Steven Johnson's Blog, page 3

Eno On Innovation In The Studio

The Innovator's Cookbook, new on the shelves this month, features a number of conversations with creative minds from technology, business, education and the arts, talking about their methods. For the next week or two, I'm going to be featuring some of my favorite exchanges from those conversations, but I encourage you to go check out the entire book, which also includes many foundational texts about innovation, plus a new introduction that I penned for the collection.

Here's Brian Eno on some of his techniques in the recording studio:

SJ: One other interesting thing about your career is that you've had such a big influence as a producer, in a sense coaxing new musical ideas out of other people. What strategies have you developed in that kind of context?

BE: First of all, the very fact of having somebody who isn't in the band and who is suggesting new ways of working is in itself very powerful. Because that person is not part of the political/diplomatic situation within the band itself. You know, any band that's been together for a very long time has done it partly by being polite to one another; a certain level of decent human rapport. So it's very difficult within a band if somebody does something and you don't think it's a very good idea—it's still quite hard to say, "Look, that's no good. Let's not bother with that." You're duty bound to go through the process of exploring it until the person himself says, "Yeah, it's not that good is it?" Whereas having somebody from the outside coming and looking at a piece without any particular loyalties or prejudices, and saying, "Well, that's working, but I don't think this is working. And this bit over here could work. . . ." People are much more ready to accept an assessment like that from somebody that they know is not personally engaged in the work. So the producer as outsider just in itself is important.

SJ: We've talked before about your technique of having the members of the band play one another's instruments in the studio. I love that idea.

BE: One of the other things that a producer can do is to think of ways to get people out of their habits. Any group of people who has worked together for a long period of time tends to fall into habits about how things are done. One person always tends to be the person who leads the process; another is the one who supports the leader; another, the one who comes in late and who doesn't say much until the very end; and another one is the stubborn one, counterbalancing the enthusiastic one. And that's all fine—that's part of the chemistry of a group of people working together. But it gets very habitual and it gets quite boring, so I think of ways of upsetting that, turning it into a game actually. So saying today, "You are going to give all the orders; and you, the person who normally does all the talking, you're going to just do what you're told. And you are going to play this instrument that you normally don't ever touch, and in fact that you can't play." [Laughs] So sometimes that does actually yield an immediately usable result. But what does very often happen is that it loosens people up. And it enlarges the envelope of possibilities within which they navigate. I mean, if you tell somebody else to play drums, you have a very simple drumbeat normally, because the person who has taken over the drums isn't the drummer, and, therefore, you start writing and thinking in a different way. It just immediately takes you out of the normal course you would have followed.

The Innovator's Cookbook

One of the thrilling--and at the same time frustrating--things about writing a book that takes on a Grand Theme, rather than a specific narrative, is that there invariably seems to be an endless supply of potential material for the project: stories, theories, academic papers, personal anecdotes, and more. This is certainly the case with the question of innovation, the subject matter of my last book, Where Good Ideas Come From, which comes out in paperback this week. Part of what I do as a writer is take people on intellectual tours--pulling them down some interesting, but long-neglected corridor in the museum of human achievement. (This happens to be one of things that I love about my job.) But with innovation, there were just too many corridors--too many stories to tell, too many other writers on the subject, to do them all justice.

And so a few months after Good Ideas came out, my gifted publisher at Riverhead, Geoffrey Kloske, suggested that we put together an anthology of classic essays on innovation to accompany the paperback release of Good Ideas. I thought it seemed like a brilliant idea, since there were many important essays by some of my heroes -- Stewart Brand, John Seely Brown, Erik Von Hippel -- whose work I wanted to celebrate. But it also occurred to me that we could do more than just a straight collection of essays. So many of the important concepts in Good Ideas had come from informal conversations I'd had with actual, working innovators, not from essays or scholarly publications on the subject. So we ultimately decided on a hybrid of sorts: a collection of some of the seminal texts on innovation, paired with a series of conversations that I conducted with innovators from different fields, among them Ray Ozzie on software; Brian Eno on music and art; Beth Noveck on government innovation.

