Author: Scott Berkun

Favorite MLK quote on tech innovation

Posted on in Innovation, Philosophyby Scott Berkun

On days like this when someone famous is honored, I try to dig up something they wrote to compare what I think I know about that person and why they’re famous, with what they actually did and said. It’s always enlightening, but sometimes I find unexpected gems like this:

(yes it’s 3 long paragraphs, but I bet you $50 it’s the best writing you’ll read today).

Modern man has brought this whole world to an awe-inspiring threshold of the future. He has reached new and astonishing peaks of scientific success. He has produced machines that think and instruments that peer into the unfathomable ranges of interstellar space. He has built gigantic bridges to span the seas and gargantuan buildings to kiss the skies. His airplanes and spaceships have dwarfed distance, placed time in chains, and carved highways through the stratosphere. This is a dazzling picture of modern man’s scientific and technological progress.

Yet, in spite of these spectacular strides in science and technology, and still unlimited ones to come, something basic is missing. There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually. We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers.

Every man lives in two realms, the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live. Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal to become lost in the external. We have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live. So much of modern life can be summarized in that arresting dictum of the poet Thoreau: “Improved means to an unimproved end.” This is the serious predicament, the deep and haunting problem confronting modern man. If we are to survive today, our moral and spiritual “lag” must be eliminated. Enlarged material powers spell enlarged peril if there is not proportionate growth of the soul. When the “without” of man’s nature subjugates the “within,” dark storm clouds begin to form in the world.

If we believe this, then why is so little of what we talk about when we use the word innovation directed at helping people make, in MLKs terms, internal progress?

Related:

(hat tip to truehoop)

Thursday linkfest

Posted on in linkfestby Scott Berkun

Linkfest for Thursday:

  • This week in science podcast. If you want your science news infused with a sense of humor, this is for you.
  • Surprise – drug research biased. Apparently the efficacy of anti-depressant drugs has been overstated by the companies that make them.
  • Cool Tools. Kevin Kelly, a founder of Wired magazine, runs this website of smart tools and gadgets, mostly non-hi-tech, for people who like to work smart. There’s an e-mail newsletter too (Hat tip to Lynn).
  • Moleskinerie. One of my favorite cool tools are my moleskine notebooks, and this blog is about the many different ways people use ’em.

Is Google ‘white bread for young minds’?

Posted on in Creative Thinking, Philosophy, Teaching/Trainingby Scott Berkun

The Times Online has a short piece about the dangers of Google dominance for education, called White bread for young minds. It quotes a professor, Tara Brabazon, concerned about the trends:

Google offers easy answers to difficult questions. But students do not know how to tell if they come from serious, refereed work or are merely composed of shallow ideas, superficial surfing and fleeting commitments.

It seems unfair to blame Google for this. But in reading the article and some background on Brabazon, it doesn’t seem she blames Google either. It’s the author of the Times article who focuses the blame on Google.

In truth school textbooks are notoriously poor sources of information on history – as are television and films, mediums children spend as may hours getting educated by as their classrooms. Really what it seems she wants, is to teach children how to interpret all kinds of media. According to the article:

Her own students are banned from using Wikipedia or Google as research tools in their first year of study, but instead are provided with 200 extracts from peer-reviewed printed texts at the beginning of the year, supplemented by printed extracts from eight to nine texts for individual pieces of work.

I get the ban – but the article frames this wrong. The ban is to help people to understand what’s being banned, not to ban it forever. As best I can tell Brabazon is trying to teach a kind of
media literacy for research. The highlight of the article for me is this quote:

We need to teach our students the interpretative skills first before we teach them the technological skills. Students must be trained to be dynamic and critical thinkers rather than drifting to the first site returned through Google

And no technology can do our critical thinking for us – we have to depend on our brains for that one. However, there have been advocates of mandatory media literacy education for a long time. The core theme being to teach children how to compare sources, deconstruct advertising, and be savvy about what they read & see, instead of wasting time training students in rote research methods devoid of critical thinking.

