which is something different. These tools may improve how we relate to each other, but at best it will improve upon something we as a species have always done. Never forget social networks are old. The best tools will come from people who recognize, and learn from, the rich 10,000+ year history of social networks. (Read the Excellent Writing On The Wall: The First 2000 Years of Social Media).
  2. There has always been word of mouth, back-channel, “authentic” media tools. In Gladatorial Rome, in Shakespearean England and in Revolutionary America, motivated individuals had ways to express their ideas and share them. Call it gossip, poems, paintings or pamphlets, there is a long history of individuals taking action to express opinions through non-official channels. The ease of using these channels changes over time, but they always exist because #1 always exists. Of note, IRC predates some, but certainly not all, of the features twitter is heralded for introducing to the world.
  3. The new media does not necessarily destroy the old. TV was supposed to kill radio – this was wrong. TV forced radio to change and in some ways improve. The web forced TV, newspapers and magazines to change, and they will likely survive forever in some form, focusing on things the web can not do well. Its unusual for new thing to completely replace the old ones and when they do it takes years. Anyone who claims social media will eliminate standard PR or mass media is engaging in hype, as odds are better those things will change and learn, but never die. It’s wise to ask what each kind of media / marketing is good and bad for and work from there.
  4. Social media consultants writing about social media have inherent biases. It’s difficult to take posts like this about social media seriously, as it’s written by someone from a social media consulting firm without an ounce of humility or perspective. It’s hard to come across as authentic if you promote a revolution that you personally stand to benefit the most from. Much writing about social media is PR people writing about the importance of PR – see a problem of authenticity here? When did PR, like advertisers, become a reliable source for what is authentic? How is SEO optimization, or similiar techniques for twitter, authentic? When a system becomes popular the greedy will game it and social media is no different. We should be worried when people with PR and advertising backgrounds or consulting firms are leading us in the ways of authenticity or integrity. The Twitter Book, from my publisher O’Reilly, takes a surprisingly reasonable, authentic and low-hype approach to social media I wish was more popular.
  5. Signal to Noise is always the problem. I’m someone who would rather read 5 or 10 really good things every day, than skim through 50 or 100 mediocre ones. I find much of social media activity consists of people re-forwarding things they were forwarded that almost none of them appear to have read, as they believe they are rewarded for publishing frequently above all else. Using twitter, facebook or nearly any social media service I often feel I’m in the minority since what’s popular is rarely what’s good. If you are interested in quality, and not volume, then the size of your network matters less than the value of what or who is in it. I’m more fascinated by how kottke.org and metafilter.org have kept such high signal to noise ratios for years than I am about most media tools I see.
  6. All technologies cut both ways and social media will be no different. For all the upsides of any invention there are downsides and it takes time to sort out what they all are. Blogs and Twitter have made self promotion, and self-aggrandizement, acceptable in ways I’ve never seen before, and I’m guilty myself. Is it possible to write or publish without self promotion? I don’t know anymore. I suspect digital tools for social media may have the negative effect of making authentic communication harder, not easier to find, as more people, and corporations, hover right on the gray dividing line between authentic and corporate, or selfish and generous.
  7. Be suspicious of technologies claimed to change the world. The problem with the world is rarely the lack of technologies, the problem is us. Look, we have trouble following brain dead simple concepts like The Golden Rule. Millions starve to death not because we lack the food, but because of greed and lack of political will. We will largely behave like idiots on blogs and on twitter because we behave that way in real life. Every technological revolution must contend with the fact that we bring our stupidity, selfishness and arrogance along for the ride with our generosity, wisdom and love (12for12k.org being a great positive example). This is true for any new technology we use, and invariably it’s this fact that plays itself out and ruins the current technological wave, setting up the frustrated landscape for the next one. Democracy, steam power, electricity, telegraphs, telephones, televisions, the Internet, and the web have all been heralded as the arrival of Utopia, and although there has been progress in each wave, it seems there are things we want that technological change can not bring to us.
  8. Always ask “What problem am I trying to solve?” The smartest thing to do with something new is to ask what is it you need it to do for you. Recognize good marketing will not make up for bad products or incompetent services.  If your company is marketing itself well to customers, or your social life is fine, perhaps you don’t need a revolution and need something much simpler and more realistic from social media. Spend time figuring out what you need. If you want to experiment and see for yourself, that’s awesome, but know that’s what you’re doing. But above all use whatever media/communication tools or methods work for you, whether they are old or new, no matter what anyone says, including me.

If you liked this post, you might also like my general purpose essay, How to detect bullshit, and How to call BS on a Guru.