And so, a little more than eight months later, we have a delightful new book, The Innovator's Cookbook: Essentials For Inventing What's Next, featuring essays and interviews by and with a long list of luminaries. (I also wrote a new introduction to the collection.) Appropriately enough, the book has an innovative cover design, with type treatment created with a 3D Makerbot printer. We've created a little video that shows a strangely hypnotic time-lapse view of the cover-creation process, with my voiceover talking about some of the principles of innovation that came out of the conversations in the book.



For the next few days, I'm going to be running some excerpts from those "Innovators at Work" conversations here, but in the meantime, take my word for it -- they're worth reading in their entirety. And if you haven't picked up a copy of Where Good Ideas Come From yet -- seriously, what is wrong with you? Go get it! 

Findings Is Hiring

As some of you know, I've been collaborating with the brilliant folks over at Betaworks for a while now on a new service for capturing, managing, and sharing quotations -- in a sense, a digital-age version of the commonplace book that I wrote about in Where Good Ideas Come From. I am incredibly excited about this service, Findings, and will have much more to say about it here and elsewhere over the next six weeks. But for now, I wanted to say that we are hiring -- looking for both a Python and Interface Engineer. If you're interested in the future of text, social reading, ebooks, and serendipitous discovery, this is a great project to get involved with, working in a dynamic and fun office with the rest of the Betaworks crew in Manhattan. If you're interested, more details are available here.

Go West, Middle-Aged Man

At some point this winter, mostly likely as I was climbing over the three feet of snow that stayed piled on our sidewalk from late December to February, it occurred to me that I had spent twenty-one years in New York City--exactly half my life. I moved here originally in 1990, straight out of college, to go to grad school at Columbia, and lived the grad-student/aspiring writer lifestyle up in Morningside Heights for seven years. Then I moved into a loft in the West Village with the woman who would become my wife. I wrote Emergence there--in many ways a love song to the Jane Jacobs vision of the city--with a view of Jacobs' old place on Hudson Street from my study window. Our first son was born while we still lived there; we watched the Twin Towers fall from Greenwich Street on our son's first day home from the hospital. When our second son was on the way, we decamped for Brooklyn, along with most of our old friends, and fell in love with the verdant, connected life of stoop culture in Park Slope. I started outside.in inspired by the local blogging scene that was flowering in Brooklyn at the time; we spent countless hours roaming through Prospect Park with our kids (now a pack of three boys) and savoring all the new shops and restaurants and coffeehouses opening in the South Slope.

All of which is to say that I have truly loved those twenty-one years in New York, but also to say that we are leaving that life for a few years. Next month, we are moving to Marin County, on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge across the bay from San Francisco. It's a two-year move: an adventure, not a life-changer. But it's a move that has been in the works for many years. As a kid, growing up in Washington DC, I oscillated between thinking I would end up in SF and NY; each February, for the past five years or so, my arguments for a California move have rolled in, as predictable as the gloomy weather itself. But somehow this year the argument stuck.

In part, it stuck because our children are the perfect age for the adventure: old enough to appreciate it, but not so old that they refuse to make the move because they can't bear to leave their girlfriends behind. I still love New York, and especially Brooklyn, intensely, but there are things I love about Northern California too -- its epic natural beauty, its long history as a driver of cultural change and new ideas. And one of the sublime things about my job is that it gives us as a family the opportunity to live wherever we want to live. To not take advantage of that opportunity, even for a few years, seems like a terrible waste.

But the other reason for the move, in truth, is that I've come to think that this kind of change is intrinsically good in itself, wherever you happen to move. An old friend who did a similar westward migration a few years ago told me that the great thing about moving is that the changed context helps you understand yourself and your family more deeply: you get to see all the things that you really loved about your old home—and the things that always bothered you without you fully recognizing it. Like a good control study in a science experiment, the contrast allows you to see what really matters. Changing the background scenery helps you see the foreground more clearly.        

