Scott Berkun's Blog, page 92

Post #1000: A Strawman for Everything

Well here we are. It's post 1000! Surprised to have written so much here.  Thanks for reading, linking, and commenting, as that's a huge motivator for my prolificity.

For post #1000 it seemed i should try and sum up. Be concise. Get to the point of whatever it is I'm trying to do. Here are five big swings, themes you'll find in much of my other writing. It's preachy as hell, but hey, it's post 1000 .

A Strawman for EverythingWe need to ask more questions. I don't just mean kids. I mean adults...

The end of the killer feature

At The Economist Ideas Economy event Matt Mullengweg, founder of Wordpress, in an excellent talk about open source software, proclaimed the end of the killer feature. He asked the packed audience of high profile influentials how many people use Firefox, and how many of them have a plugin installed – and a good percentage of them raised their hands.

He's got a point. For many kinds of products, it's the end of the killer feature. Not everywhere, not for all kinds of products. But the trend is d...

Should you pay for an outside speaker?

A potential client asked me – we're not sure it makes sense to pay a speaker to come to us. What's your argument? And so, I sat down and wrote this.

Clearly I'm biased, since I make a good part of my living being hired to speak.

However, back when I was a manager it was rare I hired someone merely to come talk to my team.  Same for consultants. The amount these people wanted seemed outrageous. I also had the sense I'd failed if I had to bring someone else in to teach, explain, motivate or do...

The 22 minute meeting (updated)

(Updated: Now with Nicole Steinbok ignite video at bottom)

No one likes meetings and for good reason. In most meetings, most of the time, most people think most of what goes on is a waste of time.

So what if you took out all of the stupid, wasteful stuff and left only the useful parts?

Enter the 22 minute meeting. This is an idea from Nicole Steinbok, and she presented the idea at Seattle Ignite 9. When I saw her present this concept at Microsoft a few months ago, she gave one of the best short ...

Should managers know how to code?

In a series of posts, called readers choice, I write on whatever topics people submit and vote for. If you dig this idea, let me know if the comments, and submit your ideas and votes.

This time: Should managers know how to code?

Back at Microsoft, we used to argue about this all the time, especially whether program managers (e.g. small team level project managers) should know how to code or not. Sadly, no one ever researched whether it had any bearing on their success or not in this ...

Quote of the week

It's amazing how much you miss right in front of your face if you are paid to miss it. And they were paid to miss it. They were paid to ignore very simple facts.

I don't have any clue [about what's coming next:]. One of the amazing things is that when you write a book about the people who saw the sub-prime mortgage collapse coming, they think you're saying that you saw the sub-prime mortgage collapse coming.

If you write a book, Liars poker, for that matter, where maybe the point of the book...

The iPad and Innovation Theory

I'm not much for speculation – when people guess about how a product will do I think there's much more luck involved in being right than anyone admits.  I wish all the futurists and prognosticators would keep a table of their bets, and honestly show how often they're right or wrong. I think they'd be humbler in their bets if they saw their history.

That said, I've been asked again and again about my thoughts on the iPad. Rather than give a fairly useless bet, I'd rather teach a smarter way to ...

How great author events happen (biznik)

Two weeks ago I spoke at a fantastic author event in Seattle run by Biznik. I speak in lots of places for many reasons, but this was one of the best run and most fun events I've done in some time. Biznik partners with Kim Rickett's Book Events, St. Michelle Wine, and Hotel 1000 to make it happen.

We had a sold out crowd of nearly 100 people and I'm pretty sure everyone had a great time.

Here's the recipe:

Real events, w/food & wine, set people's expectations to be social.People in social moods...

Google Wave and Why You Should Care

Honestly, I'm not certain yet you should care about Google Wave.

But that actually doesn't matter.

My friend Gina Trappani of Lifehacker and Smarterware fame has put an entire book about wave on the web, for free. What better way is there to sort out wave than reading her expert point of view and advice?

And even more interesting, she self published the book with PWI, a charity for disabled adults, so if you buy the book, PDF or hardcopy, much of the money goes to good use.

All the details are...

My speech at The Economist (on innovation)

I spoke yesterday at the The Economists' Ideas Economy event at UC Berkeley. Here's a rough transcript (from memory, and cleaned up) of what I said:

Today I make a living as a writer of books and I talk about ideas from those books. But my first career was leading teams of people. I worked on Internet Explorer in the early days of the web, on version 1.0 to 5.0 and my job was to be a practitioner in many of the things we've been talking about so far at this event. My job most of those years...