Scott Berkun's Blog, page 45

The Redemption of Jonah Lehrer?

Twitter is aflutter today with talk of Jonah Lehrer, the (in)famous young author caught fabricating quotes, about his recent talk at the Knight Foundation where he was reportedly paid $20k to speak.  I can’t tell if it’s the price tag of his speaking engagement, or the fact he was given such a high profile forum to speak,  that has riled people up.

What I’ve wondered about since all this happened is: how does redemption work?

We often talk about forgiveness, compassion and second chances as cultural values. These ideas are deeply imbedded in many religions and cultures. But when someone we follow fails us, those ideals go out the window. We run with our outrage and put them in a box we never let them even try to earn their way out of. Perhaps some crimes are so heinous that there is no redemption, but what are they? How do we evaluate these things?

Questions that come to mind include:

Is there a redemption formula?
Is there a number of good acts they must do, or a period of time without ‘failing’ again to re-earn our basic trust and respect?
Is our judgement based on something more than behavior? Was that true before we were betrayed?
What are the measures we use to decide?
What kinds of violations are unredeemable?

Shouldn’t there be some criteria, however daunting, we use to let people work their way out of the damage they’ve done?

From the talk transcript he’s clearly contrite:

12:39: Lehrer introduces himself: “For those who do not know who I am, let me give you a brief summary: I’m the author of a book on creativity that contained several fabricated Bob Dylan quotes. I committed plagiarism on my blog, taking without credit or citation an entire paragraph from the blog of Christian Jarrett. I plagiarized from myself. I lied to a journalist named Michael Moynihan to cover up the Dylan fabrications.”

But perhaps an apology was part of what the Knight Foundation demanded he do. The first challenge of redemption it seems is convincing people you’re at least as upset about what was done as they are, which is no easy task.

As my questions suggest I don’t have the answers. I don’t understand how the mathematics of atonement work, yet I’m convinced we need one.

What do you think?

[Update: Lehrer posted his talk transcript here]

Advice for speakers bored with their own material

A basic rule offered in Confessions of a Public Speaker is to pick material you care deeply about, since you can’t blame an audience for being bored if you are. But what I didn’t cover is what to do when you  have to present the same material 300 times: how do you stay excited about it then?

Steven Estes asked:

As academic advisors at a large university, we have a unique presentation dilemma during summer orientation.  We have to present the same material every day for six weeks.  We do use Power Point, but are entertaining the idea of breaking away from it.  We tried having each advisor present a different part of the short (15 minute) presentation, but it gets pretty stale by week three–and we still have three weeks to go.

There are many ways to keep material interesting, but they all involve some work, or at least paying more attention. Consider that many stand-up comedians do the same 45-60 minutes of material night after night. Broadway actors have to say the same lines again and again for weeks on end. What keeps them interested? Primarily it’s the energy they get from their audience. If the performer is paying attention the energy in the room, from the audience and from their co-performers, it’s different each time and that’s what makes it interesting to do the same thing again and again. Although the script is the same, each day and performance is new to everyone there and as a performer you have to use that energy from the audience to help you. 

Here’s a short list of things to consider if you’re bored with your material: 

Improvisation. If you can base part of each segment on something from the audience: a story, a question, a unique element of the particular demographic you are speaking to on that day, change will be introduced naturally as part of your material. Think of your material as a kind of Mad Lib, with segments that depend on the injection of something from the audience (or from your co-presenter). If you choose the right slot, it will be different every time.