And then there's the passage of time. Another old friend -- my oldest, in fact -- wrote an email to me after I told him the news of our move. We've both been in New York for two decades, and we are both watching our kids growing up at lightning speed. "Change like this slows down time," he wrote. When you're in your routine, frequenting the same old haunts, time seems to accelerate -- was it just four years ago that our youngest son was born? But all the complexities of moving -- figuring out where to live, getting there, and then navigating all the new realities of the changed environment -- means that the minutes and hours that once passed as a kind of background process, the rote memory of knowing your place, suddenly are thrust into your conscious awareness. You have to figure it out, and figuring things out makes you aware of the passing days and months more acutely. You get disoriented, or at least you have to think for a while before you can be properly oriented again.

So that is why we are moving: for the natural beauty, yes, and the climate, and the Bay Area tech scene, and the many friends out there we haven't seen enough of over the past twenty years. But more than anything, we're moving to slow down time.

AOL Acquires Outside.in

Almost exactly five years ago, I went out to lunch with my old friends Mark Bailey and Andy Karsch, and somehow over the course of our meal I got to talking about this idea I'd been harboring for several months about building some sort of web service that would organize local bloggers by neighborhood and zip code. By the end of the meal, Andy and Mark had convinced me that I should try to build a prototype, and had offered up seed money and other help to get my little hunch off the ground. Within a month or two, I found myself actually sketching out a user interface and talking database structure with two exceptionally talented ITPers: John Geraci and Cory Forsyth. By the end of the summer, we'd built a working version of the service and decided on a name: outside.in. The first public beta went live in October 2006.

Last Friday we announced that outside.in has been acquired by AOL, joining forces with their hyperlocal network, Patch.

It has been a fascinating, humbling (in both senses), exhausting and exhilarating ride. I served as CEO for about a year and a half, and built up an incredible investor base, with a mix of smart and supportive angels like Richard Smith and George Crowley, and wonderfully engaged venture investors: Union Square, Milestone, Betaworks, and Village Ventures. Working with Fred Wilson over the past four years has been one of the great experiences of my entrepreneurial life; he is even better up close as an investor and partner than his already stellar reputation would suggest.

A few weeks after I had somehow convinced the Board that I could continue as CEO and still write The Invention Of Air, I was introduced to Mark Josephson, and after twenty minutes of talking to him on the phone, I knew he would be a much better leader for the company in its "grownup" phase. It's not easy for a new CEO to replace a founder in the role, but somehow Mark did it with real grace and skill and good humor. I can't wait to see what he and the team build at AOL.

In the end, we built some powerful tools for organizing and curating local content at outside.in; hundreds of traditional media companies have used our platform to share neighborhood news and conversation with their audiences. (We continue to power the local news on the front door of CNN.com, a great milestone for our little startup.) As a business, though, outside.in was never a runaway success, and part of that stemmed, ultimately, from the limitations of a purely algorithmic approach to organizing local content. The best solution, we've come to realize, is a hybrid model that brings together all the existing sources of local information from the around the web, and uses it to support and augment original reporting and commentary. And that is the beauty of the AOL/Patch deal. We have the automated platform and they have the neighborhood-level journalists. For several years now, we've been watching each other, with some mix of competitiveness and admiration, but as we were announcing the deal, I realized that outside.in and Patch were just following the old romantic comedy script: "When are you two crazy kids going to realize you need each other?"

My favorite part of this whole experience, though, has been the people I've worked with over the past five years: some old friends, like Mark, Andy, and Bo Peabody; and dozens of new ones who worked at OI; all the twisted conversations on our endlessly amusing group list, nerds@outside.in; our "hipster army" days in Brooklyn and our more professional Flatiron digs. I told the team last week when we announced the deal that founding a company and watching it grow in all these surprising new directions was the closest thing I'd experienced to building a family. The thing is, except for very rare circumstances, you almost never get the opportunity to sell your family to a large Internet company. So this is a new thing for me.

Since they are family, I'm not just waving goodbye as they join the good ship AOL/Patch. I'm going to stay involved in some capacity. I remain as committed as ever to the importance of bottom-up, hyperlocal journalism, and the opportunity to continue exploring that vision with the resources and audience of AOL behind us is too great an opportunity to watch entirely from the sidelines. But clearly, this is the end of a chapter, and thus worth pausing to thank everyone who helped make this one of the great adventures of my life.

