The Myths of Innovation

With his second book, The Myths of Innovation, Scott Berkun takes a different approach to the subject. With The Art of Project Management, he provides a detailed and very useful guidebook to navigating the difficult world of managing people and projects. The Myths of Innovation is built (quite logically) around a series of relatively common myths about innovations and innovators. While I thought that I knew about the myths, the power of the story often remains even when you know that it's not true and Berkun manages to puncture the myths, while explaining the appeal. We all love a story about the bold lone inventor who had a brilliant idea that changed the world, but we don't like hearing about the failed inventions or the team of people who painstakingly followed the many dead-ends in the development of the product. Berkun shows how our love of a good story can make us miss what is important in creating anything. You need hard work, a willingness to follow your instincts, determination and being able to keep working even though many of your ideas will fail or will not be accepted.
The book is well-organized and entertaining with an extensive and annotated bibliography that can keep you reading for years. The concepts are covered clearly and extensive web links throughout the book allow you to find a broader context online as a springboard for more exploration. Berkun also drew on the experiences of innovators that he talked with and via a survey. While the book is casual and fun, it has a solid foundation based on research and experience. You can read it from front to back as I did, or jump around without getting lost. It's also a book that will be good to revisit for relevant stories and perspective as the challenge of trying something new starts to bog you down.
While much of the book debunks myths, it's also encouraging as the underlying message is that dedication and working together with people is essential for innovation to take place. It's the combination of all of the right factors that allows things to succeed and not merit or genius or luck. It's a call to action against complacency and conventional wisdom and it will hopefully get people to become more aware of what they are doing and the possibilities and opportunities that often exist in front of you if you're willing to see them.
The book boldly concludes by asking if innovation is inherently good, which made me think a lot about how our views of what we do and what we use evolve. I no longer use a pda, but a combination of tools that include a laptop, a cell phone, the web, and notebooks and pens. Progress and innovation doesn't mean more tiny devices or new things, but the innovative use of what is appropriate and what works. tags: myths, innovation, scottberkun, people, business, technology
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The Art of Project Management

Scott Berkun is my favourite writer of essays on managing people. Through the essays on his site and his essential PM Clinic mailing list, you can seek out, find and share advice on the best ways to manage people and successfully complete projects. He's now written an amazing book, The Art of Project Management, that collects and distills years of experience and knowledge into an entertaining and comprehensive package. I feel as if I've taken a whole course in project management.
While I have some experience in managing projects, much how I do things is shaped by experience and trial and error. In reading the book much of what is said seems to be simple and common sense, but it's amazing how often we don't do the things that make the most sense. What is so valuable about the book is that it helps to understand why some things work and some things don't. I recognized many of the situations in the book and wish that I'd had the insight that I gained from the book when I was dealing with those situations.
The book is divided into three major sections: "Plans", "Skills", and "Management" and within each section there are a series of examples and processes for dealing with all of the stages that a project goes through. Within my context I'm thinking of how this all can be applied to filmmaking, but the context of the book is software development. What strikes me about reading the book is how similar the processes are. I've done both software and film development, so I've seen it up close, but I didn't realize that so many of the issues exist no matter what size the team is or what creative enterprise you are working on.
The philosophical core of the book is built around people and dealing with them. While some more manipulative techniques are described, there is always a warning about the short and long term risks of using those strategies. There is a refreshing candour and a lack of dogma in the methods described. I've read many books that excite me at first, but the ideas and philosophy are often more appealing than the practical application of the ideas. Berkun manages to strike a perfect balance between a management philosophy and a pragmatic approach. The book will definitely help you make things happen and get things done. You may also have more time to enjoy your work and your life.
While the book is well-written and structured, it feels like a nice long talk with someone who is being completely honest about the way things work. It's the talk that you have with someone that shapes your whole professional life. The moment when you figure out that you can do a good job, treat people with respect, and not waste too much time and effort on things that won't work. I'm going to keep the book close to my side and refer to it often. technorati tags: book, review, artofpm, scottberkun, management, process
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Blink

How quickly can you figure something out? Apparently if you're good at it, you can tell with very little information very quickly. Malcolm Gladwell explores rapid cognition and what you can figure out without really thinking about it in Blink. It's remarkable how people can "thin slice" and look at minute (but significant) amounts of data and make decisions. Evolutionarily it makes sense that we have this ability to see small signs that could indicate danger and allow us to react, but generally most of us are not in life-threatening situations, but we still thin slice the data. One thing that I think that I'm good at thin slicing is a film. I'll generally know if I'll like a film within the first few minutes or even seconds. The title sequence and style of shooting or music will be enough. Why is that? For me I think that it is attention to detail. The story and feeling have to be just right with a film and if they get it right at the beginning, it almost always continues through. If they're sloppy at the beginning of the film, they'll probably not be careful with the rest of the film.
Thin slicing works with people as well. I usually can tell if I like someone right away (as I think most people can). How many times have you heard or thought "I don't know what it is, but I don't trust that person..." Some people can even tell if a couple will stay married based on a few minutes or even seconds of observation. Gladwell gives both positive and negative examples of when making a choice in the blink of an eye can save a life or end one. So many things in the world are tenuous, random and fragile and understanding how our brains work and how quickly we can know is a step toward making the world a better place. It's fascinating to think about how just the right amount of data can enable us to know something without even consciously understanding why we have the feeling that we're right. technorati tags: book, review, blink, malcolmgladwell
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The Tipping Point

