Scott Berkun's Blog, page 55

The hard way is the easy way

Sometimes the hard way to do something is the easy way.

I am a bad guitar player. But I’m also a very happy one. A friend told me long ago it was good to have something you suck at, but enjoy anyway. It’s a healthy reminder that fun doesn’t require skill.

I play guitar nearly every day, usually as a brief escape from writing. When I get stuck with a writing project I pick up the guitar and sing and play for a few minutes. It always feels good. Soon I feel inspired again to get back to work. But my skill level has remained in exactly the same place for years. I’m an advanced beginner, maybe.

Recently I learned how to play a proper F chord. I’d been doing a hacky version of an F chord for years, mainly because to do it right required more practice than I was willing to do.

I finally just decided I was fed up playing it the hacky way. I tried the hard way a week ago.

It turned out that trying to play it the hard way was actually much easier than the hacky way. It did take more attempts to learn play it the right way, but when I got it working, it felt and sounded much better than the hacky way. Plus playing it the right way makes it easier to learn other chords that use the same shape. Whereas the hacky way has no reuse at all. It’s just a hack.

The hard way required maybe 35% more upfront effort, but for its payoff it was easier to learn than the hacky way, which never really worked well.

Sometimes the hard way to do something is the easy way.

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Published on July 29, 2012 13:23

Does dedicated innovation time work?

I wrote a popular post awhile ago with an opinion on Google’s 20% time concept. Howard Baldwin from Computerworld interviewed me about this. Sadly, none of my comments made it into his article. The good news is here are the questions he asked with my answers.

HB: Please characterize the importance of creativity and innovation in the context of the working environment?

SB: All work is problem solving. Creativity is simply another word for the process of solving problems. If you give me a tough problem and I solve it for you, you may tell me “wow you are so creative” but really what I did was solve a set of problems. I may have used some old ideas, or some new ones, but to you it’s all the same since your problem was solved. Obsessing about how innovative you are is a mistake because it distracts from the real goal of solving important problems. The more ambitious the goals of a team, the more problem solving skills they will need to be successful and they better they need to be at identifying the real problems to solve.

Assuming you have a great idea you still need a good project team to execute it. Success for that hinges on 3 factors:

Is there a small creative team driving the project? IT groups are often dominated by committees, and suffer from too many cooks. It’s harder for good ideas to thrive if there are dozens of people who have the power to veto them while they are still young. You need a small (3-5) team of people who have power over the creative process.
Trust. Most teams are dysfunctional. They are competing for promotion and resources. If the VP of the group isn’t successful at creating a culture of trust, the most brilliant ideas in the world will be destroyed by infighting.
Leaders willing to make change happen. All good ideas demand change. The bigger the idea, the more change that’s required. Change makes people who like the status-quo very uncomfortable. If the leader isn’t willing to take on the risk of change, no progress can happen no matter how brilliant the team or the ideas they produce are.

HB: How many of these innovation/creativity programs are you aware of?

Many. It’s very trendy now for executives to create innovation programs. Most of them fail. They fail because new ideas are the easy part. What happens when the VP gets 10 good new ideas – is he willing to fund them? Bet the division on them? Cut an old project loved by another VP to make room for one single new idea? The real challenge is on the leader’s willingness to change and take on the risks of change. No method can do that for them – they have to do that for themselves as leaders.

HB: Is there something that keeps these programs from being more popular?

Shallowness and hubris. The most common practice is taking a small slice of a culture from a successful company (Apple, Google, etc.) without studying the larger context, and trying to jam it into their own culture. It’s organ transplantation surgery done with a butter knife. There is great hubris in assuming that making a poor copy of something that is not well understood will have instant positive effects. Typically the thing being poorly copied is then blamed as ‘not working’ and the cycle continues with the next fad.

It takes a long time to change a culture and IT departments are generally very conservative, risk-averse and focused on the short term. Often it’s not their fault as those characteristics are defined for them by the CEO. But the end result is the same regardless of who is the cause.

HB: What’s the coolest program you’ve seen?

The coolest programs I’ve seen are IT groups that are led by people who have experience making new products, rather than only working in IT departments. They’re more willing to embrace change, they understand how to sequester risk on new ideas, and they are better at learning new lessons.

HB: What advice would you give a CIO considering implementing such a program?

Start small. Pick one project team. Pick a good leader who is good at new projects. Let them work with a different set of rules (e.g. 20% time). Agree on the goals (small) for the project but then mostly stay out of their way and focus on protecting them from annoying people and roadblocks. When they finish, ask them to evaluate the results. Did those new rules afford better results? Ask why or why not? Ask the team ‘what did we learn? what should we do differently next time?” then share those results with the rest of the company, and repeat. If the ‘new rules’ result in progress, the VP should encourage other teams to use them. If they didn’t, the CIO should repeat the experiment with a similar team, but with new rules, fueled by the team’s own opinion for what to change.

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Published on July 25, 2012 15:09

The tyranny of category

Most of the world is curved. Other than some man made things, everything bends. Rivers, streams, trees, and coastlines are all less than straight. Even the paths we make when we find shortcuts through cities have arcing angles, and rarely run in straight lines.