Given the context, I’d hoped Tara Brabazon, the professor quoted in the article, had a blog, perhaps to respond to the thin, biased tone of the article. But her site lists only her books and CV.

She writes quite well and I’m intrigued enough by her smart, funny articles like Socrates in earpods: the i-podification of education to read more of her work.

Her most recent book is called the University of Google, which from the description advocates the teaching of research, but I couldn’t find a table of contents or even a review of the book. The best sumation of Tara’s own thinking on the issue was from these notes on a lecture she gave about the book.

Podcast/Slides from Web Directions 07 finally up

Posted on in Innovation, Myths of Innovation, On Tourby Scott Berkun

This was a special talk for two reasons. First, as my opening story explains, I delivered a special surprise to someone in the audience. Second, the 9am crowd was surprisingly lively and helped me put on a good show.

The talk covers a few topics from The Myths of Innovation, including epiphanies, the problems with innovation history, and many true stories about how great innovations actually happened.

Podcast (70 minutes, 30mb), Slides and description.

(Skip to the 11:05 mark in the podcast to bypass intros).

Thursday linkfest

Posted on in linkfestby Scott Berkun

Here’s the good stuff I’ve found this week:

Why revision should feel like torture

Posted on in art of project management, Making things happen, Writing Wellby Scott Berkun

Reading my first book is infuriating at times, yet I’m happy about it. How can this be?

Given the unusual task of revising something already published (in this case, a book), there are two likely ways to feel about it:

  1. This is great! I don’t want to change a thing.
  2. This sucks! I want to rewrite this thing from scratch.

The first case is only superficially good. If I can’t see ways to improve the writing, or to give better advice, then what have I learned about writing (or management) in the last three years? Not much.

The second case, while painful, illustrates growth. If I don’t like it, it suggests I’m capable, now, of making the same points in less words, from a better perspective, or with a clearer structure that’s more fun to read.

In truth, the book is what it is. I’m not the same guy I was when I wrote the thing, and part of what makes the book good is who I was. It has to fit together and I don’t want to wander into George Lucas territory. But it’s fun snipping sentences, tightening paragraphs, updating references, and getting those exercises in there. I get to play my own editor for awhile.

My point I suppose is it’s healthy to go back to old writing and cringe. If you’re a blogger, go back and read your first posts – you’ll laugh and cry, I’m sure. That’s good – you’re still alive and getting better.

Any artofpm corrections?

Posted on in art of project management, Making things happenby Scott Berkun

The revision of Making things happen (formerly known as the art of project management) is wrapping up.

As a last call for anyone with a correction, typo, or reference suggestion they’ve found in their edition of the book, Speak up now! Anything that you’ve though should or could be fixed is fair game.

Reward: If you’re the first to suggest a correction that gets made, I’ll get you a copy of the updated book!

Deadline: 1/10/2008.

Leave a comment if you’ve got something. Cheers.

More upcomming speaking

Posted on in On Tourby Scott Berkun

The calendar for this year is filling up, here’s what’s on the calendar for the next few months:

  • January 22nd, Vancouver BC, VanUE – Creative thinking hacks (public & free)
  • February 11-13, Wellington, NZ, Webstock – Myths of Innovation
  • March 23, Pittsburgh, PA, Carnegie Mellon University, Myths of Innovation (public & free)
  • April 22-24, Web 2.0 Expo, San Francisco, CA, How to innovate on time

If you want me at your event, here’s some info for ya.

Speaking in Vancouver BC, Tue 1/22

Posted on in Creative Thinking, On Tourby Scott Berkun

I’ll be at VanUE, the Vancouver UX chapter, speaking about creative thinking hacks. Here’s the excerpt:

Creative Thinking Hacks
Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 — 6:00 to 7:30pm
There will be networking from 5:30 to 6:00pm.
Venue: Vancouver Film school.
Cost: Free!

Description: This new, high risk talk is a volitle combination of never before seen excerpts from the best selling book “The Myths of Innovation”, combined with the essence of Scott’s popular “How to find and manage ideas” course at the University of Washington. It will simultaneously demystify creative thinking, provide tips and tricks for finding ideas, provoke wild opinions and comical rants, and explore how to become more powerful at the creative aspects of your work and life. Format: Short interactive lecture, with extended Q&A (So bring your list of “things i always wanted to know about creative thinking but were too afraid or drunk to ask”).

