Scott Berkun's Blog, page 63

Quote of the week

American Masters recently released a two part documentary about Woody Allen (available online in U.S.), which I highly recommend if you are interested in learning about the creative process. While I loved his early movies, I didn't follow the rest of his career closely (although his recent Midnight in Paris was excellent). Regardless, this documentary is an excellent balance of direct commentary from Allen, choice clips from his films and insight from critics, co-workers, family and others.

Here are two gems:

"There are a lot of surprises that happen between writing it, doing it, and seeing it on the screen, most surprises are negative. Most surprises are that you thought something was good, or funny, and it's not. I've made just about 40 films in my life and so few of them have really been worth anything. Because it's not easy – if it's easy it wouldn't be fun, it wouldn't be valuable."

"By the time you get the thing together it's such a mess, and you're flitting around the editing room making all sorts of compromises, and saying well gee, if I put the last scene first, and the middle scene at the end of the picture, and get a narrator, and use dissolves, and use opticals, and put this in slow motion and use titles here, you're struggling for survival. And I still screw up a lot of the time. So that's why I've often said… the only thing standing between greatness is me. There is no excuse."

-Woody Allen, American Masters Documentary

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Take my course on Innovation, online, right now

A secret project I did with O'Reilly Media is now available online.

For years I've taught full day workshops around the world on how to manage breakthrough projects. Beyond all the hype, it's all the practical advice and time-tested wisdom I've learned from my own career and dedicated research into how others have made great things.

The fine folks at O'Reilly Media recorded one version of the course, with a live audience, and has now made it available online. They edited it down to a lean 3 hours and 55 minutes. No fluff. No nonsense.

The course includes chapters on:

Practical Creative Thinking
Leading Creative teams
Psychology of Innovation
The wonders of incubation
Project Management for Breakthroughs
Business
Balance

Unlike the Myths of Innovation, which emphasized history and understanding, the course is focused on pragmatics –  overcoming challenges leaders and managers  face when working on projects with the goals of innovation and breakthroughs.

The  course's regular price is $99, but for today, it's available at a sizable discount (60% off).

Use discount code: CYBERMONDAY .

Head over here for all the details: you can even watch part of the class for free.

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The fascinating history of Jelly Belly jelly beans (documentary)

Recently I watched a documentary about the history of the Jelly Belly company, called Candyman: The David Klein Story (Netflix streaming).  I highly recommend it. It's an unusually honest and simply told tale about one man with many ideas, who changed an industry, with mixed feelings about the results.

What's most compelling about the documentary is the characters are so interesting. David Klein, the center of the documentary, is a charming and genuinely nice man, whose travails through the competitive world of candy manufacturing are captivating, fascinating and, and at times, provocative. It raises various questions to any viewer about how they might have done things differently, or if they even posses the inventiveness to enter those situations at all.

I highly recommend watching Candyman, as it's an unusually fresh and unvarnished tale of ideas, entrepreneurship, business and ethics, all wrapped around a tiny little tasty invention.

It'd make for great viewing this holiday season as it's a topic people of any age can relate to, and ask question about, leading to discussions about what you might have done differently. Perfect for the young inventor or entrepreneur in your extended family.

If you want to know what he's up to now, he's still inventing and selling all kinds of creative candies.

(Note: The original version of this post was lost to the angry muses of web development, and entirely re-written. If it seems different from how you remember, you're right).

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The history of Jelly Belly jelly beans

Recently I watched a documentary about the history of the Jelly Belly company, called Candyman: the David Klein story.

It's an oddly intriguing tale, one that becomes more compelling and strange as you watch.

The central figure, David Klein, the man who had the original idea for a premium jelly bean with unusual flavors, seems entirely affable and charming in his way, and as the drama of how he lost control of his company develops, this contrast between big business, competition and his simple good nature makes for great viewing.

I'd recommend it as an unusual story of entrepreneurship, creativity, business ethics, and ideas. More details of the story can be found on the wikipedia page for Jelly Belly.

If you want to know what David Klein is up to now, here's his candy company, Nifty Candy.

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Innovation vs. mere improvement: how do you know what you have?

As part of my gift to some of my kickstarter supporters for Mindfire, I offered to write a blog post on the topic of their choice. Here's the first of many to come.

Dirk Haun asked:

Can you draw a line between what's considered Innovation and what's merely considered Improvement?

I've ranted before about jargon in creativity and one of my targets has been the many tag along words people use in conjunction with innovation. This includes words like disruptive, and incremental, or innovation pipelines and innovation frameworks. It's mostly hogwash.