Good Ideas Year-End Wrap

It's New Year's eve, and I'm up in the mountains of northern Vermont, skiing for the first time in more than two decades. I wanted to write a quick end-of-2010 post thanking everyone who helped make Where Good Ideas Come From a success: all the folks who bought the book, told their friends about it, blogged and tweeted, and most of all the people who came out to the events. It was the most hectic tour I've done to date, but also the most fun and the most rewarding, thanks to all the great conversations I had along the way.

I've been tweeting some of the best-of-2010 accolades as they've come in, but here's a quick blog wrap-up. The Economist and Canada's National Post included Good Ideas on their best books of the year lists. It was named one of the best business books of the year by Amazon, Inc Magazine, Strategy+Business, and a number of other blogs. 800CEORead named it as a finalist for their business book of the year award; the winner will be announced in January.

Speaking of 800CEORead, they've just published an interview I did with Kate Mytty about a month ago. It covers a lot of ground that I haven't covered in other interviews to date, including some thoughts about the process of writing the book, and some speculative thoughts about new organizational structures. If you want an interview you can listen to, I stopped by Science Friday last week for a Christmas Eve conversation with the excellent Ira Flatow.

I hope everyone has a great New Year's holiday, and here's to us all having more good ideas in 2011.

Driven or Distracted?

A number of people have asked me what I thought of Matt Richtel's piece in the Sunday Times, "Growing Up Digital, Wired For Distraction," the latest in the Times' "Your Brain On Computers" series. It's been in heavy rotation in the Twittoblogosphere for the past 48 hours, so I'm going to assume some familiarity with the story and argument here. (If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it, despite my misgivings.)

First, I do really respect that Richtel is trying to present a balanced case here; he's thankfully chosen as the main subject--17-year-old Vishal Singh--someone who is not dropping out of school thanks to his Facebook addiction, or getting preyed on by child molesters or some other digital moral panic. Richtel quotes more concerned voices than enthusiastic ones, but both sides get an airing.

That said, I do find something puzzling about the whole choice of Vishal as a central study, because the piece assumes that his lessening interest in books and (some) of his coursework is due to the siren song of the digital screen. But what's clearly obsessing Vishal is his love affair with video editing. There's no reason to think the 1985 version of Vishal wouldn't have been equally distracted from his schoolwork by the very same hobby. He just seems like such a clear type to me--the exact kind of kid that I knew growing up, in fact that I partially *was* growing up--the obsessive kid who is so into his movies/painting/model rockets/whatever that he doesn't pay as much attention to his schoolwork. I knew a bunch of kids who really wanted to be filmmakers, and kind of blew off school for a while. By far, the biggest difference between them and this Vishal is that Vishal has access to editing equipment that my friends in 1985 could only dream about.

I read the descriptions of Vishal building his composite shots for his video and thought: here's a kid who is actually learning a high-level skill with immediate commercial value in the job market, that also exercises his creative faculties -- and he's doing it for fun! Maybe it shouldn't be a zero sum game between learning to use complex video software and learning Algebra, but if I had to choose one over the other for the kid, I'd say he's making the right choice.

The problem, of course, is that if he fails Algebra, he'll potentially have trouble getting into a good college, which could have long-term negative effects on his professional options. But if the colleges aren't smart enough to recognize that high-level software skills are as valuable a signal of merit as algebra grades, then I think it's the priorities of the college admissions team that are skewed, not Vishal's.

I think the piece would have also been helped if Richtel had spent at least some time with the kids who are doing great by traditional standards.  I mean, everything I hear about the college admission process is that it's more competitive than ever, and the problem is the surplus of super-talented kids. Are all these over-achievers somehow using Facebook less than the Vishals of the world? Maybe they are, but until we hear about them, it doesn't really matter that some kids are getting distracted  by games or social networks and doing less well in school because of it. Teenagers have a long history of being distracted by things, after all.

