Scott Berkun's Blog, page 43

Tomorrow get Mindfire 1.1 for free

The revised 1.1 edition of Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds is finally finished. More than 100 typos, fixes and little touches were added to make it the best version of the book ever.

It’s currently on sale at amazon.com, but the official launch will be tomorrow at 9AM (Wed March, 20th).

If you come back to the site then, you’ll be able to download any of the e-book editions for free.

Thanks for reading my work and I hope you’ll come by and grab it as a thank you for your support.

 

 

Why you can’t ignore Big Data

I’ve known Phil Simon since college and he’s one of the only people I’ve known that long that’s taken on a similar writing ambition: he’s written five books, including his latest Too Big Too Ignore: The Business Case for Big Data. The term ‘big data’ is popular, but on the verge of becoming jargon and I couldn’t resist interviewing Simon in the hopes he’d clarify what the hype is about and how his book helps people trying to sort it out for themselves.

Q: How is Big Data, which has now become a trendy term, different from the kind of analytics companies have used for decades?

PS: It’s definitely a trendy term. Analytics have been with us for a long time, and they’re still essential. Historically, organizations have used only structured, transactional data to drive analytics. Business Intelligence (BI) and key performance indicators (KPIs) were the rage in the mid-1990s and 2000s. They still matter today. The new boss isn’t totally different than the new boss.

So, what’s different? The types and sources of data behind these metrics. No longer are analytics based solely on structured or transactional data. For example, knowing which customers buy which products remains important. However, there’s a new source driving better metrics: unstructured data brought by Web 2.0, mobility, and the cloud. Now companies can determine what consumers are blogging, tweeting, and writing about on review sites. Amazon, Netflix, and scores of companies use unstructured data to increase sales, innovate faster, and find new insights into consumer behavior.

This unstructured information comprises a great deal of what we are calling Big Data. Analytics still matter, but now organizations have the tools to capture, store, access, and analyze new and critical types of information—and do some pretty amazing things.

Q: This is your fifth book. How did you / are you using big data to help you research and market your work?

I used Google Trends early on to gauge the popularity of Big Data vis-à-vis other terms like Business Intelligence. I wanted to run an A/B test on the title and subtitle of the book but my publisher didn’t like the idea. Eric Reis did that for The Lean Startup.

Rather than download tools and play with them myself, I went old school. I attended conferences, followed people on Twitter, and interviewed real-life practitioners who are actually doing this stuff. In a sense, it was a very different approach than my first book, Why New Systems Fail.

 Q: What was the biggest surprise about organizations that have bet on using Big Data?

Big Data has no shortage of myths. The biggest is you have to be a big company to harness the power of Big Data. Not true. Sure, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Google, IBM, and other behemoths are utilizing Big Data, but company size doesn’t really matter.

In the book, I write about a number of small companies and government agencies leveraging Big Data. Quantcast and Explorys are anything but big companies, and NASA (even with a $18 billion budget) still acts small by running contests through gamification sites like TopCoder. It’s possible to get a little bit pregnant with Big Data, something that I recommend to organizations not sold on its power.

Q: What is one of the common mistakes you’ve seen people make as they try to adopt your advice?

For one, don’t boil the ocean with Big Data. It’s simply not possible to get all of the information—and you don’t need it anyway. Even Google doesn’t index the entire web. The Deep Web remains largely a mystery It’s a journey, not a marathon. You’re not going to “implement” Big Data in a week. It’s the antithesis of set-it-and-forget-it. It’s an ongoing process, one that requires the willingness to embrace the unknown.

As I’ve seen in my consulting career, strategy eats culture for lunch. Big Data is not an IT initiative. If an organization resists integrating information into its decision-making, it’s unlikely that it will realize benefits from any data—big or small.

Q: How can readers separate the hype from the truth in experts talking about Big Data?

It’s a challenge, but I hope my book will help. I wrote a vendor-agnostic text that covers a panoply of companies. I have no horse in this race.