First, this is not the language inventors use. Find me the people who actually invented anything at any famous company and you'll find the language they use is very simple. Words like prototype, problem, experiment, design and solution. They have a problem in mind and they aim all their energy at solving it. The fancy words mostly come from people who arrive well after the inventing and innovating is done, including innovation consultants.

Second, deciding what is incremental and what is revolutionary is subjective. There is no universal measurement. From Swan's perspective, Edison made some minor tweaks to light bulb design. To anyone who was ignorant of Swan's work, Edison seemed Promethean. To pre-revolution Americans, democracy seemed brilliant and new. To anyone who'd studied the Greeks, they'd think the U.S. was ripping them off (down to the way we styled our monuments in D.C.). To measure an idea, you need to define who it's being aimed at, as where you aim will change the value of the idea.

Third, small changes can have disproportionately large effects. See Does Size Matter for ideas? (HBR). You don't necessarily need a big idea to have big changes on an industry or a product. Some very small ideas can have surprising leverage for change.

To directly answer the question, Innovation is largely a word used to describe the scale of the effect on an idea, rather than the idea itself. And since no inventor controls the effect their idea has on the world, innovation is frequently a term than lands on ideas/products after they're been released into the world, rather than before.

From the widest perspective, all ideas are incremental. Every new idea,  no matter how radical, is comprised of previous ideas and concepts, albeit perhaps combined in novel ways. Is the Prius a radical idea? Depends how much you know about the history of automobiles. Different power sources were a big part of the early days of car design, when steam and electricity were contenders.

The most sensible way to evaluate an idea is its potential impact on who it's specifically being designed for, and what problem it solves for them. If you save someone's life with an incremental idea, they'll be just as happy as if you used an innovative one. They don't care about the label, they care about the effect.  As the tragic counterpoint: if you fail to solve their problem with an innovative idea, they'll be very angry, and then they'll be very dead.

An incremental change can have a huge effect on a particular customer. If someone only speaks Spanish, and you add support for that language (an incremental improvement) it can have huge positive impact. And by the same token, a radical change to a product can have negative or no effect at all on customers. The mere fact that a new idea introduces change for users, and relearning, may mean the learning costs outweigh any of the benefits provided by the new idea.

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Can you say much in 500 Words? Essays vs. Blogs

At the book launch party last week for Mindfire, I gave a short talk. Someone asked about the new book, and essays, and I explained how it is my favorite form.

My friend Laura wrote up a good post riffing on this idea:

What I think he was getting at – and this is not confirmed by the time of posting – is that many bloggers write and ramble. They toss their ideas out there online and add to the content overload that we experience every time we log into Facebook or check our stream on Twitter. And the process of writing an essay requires restraint. It requires you to think and process and prove what you want to say before you throw it out there.

And the 500-word limit means you need to get to your point. Fast. It's a reflection of the 140-character, enlighten us, but make it quick, world that we live in. If you can't get to your point right away, then you shouldn't even bother.

She makes some other excellent points, so you should read her full post.

For a long time I believed an essay was rigidly defined as what I was taught in college. I've learned since an essay is whatever I as a writer say it is. Form is just a bag to put things in. If you can find people who keep reading what you're writing, don't worry much about form. It's mostly English majors who are struggling to write much themselves who argue much about form. And if you want to be all factual about it, the history of the essay points back to Montaigne, who followed none of the standard instructions English professors (many of whom can't write their way out of a paper bag) pretend are universal law.

The rub is that good writing must be concise without being shallow. Much of what passes as brevity (twitter, facebook and the web) is definitely short, but also empty. Just because you use few words doesn't guarantee you have anything interesting to say, nor that you are saying it well.

500 or 1000 words is an intellectual sprint. The challenge of effectively taking on a big topic in such a short space demands thinking, editing, style and courage, all of which I need to practice as a writer. Good blog posts are indistinguishable to me from a good essay. Once the writer has brought me happily into their world, form fades away.

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Things I miss

Some things I miss:

Having a diner a block away that serves breakfast until 4am
A nearby playground where there's always a good game of basketball
Meeting my friends early at school to play Salugi in the park
Running to the pizza place near my elementary school, for lunch, where you'd get a slice and a soda for $1
The undeniable sense life is unimaginably long
The freak show of White Castle on Northern Blvd and Bell, at 2am on a Friday
The convenience store that sold us 15 year olds all the beer we wanted
Talking to close friends for hours without an excuse for why
Playing football in the streets
Crusing Franny Lew, just to make fun of other people who cruised Franny Lew
The ethereal sense of abundant undivided time
Watching summer thunderstorms at dusk, raging on the horizon, above the street on my parents porch

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How do you get wise? The story of Mindfire

I'm sneaky.