Have audiences make choices. Design the material so the audience has to make choices. Let’s say you have a story you tell 5 minutes in to drive a point home. Learn 3 different stories/examples and let the audience vote to pick which one you tell (Or randomly choose one yourself each time if the audience keeps picking the same one).
Examine the room to see what options are available. Perhaps you can stand in a different place when you’re speaking. Or use a hand microphone instead of the one on the lectern. One time try walking around Phil Donahue style. Maybe use a higher pitched voice, or a lower one. If you study the room there are many variables you can add that the audience will never notice since they only see the talk once, but that will make each instance interesting for you, and you’ll learn something new about public speaking or your material each time you change something.
Play secret games with your co-presenters. Each day pick an uncommon word from the dictionary at random. Every presenter has to find a way to work that word into their section. There are many games like this you can play.
Improve the slides. How boring are your slides? Simpler, cleaner slides will garner more energy from your audience which will help keep you interested.
Tell personal stories, not lists of instructions. Don’t you have stories from your childhood you love telling again and again? If you make the presentation a series of stories, perhaps about stupid (or amazing) things that have happened at previous summers, instead of lists of instructions, your energy will be different. They don’t even have to be your personal stories: you can tell the stories of other college students.
Change something in the material every few days. Presentations are a series of linked stories. If you change even one story it forces you to also change the segue you use to get into the new story and the segue you have to use to get out of it. One seemingly small change can ripple through how you give the entire presentation, at least the first time you make the change.
Make it theater. Don’t simply do tag-team speaking where one person speaks at a time. Instead of slides, use the other two speakers to act out or demonstrate every point the speaker makes. This requires the effort to write the presentation more like a play and less like a business presentation, but it will give everyone something to do all the time and likely engage the audience better too.
Start over. It’s probably time to move on. C.K. Louis, inspired by the great George Carlin, drops all his old material each year and starts over. You’ve learned so much since the last time you started from scratch. Give yourself and your audience a chance to have fun again with something fresh for everyone.

I’m always changing my material, even in specific talks I’m asked to give again and again. I’m a different person each time I give a talk, with new stories or opinions to share. By making changes I get excited to see what happens, and it brings life to topics I’ve talked about dozens or even hundreds of times before.

Meet me in Dublin next week

I’ll be in Ireland next week, giving the Keynote at the Technology at Work conference organized by Invest NI.

On Wednesday and Thursday I’ll be down in Dublin for some relaxation, and to work on the second draft of my next book in a town with an amazing literary history (including Beckett, one of my favorites).

If you’re a local and want to meet for some drinks or a meal, let me know.

Why you should pick your own boss

Ty Clark asked me for advice on job seeking: The best advice I’ve ever heard about picking a job is to pick your boss first, not the job.

This is challenging since the system of finding jobs is designed the other way: it’s set up to let bosses pick you. Job ads don’t have a field listing a “Boss Suckiness Index (BSI)” or “what % of her reports love or hate her.” At best you talk to your possible boss during an interview, and interviews are mostly BS. Yet by focusing on who your boss will be above most other criteria changes both how you pursue jobs and how happy you’ll be once you pick one.

The simple reasons why your boss matters more than you realize are:

A good boss in a mediocre company will protect you and support you on a daily basis.
A bad boss in a good company will frustrate and demoralize you on a daily basis.

In the first case, you will learn more and possibly have more opportunities than in the latter. A good boss will recognize your talents and develop them. A bad boss may never recognize what you can do at all, or take advantage of you more than help you.

Most people looking for jobs focus on other criteria such as:

Salary.This is important, but beyond your minimum needs it can be a trap. There are many people with $250k salaries who hate their jobs and, as a consequence, their lives. They work with coworkers who were also primarily attracted to salary. If you are thinking long term, or want a high growth career, salary can’t be your primary criteria. Salary is the laziest measure of the quality of a job and therefore the weakest.
What you will work on. Many people are attracted to specific projects or roles. I did this for years until I learned hot projects didn’t necessarily make for happy/productive work environments. While I learned much, my career suffered. I watched plenty of people thinking longer term who stayed with good managers rather than chasing cool projects, and they rose in seniority in the company as their managers did.  


What your job title will be. Even if you have to work as an intern, if you are talented and work hard a good boss will recognize your ability and move you into a position worthy of your skills. Even if they don’t have another job opening for you, a good boss will have a healthy network and can help place you somewhere that does, with a good manager they know who works there. Chasing the best job title you can get at the expense of who you’ll be working for is a trap: they may never let you leave that job title, no matter how much you outgrow it.