And of course, where reading is concerned -- the piece starts with Vishal choosing between the computer and his summer reading -- we actually have a real apples-to-apples comparison of US high school reading skills, dating back to the pre-Web era. They are essentially flat since 1992 for Vishal's cohort, and slightly up for 8th-graders. How could reading skills not be damaged by all these distracting technologies? One potential answer is that--distracting as they are--they are immersing children in a world of *text*--so different from the television/telephone-driven teen culture that I grew up in during the 1980s. If reading skills aren't in fact in decline, shouldn't the burden of proof be on the tech critics?

By the way, my favorite critic in the piece is Alan Eaton, the school's Latin teacher, who calls the new tech a "catastrophe" and blames it for a steady decline in attendance in his advanced classes. Latin! You can't make this stuff up. Why on earth are these children choosing to spend time exploring the communicative possibilities of new software when they can learn the communicative properties of a language no one has spoken for five hundred years? If Facebook and Twitter only manage to eliminate Latin from the extended options of a good high school education, they will have done us all a great service.

All The Good Ideas Links That Are Fit To Print

One of the key things you hope for with an "idea" book like Where Good Ideas Come From --beyond the book sales, or the turnout at the signings and lectures--is that it will actually spark a conversation. While Good Ideas is less conspicuously argumentative than the last big conversation-starter I wrote, Everything Bad Is Good For You, it does make a sustained argument about how societies innovate, and I'd hoped that reviewers and bloggers and op-ed columnists would pick up on that argument. I also hoped that the book itself would be a platform that others would build on, borrowing its ideas and applying them to new fields that I hadn't explored in the book.

So it's been really wonderful to see the sheer volume of responses to the book--not just the reviews, but all the features and extended blog posts and discussion threads, and even new software tools emerging over the past month. I've been trying to keep up with everything on Twitter, but thought I would take the time to pull some of the links together in a single blog post. If this seems a little excessive, I promise you this is only a fraction of the material out there about the book right now. (And I know there's more to come.)

I got my start as a journalist writing about technology for the UK Guardian, and so it was particularly fun to see this feature by the very clever Oliver Burkeman run in its pages. Apparently I talked quite a bit over lunch, at least according to the opening graph: "Let's start with the invention of air conditioning. This is only one of approximately a zillion topics addressed by the science writer Steven Johnson during the course of lunch at an Italian restaurant in downtown Manhattan; some of the others include Darwinian evolution, the creation of YouTube, the curiously perfect population density of the Park Slope neighbourhood of Brooklyn, the French Revolution, the London cholera epidemic of 1854, the first computer, The Wire, and why 9/11 wasn't prevented."

The Guardian feature ends with a discussion of the politics of open networks, which I then explored in my detail in this column from the NY Times Sunday business section: "... a few weeks ago, during the second stop on the tour for my new book, I found myself being interviewed in front of a Seattle audience and responding to an opening question that I had never been asked before: "Are you a Communist?" The question was intended as a joke, but like the best jokes, it played on the edges of an important and uncomfortable truth." I also wrote a long feature for the Financial Times applying the book's theories to the amazing surge of digital startup activity in my home town of New York.

In terms of reviews, here's a small sample of recent appraisals of the book. The LA Times ran a very thoughtful and kind assessment, with some caveats: "Like all of Johnson's books, Where Good Ideas Comes From is fluidly written, entertaining and smart without being arcane. But is it any more successful than Renaissance recipes for turning lead into gold? 'The more we embrace these patterns' in innovative spaces, Johnson says, 'the better we will be at tapping our extraordinary capacity for innovative thinking.' I'm not sure it's that easy...

Less kind was Christopher Bray in The Independent, who seemed to confuse my argument with Malcolm Gladwell's theories about genius in Outliers, despite the fact that I don't talk about the concept of the genius at all in Good Ideas: "Blue-sky thinkers with their helicopter views will doubtless claim that Johnson's suggestions help them push the envelope, but the rest of us can see that his 'adjacent possibles' and 'liquid networks' are no more than the latest flimflam. At one point, Johnson tries to convince us that ideas grow out of ideas the way the natural world synergises. Beavers gnaw down trees in which woodpeckers drill holes in which songbirds nest – and in some way, I forget quite how, it's all a bit like Twitter."