Although I list some solid rules of thumb in the book, realize that there’s no one “right” way to do Big Data. There are many tools, viewpoints, methodologies, vendors, consultancies, and talking heads with more than a little skin in the game. Every organization wants to be “uniquely positioned” to handle what is a burgeoning area. Take vendor claims with a 50-pound bag of salt.

Finally, understand that many things are still playing out. Big Data tools like Hadoop, NoSQL databases, and the like are relatively new. Yes, there are case studies, but this is evolving at warp speed.

Too Big Too Ignore: The Business Case for Big Data is on sale now. You can grab a free sample of the book here (PDF).

Why We Love Sociopaths: Book Review

The other day I saw some high school students in a coffeeshop, and on the table was a book titled Why We Love Sociopaths. I laughed when I saw it, thinking it was an excellent book title. Then I looked it up on kindle and read the whole thing that night. At 100 pages it covers a wide range of ideas, questions and criticisms of modern television, a second cousin to Postman’s classic Amusing Ourselves to Death.

While I’m a fan of the high quality of television we’ve seen in the last decade, perhaps the highest of all time, I’m often bothered by how horrible the lead characters are as people. Certainly Shakespeare had some lead characters who were cruel or rotten and it’s not a new structure for drama. But if you run through The Sopranos, The Simpsons, The Wire, Mad Men and even South Park, you find consistent reprehensible behavior among central characters, sometimes played for comedy but often seriously.

Kotsko, a professor of humanities at Shimer college, improved my thinking. He takes many popular shows and breaks them down, exposing, through a conversational and refreshingly non-academic style, deeper questions and theories as to why these characters are popular to modern America.

I didn’t agree with all of his analysis, but that’s part of the fun. What do I believe? His take was consistently interesting enough to provoke me into deeper thought, a compliment for any book.

If you’ve never seen The Wire, House, The Simpsons, Dexter, Breaking Bad or the shows I’ve mentioned above enough to know the main characters and themes, I’d pass on this book. His analysis lands well if you’ve seen the shows, but for shows I didn’t know it was harder to follow.

Here are some good quotes from the book.

On evil sociopathic characters being a form of wish fulfillment of escape from morals:

 The sociopath is an individual who transcends the social, who is not bound by it in any gut-level way and who can therefore use it purely as a tool… If only I didn’t give a fuck about anyone or anything, we think—then I would be powerful and free.

On reality TV shows rewarding sociopathic behavior (manipulations and betrayals):

Many of the adult games that Augustine was so skeptical of remain with us today: the quest for wealth or fame, or public debates and trials won by rhetoric and technicalities rather than truth and justice. Since his time, however, at least one new adult game has emerged—the reality TV show.

The centrality of exclusion to the model can be seen in the fact that even apparently skill-based shows, such as America’s Next Top Model or Hell’s Kitchen, with outside judges determining the winner rather than a vote of one’s peers, typically rely on the slow work of “voting people off the island” rather than any kind of positive score-keeping.

On Dan Draper’s inherent sociopathy:

What kind of man’s first thought, in the split second after witnessing a horrific death, is not to panic, not to head for cover, but to consider how he can take advantage of this situation to raise his social standing?

This mercenary approach to human identity is a necessary correlate to his ability to buy his own pitch, showing the thorough inner consistency of his worldview: everyone can be manipulated by the same emotional triggers, including me, and everyone is interchangeable, even me.

I read the whole book in one sitting. If you’re curious fan of these shows, you’ll enjoy the book.

How to design a great book cover (Behind the scenes)

Next Wednesday the 1.1 edition of Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds, a collection of my best essays, will be officially released. More than 100 corrections, typo-fixes and little fit and finish improvements were made. Amazon is already selling 1.1, but Wednesday 3/20 9am PST is the official launch and I’ll be giving away the e-book editions free for 48 hours.

Meanwhile I’ll share behind the scenes reports on how the book was made. First, how the cover was designed.

After vetting more than 30 designers who applied, I hired Tim Kordik. And I’m glad I did. I wanted not just a graphic designer, but someone who was interested in helping define the book end to end, from the interior design, to the title, the content and of course, the cover.