VanUE provided a great crowd last year, look forward to speaking there again. RSVP here.

The trashing of zen: a rant

Posted on in Philosophy, rantby Scott Berkun

George Orwell wrote about what happens when we misuse words. A core theme in the novel 1984 is how abuse of language enables other evils. Well the time has come: I’m stepping up to defend the word Zen.

Zen is in a sorry state of abuse. Much like the word innovation, the word Zen is now a placeholder for thought, used for its connotation of something positive rather than any specific meaning. People often use the word in complete ignorance. Here’s what the word means:

To practice Zen is to use meditation and other techniques to develop an understanding of oneself, and seek spiritual enlightenment

That’s heavy, no? Can you think of a concept more worthy of respect than someone dedicating time to seeking spiritual enlightenment? To understand their true selves? If more people spent time figuring out how to be cool with themselves spiritually (in whatever flavor they choose), instead of accumulating more stuff they don’t need, or taking things that aren’t theirs, we’d be happier all around on this planet. The word Zen, and it’s meaning, gets a top shelf spot on the list of words worthy of reverence and respect.

So how then, can we explain the following?

  1. Zenhabits.net, a fine site about personal productivity and more, but it’s a lifehacker competitor, not spiritual or even philosophical in focus. Zenhabits also has an e-book called Zen to done, the ultimate productivity system. Why must we suffer these incomprehensible contradictions of Zen and productivity in the same sentence? Simply because the alternatives weren’t cool enough for the author.
  2. Worse perhaps is CSS Zen Garden, which uses not only the word Zen, but the Japanese rock garden, which are used by some in meditation practices. To their credit, at least they’re giving stuff away, but still. That’s charity garden, not zen. (Why wouldn’t simply CSS Garden have been good enough?)
  3. Presentation Zen, which is a blog, and book, on professional presentation design. It gives very good advice, but what does this have to do with Zen? Not much. The spirit of the advice is minimalism, an element of many eastern philosophies, but minimalism is not spiritual by itself. I know Garr Reynolds and I like him and his presentation advice, but the question remains. Most presentations are capitalistic and not spiritual acts.
  4. Of course we also have ZenCart, a shopping cart service, the Zen drupal theme, an MP3 player, a communal blog, and an Internet provider.

Some of these things are good and people like them, but they have nothing to do with Zen. The word is decoration. It’s a marketing hook, used to suggest but not provide. Many use visual imagery that vaguely suggests eastern philosophy, but it’s purely visual. The superficial without the substance.

I’m no saint of titles. I took criticism from friends for titling my first book The art of project management, as “The art of…” is perhaps the most cliche title in the world (Perhaps I’m redeemed by the name change, perhaps not). But unlike the sites above, a cliche title can accurately describe what is being offered, without the material itself being cliche.

These sites use this amazing word, Zen, fun to say, beautifully compact, high in noble purpose, and use it for decoration. Orwell would claim these folks are both benefiting from the dilution of language, and promoting the further gutting of an enlightenment-path into a for profit choice of branding style. Ok. Forget Orwell, he’s dead and can’t speak for himself: So I make that claim. This is bad for everyone. How bad? I have no idea as we’ve been doing this to words and ideas for a long time.

From my skimmings of these sites, these folks are smart. I’m sure they all knew synonyms for good, great, cool, or whatever it was they were looking for could be found in any thesaurus. They could have been industrious enough to make up their own name or hire someone to do it for them. They could even have stooped, like I did, to reuse a naming cliche (Secrets of, Art of, etc.). But instead they chose to drag a word like Zen into the laziest kind of intellectual mud.

Certainly, these folks have company. Many point the finger at Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance for starting the trend. It’s an excellent book on one man’s explorations into philosophy and life, but Zen is a sideline. Of course Pirsig was probably riffing off of Herrigel’s Zen in the art of archery. That book actually is about Zen, and the attempt by a Westerner to practice it. It should be required reading (despite its flaws) for anyone who even thinks about taking command of the Z-word for their own profit.