Jason Jones, at ProfHacker, reviews the book in the specific context of its uses in higher education: "This is also Johnson's best-written book, and it's an argument that this connection-making thinker was seemingly born to pursue. Full of stories of innovation from across the disciplines, but with recurring themes from biology, cities, the arts, and the web, Where Good Ideas Come From is an unmissable book for anyone who cares about creativity, innovation, networks, or higher education." For the business market, 800CEOReads founder Jack Coverts writes in his review: "Where Good Ideas Come From is a book that requires some investment from the reader because of the complex nature of idea creation and evolution, and the fact that Johnson digs deep into it. But the great research and engaging stories make that investment small compared to the rewards. This is one of the best books of the year."

This BBC Business feature includes a video clip airing on BBC World News this week; if you'd like to get a sense of what I sound and look like when I'm jetlagged, unshaven, and fighting a week-long cold and sore throat, this is the video for you! I thought these questions from Alan Jacobs at New Atlantis were very astute ones: "But as I read and enjoyed the book, I sometimes found myself asking questions that Johnson doesn't raise.... Can a society be overly innovative? Is it possible to produce more new idea, discoveries, and technologies than we can healthily incorporate?" In the Observer, Robert McCrum uses the book as a launching pad for an interesting discussion of literary creation.

And my favorite of all: Chris Whamond is developing a web application inspired by the book at slowhunch.com. As he puts it, "the big idea behind SlowHunch is that it connects ideas and enables them to cross-pollinate and build upon other ideas. This is a site for developing ideas, not just recording them." Perhaps, when we're done, each chapter of the book will have inspired a new web application or startup. Liquid Networks may be the "latest flimflam" but that doesn't mean it won't make a killer web site!

Good Ideas, Week One

It's been a crazy eight days since the Good Ideas World Tour launched; I've done about thirteen events in six cities, and at least twice as many interviews. Thanks to everyone who has come out, and who has bought the book or tweeted and blogged about it. All that work (and fun!) is paying off: the book will debut on next weeks' NY Times bestseller list at #23, in an insanely competitive week to be selling a new book. That's my fifth straight national bestseller, so I am going to take some time tonight to savor here in Chicago, but the tour keeps rolling tomorrow with a flight to St. Louis, followed by Minneapolis, Boston, New York, Dallas, and Austin. Come out if you can!




In the meantime, a few quick updates of interesting reviews and other responses from around the Web. The amazing Cory Doctorow wrote a review for BoingBoing that called the book a "multidisciplinary hymn to diversity, openness, and creativity." Salon is running an interview with me called "Epiphanies Are Overrated." Tuesday's Wall Street Journal featured a very smart column by Gordon Crovitz on Facebook, The Social Network, Larry Lessig, and Good Ideas. You can watch a video of me drinking a very large glass of Malbec and discussing the book on Asylum's Drinks With Writers series.




Finally, tomorrow's Financial Times includes a long review of the book by their columnist John Gapper; it may be my favorite review yet, and it ends with these lines:




"It is much more stimulating and insightful than the average innovation tome and Johnson does not attempt to lock the reader into a Gladwellian conclusion. Instead, it is like one of the reefs that initially baffled Darwin and are so admired by Johnson – a huge diversity of bright ideas co-exist happily without destroying or spoiling each other."




I suspect that will find its way onto the paperback jacket.

Pub Day

It seems like it's been out for a month now, but my new book--Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History Of Innovation--officially hits the shelves in a matter of hours. I worked harder and longer on this book than any of the six books before it, and I'm as proud of it as I am of anything I've written. I hope you all get a chance to pick up a copy, and to stop by one of the events on the tour, which starts today in my old hometown of Washington, D.C. You can buy the hardcover or the Kindle edition on Amazon, or here from Barnes and Noble. And of course it should be available at your local bookseller as well. I'll be posting and tweeting from the tour as the responses come in from the events and the reviewers, so stay tuned...