I wrote up a short design brief that’s good for any book cover:

Bet big on one visual concept
Title should be readable in thumbnail / 10 feet away
Simplicity wins
Be bold

We brainstormed for an hour and Kordik went off and put some early sketches together. I made clear I was comfortable working low-fidelity  so we could try things quickly and throw aways ideas without sunk cost feelings. He was all for it.

Round one

Here was the first round of concept sketches:

 

Tim paired each sketch with a brief description to help explain the idea, in case I missed it.

 Round two

We discussed which directions we thought were strongest, and he did a second round. We killed some concepts and added a couple of new ones. The entire round was higher fidelity than last time:

We picked three of these concepts and let blog readers vote: over 300 people participated.

The vote was used to inform our thinking, but not to drive it. Many of the comments people left were useful and Kordik and I discussed them. We didn’t agree with some of it, but it did help us step back and look and what we’d done differently.

Round Three

We narrowed the field to one concept. We did a couple of one-off last attempts at other concepts, but they didn’t pan out so we killed those paths.

I loved the idea of a book’s central image being a warning label of some kind. But round three revealed the challenges of the triangle for the central element. It left too much trapped whitespace, and the top angle of the triangle always felt strange.

But I loved how playful Kordik was in trying out different options. It let us look at alternatives instead of trying to imagine them.

 

Round four

Moving to a circle, the simplest shape, made sense and we ran with it. Tim came up with the bullseye grey/white effect which is powerful and striking.

We moved on to the next level of detail down: the fire and the objects coming out of the fire. Kordik tried many different sets of images. We tried at first to pull images that matched the essays (life, death, time, inspiration, etc.), but it was hard to arrange them without it feeling cluttered. Kordik tried many variations and probably wanted to strangle me.

During one meeting, Kordik thought using my profile for the cover might work. I resisted at first: I hate books with pictures of authors in them. Why should readers care what the author looks like? But I figured I had nothing to lose by letting him take the photo.

Kordik did a great job, making it subtle enough that few would notice (I love books with secrets). It worked great and all future mockups had my profile as the silhouette. Here’s the picture the profile is from. He gratefully edited our the WordPress beard I had.

 
Round 5:

We did a final round of blog reader voting, and 300 people let their opinion be known. It came down to the details for the fire.

As much as I had pushed for all of the icons in the belief those little details mattered, the simple bubbles were cleaner, simpler and stronger, and gave more whitespace to the design.

We were close enough that Kordik finished up the full jacket design.

The blurb:

Blurbs are silly things (see the secret life of blurbs). Since I was self-publishing I decided to be honest and have some fun.

Final cover for First Edition:

After months of work, and dozens of itterations, we arrived at the final cover design. I loved it. It’s the strongest cover design of all of my books, and I’m convinced it’s because of Kordik’s willingness to experiment and not fear exploring alternatives.

 

Final cover for 1.1 Edition:

For the upcoming 1.1 edition we made the book size smaller, down from 9×6 to 8×5. We simplified the cover by dropping the black/white strips on top and bottom.

Hope you found this behind the scenes post interesting. To get all the photos together took hours. Leave a comment to let us know it was worth it.

If you want to know what I learned by self-publishing here’s my rundown.

If you can’t wait, you can buy the 1.1 edition now, or put a reminder on your calendar to come back Wednesday and get it for free.

The No UI debate is rubbish

A debate is rising on whether the old platitude No UI is the best UI is good or bad. I’ll tell you who is right: no one.

Debates like these fall into the same stupid trap academics have fallen into for centuries: Platonic ideals are an illusion. They’re fun to play with, but they’re useless when your hands are dirty trying to solve a real problem for a real person.

The only sane replacement is The best UI is what’s best for the person and situation I’m designing for. That’s all. Who cares what’s best in the abstract? No one hires you to design abstractions, and if they did, your business card should say “Platonic Theorist” not “Designer”.