If you’re curious about Zen, I’m no expert. Here’s a good experience to start with. I bet you’ll be surprised. (flash site, but worth the ride).

The single best book introducing meditation (and by-proxy Zen & Buddhism), is Turning the Mind into an ally. Highly recommended (it’s the best of many I’ve read).

Stop Saying Innovation – Here’s Why

Posted on in Innovation, Managementby Scott Berkun

[Update: an edited version of this post was published at The Economist]

I’m confident in this advice: Stop using the word innovation. Einstein, Ford, Leonardo da Vinci, Picasso, Jobs and Edison rarely said the word and neither should you. Every business audience I’ve said this to has laughed and agreed: we all know other people use it as empty verbiage, but what about ourselves?

The word has little meaning, used as a vague substitute for “cool”, another problematic and highly subjective term. The people who use the word innovation most often have the least idea what the word even means. Next time you hear the word, ask and see.

People with good ideas and who do good work solve problems. They let their ideas be defined by the importance of the problems their ideas solve. It’s the solving of the problem that gives ideas power, not an adjective slapped onto Powerpoint slides or into job titles.

Great teams know this and drop pretense in favor of simple words like prototype, experiment, problem, solution, user, customer, lesson and design. Simpler language accelerates progress. Inflated language slows it down and confuses people. Calling yourself tall doesn’t make you tall. A word is just a word. It’s your actions that matter, not the labels you use.

There are four things you can do:

  1. Ask people who use the word what they mean. If ever anyone says innovation in a meeting, ask “Can you give an example of what you mean by innovative?” If they can’t, you’ve just saved the room significant time. Often they don’t know: they’re using the i-word as a cop-out for clear thinking. Point them at a good definition.
  2. Use better words instead. Often people mean one of 1) we want new ideas, 2) we want better ideas, 3) we want big changes, 4) we need to place big bets on new ideas and be more tolerant of taking risks 5) We want to make a lot more money. Great. Any of those short phrases are more powerful and specific than the i-word. Use them instead.
  3. The best definition of innovation is: significant positive change. It forces the attention on what kind of positive change you want (better sales? higher quality? more customers?) and how large an improvement you desire (10%? 40%?). To say you innovate every day is hubris and belittles the history of true inventions that changed the world. Staying humble helps you focus and increases the odds you’ll do excellent work.
  4. Avoid using the i-word in presentations, emails and internal documents. It’s one thing for marketers to use innovation in press releases. It’s another to let that word cloud up how people making things think about what they’re making. Force your team to be precise and give up the crutch of the innovation word. Ask: what problem are you trying to solve? what benefit are you trying to create? Reward people who use the word sparingly and find better ways to communicate.
  5. Just be good – That’s hard enough. Most things made in the world suck. If your company struggles to make a half-decent product, with the morale of a prison, why are you talking about innovation? You have to get the training wheels off before entering the Daytona 500. If you can making something good, that solves real problems, works reliably, is affordable, and is built by a happy, motivated and well rewarded staff, you’ll kick your competitor’s asses. Focus on solving those real problems. If you succeed on those, innovation, in all its forms, will likely take care of itself.

You can’t have innovation by any definition without being willing to take risks. But there is nothing less risky than merely repeating a word while taking no action.

Breakthroughs are a matter of perspective and if you take a wide view it’s being good that beats innovation nearly every time.

If you like this advice, you’ll love the paperback edition of The Myths of Innovation. Read the excellent summary of the ten myths from the book.

economist-article-berkun-trim

Thursday linkfest

Posted on in linkfestby Scott Berkun
  • Updated list of online games with good UX design. The folks at goodexperience update this list of games with the primary critieria being fun, easy to learn gameplay.
  • How it all ends. A very smart, funny, well produced but low-tech, youtube video about understanding global warming. Interesting primarily for it’s well done wacky / teacher / presenter learning style. This took significantly more time to make than to watch. It’s just flat out good, intelligent communication of an opinion.
  • Apophenia. Whenever you meet someone with misplaced faith in some crazy stock market investment strategy, instead of just calling bullshit, you can now tell them they suffer from apophenia.
  • Lakota indians threaten to secede from the U.S.. Hard to tell how far this will go as the logistics here are complex no matter what the laws are, but it’s an interesting story so far.