Picking bosses demands having a strong network. You need to cultivate friendships with people in your field where you can share notes on the bosses you’ve worked for. It takes time and research to put it together, but knowing who in your field the good managers are and seeking them out is the best asset you can have for a long and healthy career. If you have one or two companies in mind, investigate who the best bosses are in your job function so you know the landscape, and if the opportunity presents itself, which way to lean if an opportunity arises.

The less experience you have, the harder it is to pick your own boss when you’re hired. That’s ok. Instead ask about how much internal mobility there is: do people move between teams and groups easily? If yes, once hired your goal should be to figure out what things you need to set in motion to give you that choice and to study who is the best boss there for you.

How to learn from a nuclear missile

One great way to find management insights is to study a field other than your own. By becoming a tourist, a traveler, it’s easier to be curious. You can ask big questions since you’re free from the baggage of your own ego. It’s one reasons movies like Apollo 13, Hoosiers, and Miracle are popular films among management types looking for inspiration, rather than stories pulled directly from the business world.

One recent find is the story of the Polaris nuclear missile management team. Could you design a breakthrough technology, under competition, short deadlines and the defense of the free-world at stake? These guys did.

The story is told by the boringly titled book The Polaris System Development. Although published by Harvard University Press, its not easy to find. The best summary I’ve found is from, of all places, Budapest University. Here’s an excerpt:

Once given the mandate and start-up funds, the SPO had an enormous task – to bring into being an entirely new weapons system. This included nuclear powered submarines, then in their infancy, global navigation and communication systems, missile systems, launching systems, fire-control systems and maintenance, support and training programs. Most of these components did not exist at the time – many were still only on the drawing board. All had to be designed, built, tested and integrated into one workable unit and made operational, from scratch — within five years! Building a weapons system based on the promise of one or two technologies was not unusual, but doing it on a dozen technologies was.

Read the entire summary/analysis of the book (PDF). It’s an easy read and I promise will have you thinking more deeply about your own business than your standard case studies will.

Update: here’s an additional summary and recommendation.

Hat tip to Steven Smith for recommending the Polaris story.

Have other great stories of management and innovation from unusual projects? Leave a comment.

[Note: this article originally written for Harvard Business Review.]

Research assistant wanted

I’m hiring a research assistant to help with my current book about working for WordPress.com, a company where everyone works from anywhere around the world.

This is an experiment at finding a win/win for working on a book: lets see if it works.

The goal of the research is to find data, and good summaries, to answer questions about remote work across different industries and cultures. It’s a task I can do, but one of you folks who likes researching things might enjoy helping with a book, and getting paid for it.

Here’s the rundown:

The job starts ASAP
It’s probably a total of 10-20 hours of work over the next month
The tasks will be things like “find out what companies have trait X or Y” or “what evidence is there of V or Z”
You need basic statistics knowledge (how to poke holes in study claims and evaluate research quality)
You need to have google-fu and possibly fu for academic search engines
You need to write well enough to organize what you find so it’s easy for me to consume, with references
You’d get to help shape some of the book and chat with me about various book things
You can tell me what you think you should be paid

To apply:

Answer this question: “What % of companies allow telecommuting of any kind?”
Write up a brief summary and cite your sources
Email it to me at info at scottberkun.com
Include the words “inchoate” and “papaya” somewhere in your message
I’d expect this would take an hour or less to complete
You have until EOD Friday

There’s only one position and I will update here as soon as I’ve found someone (So check back before you do this work). I don’t want to waste your time.

Cheers.

How to revise a first draft (update on the next book)

The only faith a writer needs to have is in the next draft.

The quality of any draft doesn’t matter much provided its not your last draft.  The goal of any effort in writing is to work hard now to provide the future version something better to work with. Each draft is a gift to yourself in the future.