Jared Spool used to print t-shirts saying “It Depends”, a running joke about the only sensible answer an honest practitioner of design can offer to false dichotomies.  The problem is false dichotomies are attention magnets, tempting people who aren’t busy actually designing things into grandstanding on the pretense one side is right and that winning proves their design talents. Even Krishna’s post on The best interface is no interface and  Timo Arnall’s “No to NoUI”, which are both well written and offer merits on both sides, go too far. Design abstractions are fun but not worthy of long arguments if they’re taken too seriously. At the moment a good designer sits down to design a specific thing for specific people these abstract debates have limited value.

The best possible interpretation of the “No UI” platitude is its an echo of the age old cry for simplicity. Simplicity is a highly desired thing. No sane person wakes up and says “Dear god I hope each of my interactions with machines today is complex and overwhelming! Praise the lord of complexity.” Of course everyone defines simplicty differenty, but in their own little world simplicity is a goal.

But to proceed further is a fools errand: there is no perfect design for everyone (See The Myth of Optimal Design). All designs fail someone in some situation. That’s what part of design is: picking who you will fail and how you’ll fail them. Any attempt to confidently average out a trend across all people and all situations is borderline idiocy.

Sometimes a huge amount of UI is the best UI

The canonical example is airplane cockpits. Pilots are control freaks. People may die if it takes 12 clicks to dig down to the nth level advanced control panel to change a setting.

Of course a designer could design a radically simpler design: The MegaGenius AutoPilot. Just one toggle switch you turn on to fly, and it uses it’s psychic power module to instantly recognize where everyone wants to go, plans the trip, cooks dinner, clears details with the tower, and takes off, while playing a music playlist perfectly tuned to your mood and destination. Now anyone can fly a plane (to the great sadness of the airline pilot’s union).

Is this better than the cockpit design with 4000 levers? It depends.

Questions include:

Who are you designing for?
What do they know?
What do they need to do?
What situations are important?
Will they ever be in situations we can’t predict?
How important is it to design for when the design fails?

There is an infinite spectrum of alternate designs between the ‘complex’ cockpit and the MegaGenius Autopilot. I’m sure cockpits are ripe for design improvements and simplifications. But we can’t say which specific designs are better or worse without answering questions like the ones above. In the abstract there is not enough information to design well, since you end up designing for everyone in every situation which is impossible.

But for fun, lets say we went mad. We convinced ourselves everything on the planet should just be a toggle switch. Our empire grows, building MegaGenius designs for everything.

And we run around installing psychic modules, ripping out the offending dashboards, keyboards, steering wheels, and every affordance known to the human race, replacing them all with automated magic switches.

What happens when one of these switches breaks?

As soon as anything breaks, the repair person faces a different kind of UX, the experience of trying to repair something. Are we designing for them too? Or do we not consider them users? Is the least amount of UI appropriate for them as well? If so, inside the switch should just be another set of toggle switches, going on into infinity all the way down? Even insane designers have moments of clarity and recognize that not everyone, all the time, is best served by militant simplification. There is always a person and a scenario justifying visible, and complex UI. Not all complex UI is designed equally: there are nuances to good complex design just as there are for simple ones.

Sometimes almost NO UI is the best UI

Now lets work the other way. Imagine we ran around the universe replacing every UI for anything with airplane cockpits. In every hallway, bathroom and bedroom, you’d find this on the wall instead of a light switch. To turn your mobile phone on or off, you’d have this to deal with. Want to open a door? No knob for you, instead you have to pull twelve levers , check readings on 3 displays and then simultaneously push two butons.

Of course this is absurd.

But it’s just as absurd as replacing every cockpit with a lightswitch. While the two UIs haven’t changed, the person and situation they’re being used in has and that makes all the difference.

In the end False Dichotomies are taunts. They get people riled up and picking sides. I’m telling you not to bother. Design is all about the specifics and when you see people red in the face arguing about abstractions either grab a beer and watch for entertainment, or do what’s more productive for your design talents and go make something for someone.

Mindfire 1.1 Launch: Wednesday 3/20 – help wanted

An updated edition of Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds, with more than 100 fixes, typo corrections and other minor improvements will be officially released next Wednesday. This collection of my best essays is finally cleaned up, polished and worthy of more readers.