What is your dangerous idea?

Posted on in Creative Thinkingby Scott Berkun

The folks over at Edge annually pick an interesting question and let leading scientists and notables offer short essays to answer. It’s fun and truly thought provoking reading (I hate that phrase, but it’s true here so I’ll use it).

This year the question was What are you optimistic about?, but I found the answers to the 2006 question was “What is your dangerous idea?” even more interesting. My favorite answer to that one comes from Geoffrey Miller:

This is the Great Temptation for any technological species — to shape their subjective reality to provide the cues of survival and reproductive success without the substance. Most bright alien species probably go extinct gradually, allocating more time and resources to their pleasures, and less to their children.

You can read his full answer here (scroll down), as well as the full list of answers by other folks, including Howard Gardner, Jaron Lanier, Daniel Dennett, and Freemon Dyson.

Learning from London’s speakers’ corner

Posted on in Teaching/Training, Travelby Scott Berkun

On my first trip to London in 1996, on a whim from a blurb in some guidebook, I checked out Speakers corner @ Hyde Park. I just could not believe the blurb: a place where anyone could stand up on a box, preach or rant to their hearts desire, and throngs of people would come to listen, all for free.

Inconceivable!

In NYC, we had a name for public speakers – crazies. We’d ignore them, or as a gang of kids, terrorize them. As adults, who has the time to stop and listen? The notion was absurd, and in my then fully charged American arrogance I figured if such a form of free speech were possible, surely I’d have seen it before in America.

So I went to see for myself – It was true and it blew me away.

  1. It’s self-organized. Anyone can stand anywhere and start going.
  2. People get interactive. There’s lots of yelling and heckling.
  3. It’s mostly peaceful. No one is forced to speak or listen.
  4. Some of the speakers are amazing. They own their crowds without microphones, podiums, powerpoint – just them and their voices.

Many speakers were political or religious, but many weren’t. Some were pros who seemed to be regulars at the corner, but many were just working people interested in debate. The experience redefined what a public speaker meant. It’s one thing to speak at a conference or in an office where there are rules of conduct, but entirely another to speak where no one has any obligation to even listen to you.

I can’t say what goes on at the corner is a good way to debate issues, but it sure is an experience and any thinking person can’t observe what goes on there without some kind of opinion.

I’ve been thinking more about speaker’s corner lately for two reasons. First I now make a living as a public speaker, but also because of the rise of informal presenting, from un-conferences, Pecha-Kucha, and 99 second or 60 second university talks.

Here are a few videos that capture something of the experience;

  • Speaker’s corner / mad world. The best video of the bunch. It takes a sad view of the corner, but it does the best job of capturing the variety of speakers, formats and confrontations.
  • A debate about oil, no doubt a popular one these days. Watch the first speaker lose control to a better speaker in the crowd.
  • Race, drugs and politics. An excellent speaker who has his crowd captivated, heckle-free, for nearly 10 minutes. Wow.

The question I’ll ask you is the same one I ask myself:

  • Would you have the guts to speak at speaker’s corner? (I chickened out in ’96)
  • If yes, what would you speak about?

Usability review #4: Simplygoogle

Posted on in design, ui review, usabilityby Scott Berkun

#4 on the free review list is SimplyGoogle a utility page, exploding out many of the google options onto a single page. Since there aren’t that many user tasks here, there wasn’t much to work with. The core problem with the page is layout – it’s an endless series of command buttons running down the middle of the page.

The easy remedy is the ever handy radio button: as a rule of thumb, if you can get away with one command button instead of ten, you’re making an improvement. You get tons of real estate back, and it’s easier to scan the list of options.

Before:

simplyg-before.jpg

After:

simplyg-after1.jpg