Putting things in order has value and right angles have their place. Order can give clarity and simplicity. The city grid makes certain neighboring streets are in parallel and not curved away from each other, which is a blessing when in a foreign place with a poor map. But organizing requires conformity, and conformity creates a tyranny over perception. While our universities divide the world in academic subjects, the world itself is not divided at all. The world has an infinite number of ways to be looked at. A bridge is not just engineering, it’s physics, commerce and aesthetics too. A person is not merely a name, they are biology, chemistry, physics, psychology, and metaphysics all at once. They can be a neighbor, a brother, a friend, a nemesis, simultaneously. We are multitudes and we, and everything in the universe, posses elements we may never define and that defy categorization.

The tyranny of category is when we think a thing is only what we have labeled it to be. A master of taxonomy and judgement has the illusion of expertise, since they choose what label an idea, or a person, is given. But like an olympic judge for gymnastics, the ability to score a performance on a scale from 1 to 10 is not the same as the ability to perform gymnastics itself. If you show me a soufflé, I can tell you what category of food it is, and judge it on how it compares to others I’ve eaten, but that does not give me the skill to make one. A film critic can harshly criticize a movie, but not possess any of the abilities required to make any film at all. The ability to categorize and critique has the pretense of superiority to creation, but not the substance.

In some cultures there is a tyranny of taxonomy. Nothing can be done without being categorized first. And that categorization limits the potential of the idea or the person since in a rigidly taxonomic environment, moving between categories is not allowed. The categories are primary, and the reality is secondary. It’s no surprise that these cultures produce square and lifeless things. Their obsession with order is contrary to the nature of ideas, and the world. Without constant reminders that categories are malleable inventions of convenience and not manifest in the world itself, the possibility of free thinking and progress is denied.

In Alan Watt’s The book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, he offers a visual example of this problem. Compare this:

To this:

As Watts wrote:

[in the second drawing] order has been imposed on chaos. We can now say that the wiggle goes so many squares to the left, so many to the right, so many up, or so many down, and at last we have a number… However much we divide, count, sort or classify this wiggling into particular things and events, this is no more than a way of thinking about the world: it is never actually divided.

I will mark this post intentionally as uncategorized.

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Published on July 18, 2012 14:41

How to be creative – the short honest truth

I’ve spent a decade studying how creatives do what they do and its simple: they work. Creativity is best thought of as a kind of effort, not an abstract thing – it’s what goes on when you are trying to solve a problem. The problem could be writing a poem, making a song, designing a website, anything. But no creative person in history was creative independent of working on some kind of project.

The biggest difference between you and Picasso, or Einstein, or whoever your heroes are is that they out work you. They spend more time in front of a canvas, or guitar, or computer, working away at applying their minds and souls to specific things.

Want to be more creative? Pick a problem you care about and get to work. If you don’t care about anything, your problem isn’t creativity, it’s apathy. If you start things and give up, your problem isn’t creativity, it’s dedication.

Few people in history that we call creatives today read books or took courses on creativity. Instead they apprenticed with masters in a craft and worked with them. They did the grunt work until they had the skills needed to do more sophisticated work. They learned how to develop ideas and deliver finished work by working. There is no other way.

Don’t believe me? Pick any creative hero, and any creative work they’re famous for, and investigate how many sketches, or drafts, or attempts they had to make to get it right. They may have had flashes of insight here and there, but those came while they were working their asses off. Ideas are cheap, it’s the passion to make ideas real that’s rare.

Also see: My Creative Mornings talk on Creative Thinking Hacks

(Note: originally posted on Quora)

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Published on July 17, 2012 08:57

How to become creative – the short honest truth

I’ve spent a decade studying how creatives do what they do and its simple: they work. Creativity is best thought of as a kind of effort, not an abstract thing – it’s what goes on when you are trying to solve a problem. The problem could be writing a poem, making a song, designing a website, anything. But no creative person in history was creative independent of working on some kind of project.

The biggest difference between you and Picasso, or Einstein, or whoever your heroes are is that they out work you. They spend more time in front of a canvas, or guitar, or computer, working away at applying their minds and souls to specific things.

Want to be more creative? Pick a problem you care about and get to work. If you don’t care about anything, your problem isn’t creativity, it’s apathy. If you start things and give up, your problem isn’t creativity, it’s dedication.

Few people in history that we call creatives today read books or took courses on creativity. Instead they apprenticed with masters in a craft and worked with them. They did the grunt work until they had the skills needed to do more sophisticated work. They learned how to develop ideas and deliver finished work by working. There is no other way.

Don’t believe me? Pick any creative hero, and any creative work they’re famous for, and investigate how many sketches, or drafts, or attempts they had to make to get it right. They may have had flashes of insight here and there, but those came while they were working their asses off. Ideas are cheap, it’s the passion to make ideas real that’s rare.

Also see: My Creative Mornings talk on Creative Thinking Hacks

(Note: originally posted on Quora)

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Published on July 17, 2012 08:57

Best posts of the month

You might be surprised to learn I send out a monthly newsletter covering any big news, tour dates, new magic spells, as well as a nice beefy listing of my best posts of the month. About 15k people subscribe, but I know more people read the blog directly. As an obvious experiment, I’m posting the best of here too.