While I write about business and creativity things, every 4th or 5th post here for years has contained a  dose of philosophy. I'd never call it that of course, since nothing makes people stop having fun faster than mentioning the P word. But posts like How to be a freethinker, Simplifiers vs. Complexifiers, Hating vs. Loving and even How to detect BS all poke at wisdom, albeit from very different directions.

The goal in my new book, Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds, was to compile my best provocative essays (including those listed above) into one easy to read volume. To stop being sneaky, and frame a book on the theme of intelligent provocation of wisdom. If you want to think hard and have fun, this book can do that for you.

Between the lines of the book is how I've learned whatever it is I know.  The process I've used all along to write these essays is something like this:

I read and listen
I think
I come up with a hypothesis
I write it down
I share it
People respond and I read
I'm right, but also wrong
I patiently sort out which is which
I learn from where I'm wrong and think about it more
I refine where I'm right, and think about it more
Repeat

In the book, you benefit from over a decade of me learning how to be wise, from writing. I write often, if you haven't noticed. And I know not all of it's great. But I can promise the best writing I've done in the pursuit of wisdom is in Mindfire. And I hope you'll pick up a copy for that reason alone.

And when you do, please write a review. Let me know what you think. Even if you hate it, you'll be helping me write the next thing and the next. If you think I have more wisdom to share than you found, this will ensure there's more to come.

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In defense of flubs (and Rick Perry)

It is foolish to confuse a moment of forgetting with stupidity.  All people who speak make mistakes. We forget things. We confuse words. We lose our train of thought. And if you listen to a recording of yourself for even an hour in your daily life you'll notice all sorts of gaffs, odd pauses, and long moments of complete inability to remember facts you are certain that you know.

Taken in context of everything else you say, these moments are easily overlooked by your coworkers and family. But taken out of context, and shown in isolation, its easy to make you look downright stupid. Even though all those who think you are stupid based on a small sample, make the same mistakes in their own lives every day.

Presidential debates are shows. They mislead us into thinking speaking on TV is the primary function presidents have, and better speakers will make for better presidents, which is sketchy logic at best. A candidate can claim whatever they like at the lectern, but doing the job requires a very different set of skills.

In the case of Rick Perry, I won't say much about his merit as a presidential candidate. It's safe to say I'm not a fan. But I can say that a flub, on its own, is a poor basis for evaluating anyone's ability to do anything.  He could have handled his forgetting (and his campaign) with much more poise, but the mistake itself is almost noise.

A week ago, a 4 minute video, often titled with suggestions Perry was drunk when he spoke, made the rounds. It was excerpted from a 20 minute speech, and it is informative for anyone who only watches the highlights to watch both.

It would have been nice to see discussion of the merit (or not) of his ideas drive how we evaluate him, but that would involve more effort from us than watching entertaining video clips that gives us the illusion of feeling smart.

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Why give a book away for free?

[image error]Last week I decided to give away my new book, Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds, for free from my website, for 48 hours. Some have asked me why I would do this, as I've been a popular author and my previous books have sold well.

Here's a list of reasons why:

Platform. I could have sold some books, but by giving it away for a period of time I got extra PR and reach I would have had to pay for otherwise.  I tripled the size of my mailing list in just two days.
Interest. It's a way to generate interest in the book, and the wave of interest will outlast the 48 hour free period (at least I hope so :) Sales are slow today, but I'm betting the free readers will like what they read, and create a second wave of interest.
The book is a collection of essays already online. I wanted to ensure my loyal readers didn't pay for the book in digital form, since they'd read much of the book already. I wanted to avoid any fan saying "I didn't realize and I paid for it – I feel like a sucker".  Instead I want them to feel enlisted to spread my work, and making a new book free empowers them to do that.
I'm a long-term author. I'm not worried about the sales of any particular book. I need to experiment and try different things to learn about how all this works so I'm smarter about how to create and market the work I do.
I'd like to broaden my reputation. Mindfire covers a wide range of challenging topics not in my other books, and it will expand people's perceptions of my abilities.  I'd gladly trade a pile of royalties (short-term) for an improved perception and wider fan base (long-term).
Giving it away generates interest from people who want to know why an established author would do this :). It's another way to gain attention for positive reasons.

You can download a free preview of Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds  (nearly 1/3rd of the content) right here.

The book is for sale on amazon.com (print / kindle), Barnes and Noble, Sony Nook and iBookstore.

Also see, Why I decided to self publish Mindfire.

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