9AM PST Wednesday March 20, I’ll make the book available for download here, for free, for 48 hours.

If you’re a fan, please put on it on your schedule. I’d be grateful for help spreading the word on the day.

I’ll be posting some fun making of materials from the book as we get closer.

Cheers.

 

Why schedules help even when they’re wrong

In an HBR article called The Dirty Secret of Project Management, the author claims the secret is no one believes in their schedules. I don’t agree that it’s a secret, but that’s not the point. Forget whether a schedule is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. Even if a project ends up months behind it probably did several important things.

Schedules, no matter how inaccurate they are, can do the following:

Schedules encourage commitments. A schedule is a list of tasks and names. To have a schedule means people have said they are promising something. Those promises form bonds between people that create morale, energy and trust. Of course if someone fails to deliver on their promise that breaks trust, but that’s the not necessarily the fault of the schedule itself. Even if everyone is behind schedule, everyone may be working as hard as the can and respect each other for the progress they’re achieving. Sometimes being behind schedule, or sharing the challenge of the schedule, brings a team together.
Schedules inspire people to feel part of a whole.  Everyone on a project with a schedule has the same endpoint to look forward to. They can see how their work fits in to something much greater than they could do alone. A schedule also allows people to anticipate challenges in the future, and easily recognize who they need to work with to overcome them.
Schedules break abstractions into chunks. A common rule of thumb in software is estimates must be between 1 and 3 days. A work item listed for “20 days” means someone hasn’t thought hard about their commitment. Schedules force people to break fuzzy ideas down into small, thoughtful pieces. And in the breaking down, good thinking begins.
Schedules make work trackable. Once you have a list of small work items, with names, it’s possible to track progress. Everyone can see as each unit of work is checked off the list. Even if the pace is behind ‘the schedule’, people have constant feedback on how much closer they are to the goal. Tracking work, and noting dependencies, helps people proactively deal with challenges before they block the  project.

Of course you want an accurate schedule. But even if you don’t have one, schedules provide important things successful projects need.

This is an excerpt from Chapter 2: The Truth About Schedules, From the bestselling book, Making Things Happen.

 

Upcoming speaking engagements near you (Bellevue, Chicago, Milwaukee, San Diego)

Here are a few speaking engagements over the next few weeks:

April 1st, Bellevue, 6:30pm, Microsoft Retail Store (details) – Speaking about speaking
April 6th, Chicago, TedXDePaul (tickets on sale and go fast) – on creativity and curation
May 1st, Milwaukee, WI, Keynote at SATURN Software Architecture conference, (details) – talking about the new book
Tue May 22nd, San Diego, An Event Apart (details) – on getting feedback without frustration

If you’re interested in hiring me to speak at your event, start here.

 

The top women innovators of all time

In honor of International Women’s day here’s a list of my favorite female innovators of all time.

Historical note: what’s most disturbing in the history of all innovation is how unfair history has been to women. Is hard to identify a singular cause but there’s evidence the shift to monotheism changed what had been a more balanced view of power, when there was still respect for male and female powers, into masculine centric cultures (See The Alphabet vs. The Goddess). Even by the time of the Western Enlightenment, women were still given few opportunities to study, work in pioneering fields or to receive acclaim for their work. It’d be wrong to blame monotheism alone, but its negative influence on opportunities for women is clear.

The ancient Greeks, who were progressive on many fronts, had few female philosophers and scholars, although there were some. Among the better known is  Hypatia, but few works from the time survived and it’s hard to know how much influence she had.