I’m working on my fifth book now and I’ve developed these rules for how revise draft #1:

Let it sit for a few days. The best editing happens when you are unattached. You need distance from the work to be able to edit it well. You need to be willing to rip entire sections out and rewrite others. If you’re afraid to cut anything, you’re not ready. Let it sit more.
Print the whole thing out. We read more carefully on paper. Writing notes on paper can be easier, depending on your habits (see ‘true reading’ below). There’s also a pride you’ll feel in physically holding the book you don’t get with digital versions.
Read the whole thing (aka ‘The Big Read’). I read the entire book in one or two sittings. I need to have the entire experience in my mind to properly consider how to reorganize things. This read is often painful: you must confront all the things that aren’t finished yet, which will be many. The good news is everything is easier after the Big Read.
Take high and low level notes. Catch grammar and typos, but primarily note issues of pace, flow, and unneeded paragraphs. Put question marks down for things that don’t make sense. Does the flow from one chapter to the next make sense? Is there a chapter that needs to be added? removed? Sections within chapters that make no sense? Do I rewrite this or cut it completely? But I don’t rewrite as I do the Big Read. I make notes but try to continue as much as possible, as if I were just a reader.
Get feedback. A draft, even with dozens of typos and known issues, is still a complete work someone can read. Ask two or three people you know, who you trust, who you can count on to give you honest feedback to have a go. Start with a few chapters: if that goes well, give them more. Be specific about the kinds of feedback you want, when you need it by, and how they should deliver it to you. Make it easy for them: they are doing you a big and intimate favor. Make sure to separate your supporters who cheer you on, from people who will give you the tough but fair feedback you need to make the book better. They are probably not the same people. Giving the book to your bigest fan or best friend puts them in a bind: they want to be positive, but what the book needs most is an honest, knowing eye, something they may not be qualified or comfortable giving you. It does not improve the draft to be told only “your draft is great.”
Get to work on the second draft. With my notes, and notes from early readers, by my side, I get to work in digital form. If I’m moving chapters into a new order or writing new ones, I do that first. Then I work in the order of the chapters, revising, rewriting, rereading and editing as I go.

Many writers never do #3. It shows. The goal of a book is to provide one experience that lasts hours. If the author doesn’t read through the entire book in draft form it will be sheer luck if the chapters hold together well.

Working on paper also forces truer reading. If you work with a digital version you’ll be tempted to clean things up as you go. This seems efficient but it takes you out of the reading experience and puts you into a writing mode. It’s more important to be inefficient, but stay in the reading mindset to truly understand what the book currently is, so when you’re done you’ll have clarity on what it needs to become.

The second draft is always a delight to actually work on.  It’s as if a gift was given to me: much of the heavy lifting is done. Even if a chapter needs rewriting the creative energy required is much less than working with blank pages. And since often the best move is to rip things out, the book gets better in big swings at every turn.

In many cases for non-fiction books, two major drafts are all you have time for.

Here’s what the first draft for my next book looks like from 10,000 feet. 76k words.

I’m doing the Big Read today. Wish me luck.

 

 

What rules do good friends follow? (thoughts wanted)

I’ve been thinking about friendships and why some last and others fade away. It seems there is an unwritten set of rules people who stay friends are able to follow, even if they don’t even sit down and discuss them.

I’ve certainly never had a friendship where there was an official meeting, where a  friendship charter was drawn up detailing what everyone expected of each other, or planting seeds for how to deal with difficult situations that might arise. Have you ever been a friendship where a compact for how the friendship should work was discussed?

It seems strange to me how sometimes the most important relationships in our lives are assumed to not require the same investment of consideration for how they function (or fail) as the relationships we have at work.

I’m looking for your thoughts on what the implicit, or explicit, agreements friendships that last have. And any stories you might be willing to share about how you arrived at those ‘rules.’ Or how the lack of them impacted you.

Looking forward to your thoughts.

Learning about management from open source projects

In the course of working on the new book about my time working for WordPress.com, I’ve been reading various books on open source projects and how they’re managed. The most useful book by far has been Fogel’s Producing Open Source Software.  There’s plenty of good advice for all managers of software development no matter what philosophy is used.

Fogel does a fantastic job of taking the core challenges head on, from what culture and community are, how to grow them, dealing with conflict and the roles leaders have to play for healthy cultures to grow. Some of the book does focus on tools, which I didn’t need, but that let me read the entire book in a single enjoyable sitting.