Update: @jmichelle posted a response, In defense of social media, on O’Reilly Radar. I responded in the comments.

Update, part 2: six months later, here’s a follow up post: twitter reconsidered.

Update, part 3: A video of me presenting on this topic at Seattle Social Media club (slides):

 

Can you force questions on an audience?

Posted on in audiences, interactive, lecturesby Scott Berkun

Here’s a question from the mailbag:

Last week I held a presentation to my company (around 60-70 people). My strategy for the post-lunch session was to keep the audience involved by asking questions. This was to prevent people from falling asleep from the food coma.

What I did was have a slide with a question, ask the audience, see what came up, and then reveal the answer I had in mind. I got a few interesting answers and it felt like it was partially keeping people from falling to food coma. Afterwards I got some appreciative comments from programmers who attended both about the contents and about the style of the presentation.

One problem:  Our CTO thought that the way I’d asked questions when I already had the answers prepared was demeaning. He felt strongly about this in terms of “that’s something you just don’t do”.  To me, I wouldn’t be standing there holding a presentation if I didn’t think I had answers that not everyone in the room did. Asking people to think about things rather than spoon-feeding them “truth”, to me, is a way to help the process of learning.

What do you think?

There are few things “you just don’t do” as every audience is different and the rules change depending on what they’re expecting, and how good you are at using a technique.  So it’d be rare I’d ever say “you can never ever do X”.

It’s also important to realize there are many ways to reveal those answers, some which might be demeaning (“you guys were too stupid to say things like this”) but others that are entertaining, interesting and enlightening (“Here’s what I had, but your answers were better for these 2 reasons, except that you missed…”).  So how you do it is as important as what you do.

The main problem I see is whether the questions you were asking were what the audience wanted to learn.  I’d rather do one of these:

  1. Ask 5 or 6 people who were going to be in the audience ahead of time what their actual questions were and use them instead of guessing.
  2. Only ask them questions that reflect something I’d taught them in the lecture.  So after demonstrating how to do long division, I’d give them an easy long division problem. Then the questions tests my ability to teach as much as it tests what they know.  Any wrong answers means I failed, not the audience.

In the end the CTO is entitled to his opinion, but it’d be wise to have the opinions of the audience recorded in some simple way so his perspective is informed by what the majority felt.  Having a better way to judge the value of a session is probably the best problem to solve here.

Wednesday linkfest

Posted on in linkfestby Scott Berkun

Sorry its been awhile – on the homestretch for the new book, had a vacation, and also a total ISP meltdown. It’s been an interesting month :)

Here’s this week’s links:

And here’s what’s new on Speaker Confessions:

Instant feedback for speakers?

Posted on in audiencesby Scott Berkun

At the  Business to Buttons conference this month, I noticed an interesting way to collect feedback on speakers at every session.

Instead of bothering with a complex survey, which has to be sent out, complied and edited, they simply place two voting boxes at the door, with two piles of small cards. One pile green, one pile red.

As you leave you grab a colored card and drop it in the voting box. And by counting the cards it’s quickly clear how well received the session was.

The upsides to this system:

  • It’s fast
  • It’s simple: either the session had value or it didn’t.
  • There is no extra work

However there are problems too:

  • It’s not secret.  People see which pile you grab a card from, including possibly the speaker or his/her friends, which may change people’s votes.
  • If you get lots of reds it might not be clear why.

But I do love the idea as it quickly gives the speaker a sense of how well they did, and forces audiences to choose one way or the other.

The problems can be solved by finding a way to make it secret, even just by moving the box to outside the room, covering it, or finding a clever way to protect the anonimity of people voting.

(Seattle) Cool event: Small and Special

Posted on in entrepreneurship, Seattleby Scott Berkun

I’m in believer in the philosophy of the small.

Part of why I quit was I wanted to work on things I could get my entire hands around (e.g. books), even if I made less money than I would for continuing to play a small role in the making of big things.  I bet I’d get more pride and pleasure from making things I loved, even if they are only used by a few people, than I would for the thousands of compromises that come with making things used by millions of people.

One of my former bosses at Microsoft, Hillel Cooperman, has not only gone on his own with Jackson Fish, a company that makes hand crafted software (you read that right), but he’s started up a little event for people who share the small and special philosophy.

What: Small and Special – a tiny conference for entrepreneurs and hopefuls

When: June 30th, 2009, 2-6pm

Where: Seattle (Georgetown)

Cost: $25!

You can find Registration details and the excellent speaker list here.

If you’re a small business owner or have thought about starting one, this is a great way to meet many locals who are a few steps ahead of you. Check it out.