Maybe this will encourage you to subscribe? Maybe you’ll dance in delight? Or perhaps you’ll curse my soul to an endless pit of despair for putting yet another annoying “best of” monstrosity into our nice little universe. Who knows? It’s an experiment! There is only one way to find out – here goes.

My best posts of the month:

Big News: I’m independent again
Inspired by a film, three times
The three piles of life
The future of outsourcing
Top Gun: In Hecklevision! (Review)

You can of course subscribe to the newsletter, free and awesome, right here.

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Published on July 09, 2012 11:26

The future of outsourcing

Dave Rodenbaugh, from How to buy a website, was one of my kickstarter supporters for my latest book Mindfire, a collection of my best essays. He had this request for a blog post: Where do I see outsourcing heading in the U.S. and the world for the next 5 years?

I avoid thinking about macro-trends. Even if on average all corporations are doing 10% more outsourcing, there can be many specific industries where the trend is exactly the opposite. The macro-trend matters less than what’s going on inside the particular industry, or company, you care about.

The short answer is outsourcing will continue to grow. And to shrink. I don’t see anything in the next 5 years that dramatically changes anything.

Outsourcing will grow because there are always businesses looking to reduce costs. By moving a job from inside to outside a company, the price paid for the work drops. Any large established company will eventually see slower growth, and will look for ways to make up the difference by saving money. There will always be companies looking to outsource and technology makes it easier every day.

Outsourcing will shrink because as soon as you outsource a job, you limit that worker’s ability to bring you new ideas. By making the job a commodity, the worker can no longer easily suggest ways to improve how the work is done. They will never, ever, offer a proposal that is better for the overall business but that eliminates the specific tasks they are being hired to do. For example, when you hire someone to mow your lawn, they are never going to suggest you get rid of your lawn. Whereas if you have a landscaper on staff, they will continually look for ways to improve your yard, including designs that have no grass at all. For companies or projects aimed at the equivalent of rethinking the yard, it’s natural to do as much work in-house as possible.

The rub is this: the more you outsource, the more compartmentalized and specialized your organization becomes. This can make you less flexible and less likely to develop new ways of working. Optimization demands inflexibility. A heavily outsourced company will have a hard time competing against a smaller, younger company that has found a new way to work. That younger company can afford to be inefficient since they are small, and inefficiencies can lead to discoveries. If they successfully take market share from the market leader, the market leader may never recover, as they’ve become less than the sum of their parts.

In larger organizations, the move to outsource or not swings on a pendulum. At times when competition wanes, or the economy stalls, there is a push to save costs and simplify, and more work moves outside. At other times when competition increases, or the market expands, more work moves inside to accelerate growth and take advantage of new opportunities. But as a rule, you never want to outsource work that is strategic. Your core business and core roles should always be done inside your company. Only a fool would outsource their heart or lungs by choice.

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Published on June 29, 2012 11:12

Trinity: a graphic history of the Atomic bomb (review)

I’m a fan of graphic novels on non-fiction topics. By putting techniques from comics and illustration at the forefront of the book, there is a power to convey complex ideas in salient ways that transcends written language. Books like LogicComix and The Book of Genesis by Crumb take on ambitious topics with grace, style, potency and charm.

The book Trinity, by Jonathan Fetter-Vorm of Two Fine Chaps, takes on the development of the first atomic bomb. He describes the planning, the personalities, and, with great style, the science involved in how they developed the ideas behind the bomb. It’s a short book, as most graphic novels are, but the illustrations will last long in my mind.

If you’ve been intimidated by Rhodes classic The Making of the Atomic Bomb and want a gentler introduction into the central history, issues, science and drama, this book is a great place to start. It’s also appropriate for young adults (the illustrations of the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end are moving more than graphic).

You can buy Trinity: a graphic novel history of the atomic bomb here.

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Published on June 28, 2012 08:47

Top Gun in Hecklevision: review

Weeks ago I saw the movie Johnny Mnemonic in a clever format called Hecklevision. In Hecklevision anyone in the audience can send text messages that appear on the screen. In my review I mentioned how the concept is interesting, but the particular movie and crowd didn’t live up to the idea. I decided to give it another try, and last night I saw Top Gun, in Hecklevision at Central Cinema in Seattle. It was the killer movie for the Hecklevision concept.

This time it was a packed house, even though it was a Monday night. And since everyone was very familiar with the movie, the heckling was much better. A high percentage of people participated rather than just watching which changed the vibe in the theater for the better. At times there were so many jokes appearing on the screen, they scrolled off while I was still laughing at them. As you’d expect the humor was often crude, but often clever too. I was impressed by how fast some people could generate funny comments. It seems the bigger the star, and the bigger the clichés, the better the heckling will be. In this regard, Tom Cruise at Val Kilmer turn out to be superior heckling material, compared to Keannu Reeves and Dolph Lundgren.

I’d definitely recommend Hecklevision if you can go with a large group of friends, or can find a showing of a popular film that will draw a big crowd.

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Published on June 26, 2012 11:03