Top women innovators of all time:

Marie Curie - First person in history to win two Nobel Prizes (only other person to do it was Linus Pauling). She also defined the theory of radioactivity, a discovery she died for. Her life story of fleeing Poland for France, helping her family, and charitable works is awe inspiring. She discovered two elements and developed the first treatments using radioactive isotopes.
Georgia Okeefe The movements of her creative work over a prolific lifetime are comparable to Picasso’s in many ways. She was the first woman to have a solo show at The MOMA in NYC (1946).
Jane Austen - Helped define the style and structure of the modern novel and is one of the most popular writers in history.
Susan B. Anthony – A relentless advocate for equal rights for women, she wrote, lectured and organized groups in the pursuit of voting and other rights. She was arrested, in an act of civil disobedience  for voting in the 1872 U.S. presidential election. She died 14 years before the 19th U.S. Amendment was passed, granting voting rights to women.
Indira Ghandi became prime minister of India in 1966, second woman head of state in modern history, the first was  Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka (1960). Indira had an enormous impact on the future of India, defining many policies and systems of government still in use today.
Florence Nightingale – More than a nurse, she pioneered the use of statistics and visualizations (Nightingale Rose Diagram) and was a prolific writer and teacher. Medicine has been a productive field for women, with Françoise Barré-Sinoussi (contributed to discovery of HIV), Gertrude B. Elion (pioneer in cancer medication, Nobel Prize in Medicine 1988) and Clara Barton (founded the Red Cross) and Elizabeth Blackwell – First woman to receive a medical degree (1849) and become a doctor in the U.S.
Grace Hopper invented not only the progamming language COBOL but the very idea of a compiler (1952). And if that weren’t enough she was an Admiral in the Navy.
Ada Lovelace - The first computer programmer in history. She is possibly an example of historic gender bias, as some of the work Babbage is credited with possibly should be attributed to her, although the history from the time leaves many questions about who did what, as the work they were doing was of interest to few at the time.

As my historical note suggested, I’m not surprised all of these women lived in the last few centuries.

Top lists of anything are subjective. If you emphasize politics, arts or engineering you end up with different people. My goal was to balance the impact and challenge of these people’s works independent of how famous they became, regardless of domain.

In the category of modern marvels:

Kevlar, used in bullet proof vests was invented by Stephanie Kwolek(1965). The car windshield wiper by Mary Anderson (1903). Patsy Sherman co-invented Scotchgard in 1956 (despite her high school aptitude test telling her she should be a housewife).
Many homemaking and clothing inventions were by women, likely because these were the first domains they were allowed access to. The wire bra was invented by Caresse Crosby (1914), Josephine Cochrane invented the dishwasher in 1886 and Bette Graham invented Liquid Paper in 1956. Chemistry, the rising science in the 1950s, created new opportunities that were open to women for the first time.

Notable Mentions:

I did study Cleopatra, Mother Teresa, Amelia Earhart and many other famous historic women. The challenge is being famous and making contributions are different things. The history on Cleopatra isn’t great and Hollywood factors more in our perceptions than the sketchy facts we have. Mother Teresa didn’t invent or pioneer much of anything as far as I could tell, and while her charity is impressive it didn’t warrant a place on this list. Earhart’s short life is inspiring of course, but I’d consider her more a pioneer (first to do something) than an innovator (progressing something in a way that has lasting impact).

Hedy Lammar wins a prize for the most hollywood sounding story that happens to be true, as not only was she a  famous actress, but she patented a covert communications system used by the U.S. military and is used in how Bluetooth and Wi-Fi work.

Queen Elizabeth I had an astonishing autonomy, one of the first female heads of state, but her reign didn’t achieve much of lasting impact. Of course she may have inspired many women of later generations, but it’s hard to measure that on a list like this. Margaret Thatcher and Hillary Clinton also surface in political history, but their good works and visibility, while notable, were hard to stretch into innovations. Alison Bechdel actual came to mind for her Bechdel test which will blow your mind if you’ve never heard of it.

If you have a favorite female innovator I should study, leave a comment.

A class full of The Myths of Innovation

Many universities use The Myths of Innovation in courses on entrepreneurship or creativity, but David Burkus lined up his class for a photo, which I promised to post here.

Among other places he teaches at OSLEP, a program for top students across Oklahoma and they’re seen here.

If you use my book in a course, let me know. If you send in a photo I’ll post it here.

And of course you can read two full chapters of the book here.