A second edition is underway and you can contribute to the kickstarter project to make sure it happens. I did. The 2nd edition is slated to come out this fall.  The current edition is available online for free here to read right away while you wait for the update.

 

Choice quotes from the book include:

Try not to let humans do what machines could do instead. As a rule of thumb, automating a common task is worth at least 10 times the effort a developer would spend doing that task manually one time. For very frequent or very complex tasks, that ratio could easily go up to 20 or even higher.

On the faith in fancy projects and heroes:

The most well-known organizational models of getting things done—whether it’s building a house, producing a motion picture, or writing software—tend to concern the prediction of and commitment to specific outcomes, mitigating risk to the plan, and correcting surprises along the way. In such models, innovation is seen to happen at the moment of inspiration of the idea—and the remaining 99% of the effort is perspiration, to paraphrase Edison. Say it along with me: “Yeah, right.” This view looks at innovation as a very solitary sport; we want to talk about Steve Jobs as the guy behind the iPod, rather than the mix of good engineers and product marketing types who collaborated with Steve to find the right sweet-spot combination of features and fashion.

On the myths and realities of crowdsourcing:

Without descending into hand-waving generalizations like “the group is always smarter than the individual” (we’ve all met enough groups to know better), it must be acknowledged that there are certain activities at which groups excel. Massive peer review is one of them; generating large numbers of ideas quickly is another. The quality of the ideas depends on the quality of the thinking that went into them, of course, but you won’t know what kinds of thinkers are out there until you stimulate them with a challenging problem.

And on managing releases out the door:

Thus, the process of stabilizing a release is mostly about creating mechanisms for saying “no.” The trick for open source projects, in particular, is to come up with ways of saying “no” that won’t result in too many hurt feelings or disappointed developers, and also won’t prevent deserving changes from getting into the release.

The Meaningful is greater than the Improbable

In Kevin Kelly’s recent article The Improbable is the New Normal, he points out how we can now see amazing things every minute of the day.

Every minute a new impossible thing is uploaded to the internet and that improbable event becomes just one of hundreds of extraordinary events that we’ll see or hear about today. The internet is like a lens which focuses the extraordinary into a beam, and that beam has become our illumination. It compresses the unlikely into a small viewable band of everyday-ness. As long as we are online – which is almost all day many days — we are illuminated by this compressed extraordinariness. It is the new normal.

He’s right. The ubiquity of video cameras mean Youtube is the largest event filter in history, allowing us to create an endless playlists of amazing things.

That light of super-ness changes us. We no longer want mere presentations, we want the best, greatest, the most extraordinary presenters alive, as in TED. We don’t want to watch people playing games, we want to watch the highlights of the highlights, the most amazing moves, catches, runs, shots, and kicks, each one more remarkable and improbable than the other.

This is not true for everyone. Highlight reels get boring, fast.  They show people we don’t know doing things in places we’ve never been. We have no emotional stake in what happens. The lack of contrast with the ordinary makes each clip less potent than it would be on its own.

Amazing things can be meaningless. The spectacle of a stranger has no personal significance.

But watching your son play in his first high school basketball game, or your best friend get up on stage at karaoke for the first time, even if neither results in any performance worthy of anyone else’s interest, will mean a great deal to you. Someone you care about will have done something that mattered to you and to them, transcending any universal evaluation of how probable it was or wasn’t.

For many people the video they care about most is meaningless to the rest of the planet. And same goes for their memories too.

I am unsure of what this intimacy with the improbable does to us. What happens if we spend all day exposed to the extremes of life, to a steady stream of the most improbable events, and try to run ordinary lives in a background hum of superlatives? What happens when the extraordinary becomes ordinary?

It’s possible it has little or no effect. For decades television has been a box of improbable events, churning out endless scenes of unlikely situations, played out by absurdly beautiful people. Mostly the effect has been nil, or worse, has drawn many people to spend much of their free time watching more television.

It’s meaning that matters. An endless hi-def video stream of amazing things may have zero effect on our courage to decide what has meaning, and to get off our asses to do something about it.