I love Malcolm Gladwell's writing and while his best known and most influential book is The Tipping Point, I hadn't read it until a few months ago. I picked it up because I knew that I was going to be reading Blink as soon as Carolyn finished reading it. The Tipping Point is a great exploration of the idea of rapid change and epidemics. It's about people and ideas and how some things can rapidly change and other things don't change at all. The way that Gladwell tells the story and explores the ideas is through fascinating people that he meets. What I love about the book is that it made me think about all sorts of things that I've been seeing develop lately from Moleskine notebooks to podcasting to RSS feeds to tagging. It's fascinating to see how obscure films or web sites or ideas take hold and spread rapidly, even though they may have been dormant for a long time. Tracing this stuff is a lot of fun. I love it when you can apply ideas from a book to new things, which is probably an indication that the book is fairly solid and won't seem to be dated as time goes by. I love the way the Gladwell thinks and now I'm reading Blink and loving that as well. technorati tags: tippingpoint, malcolmgladwell, book, society
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The Coma

"If we wait long enough, something strange will happen."

I've only read one novel by Alex Garland and seen one film where he wrote the script. I loved the film (28 Days Later) and I also loved the book (The Coma). The Coma is the story of a man in a coma. It's a small, beautiful book that is filled with woodcuts by Nicholas Garland (Alex's father). I read it very quickly over three nights just before I went to bed. Maybe it wasn't a good idea since I had a hard time sleeping over those three nights. My sleep was... strange. The novel is subtle and it wasn't until I was about a third of the way into it that I started to realize what was going on (which I'm not going to tell you). It's not a big secret, but, like a dream it's hard to explain and maybe that's the point. Garland explores what it means to be awake and be asleep and make us wonder about ourselves, how we think and what we are. How much of us is us? What can we lose and still be who we are? How do we define ourselves? Is it how we look, how we feel or how we think? Garland writes very well and I loved the condensed prose that slowly unfolded in front of me. It made me think a lot and sometimes made it hard to sleep. It's good when something does that.
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Free Culture

Lawrence Lessig is Stanford Law Professor who founded the Center for Internet Law and Society. He's a cogent writer on the intersection between intellectual property law and creativity. I first noticed him (although I now realize that I'd read him earlier) when he represented Eric Eldred in the U.S. Supreme Court case to overturn the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. He's also chair of the Creative Commons project which is how this very blog is licensed. His most recent book is Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity and in a great example of putting your money (or book) where your mouth is he's licenced the book (and made a freely downloadable version of Free Culture) under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License. You can also buy Free Culture in an old-style paper version with the pages all bound together. Derivative versions have started appearing already with one of the neatest ones that developed was AKMA's idea to have people read and record chapters, which is almost completely done after a couple of days. I've downloaded the PDF version and I'm reading it now. It's great and I'm going to buy the print version to finish reading it. I have to admit that I'm a bit of a policy wonk and I love the argument that he's making in contextualizing the development of law, culture and public policy. Maybe it's a Canadian trait with so much of our national identity wrapped up with communication technologies and being the birthplace of Marshall McLuhan and Harold Innis (who linked "Empire and Communications"). I'll end with a quotation from Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig:
"A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists donÕt get paid. A culture without property, or in which creators canÕt get paid, is anarchy, not freedom. Anarchy is not what I advance here."
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You Are Here

I'm finishing up a very neat book called You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination that was a Christmas present (which could explain why I haven't written anything here in so long due to a lack of time). It's written by Katharine Harmon of Tributary Books and I'm having a great time exploring it.
I first realized that I loved maps when I worked for a summer in a library many years ago. There was a map room which was filled with neat maps and I was lucky enough to be able to design some maps for the library. I didn't know much about maps or design, but being in a library I was able to look up some stuff. I wanted to use symbols for the map so I look around and found a book of symbols that I used for the map. These were in the days before more visually oriented computers (and in the early days of the Mac before I had used one) so I photocopied and typed and pasted things together to make things. Now I have access to tools to make all sorts of graphics and maps and I don't have time to do it...but I do have to right, so that's what I'm doing now.
The book has over 100 maps that tell more about the people who made them than the places they describe. It's a great way to think about mapping in a different way from simply describing the physical or geographical arrangements of things on the surface of the earth. It also reveals the amazing creativity and distinctive ways of looking and thinking about things that exist. It makes me think about my perception of the world in a different way.
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All Tomorrow's Parties

I just finished reading William Gibson's All Tomorrow's Parties which I like a lot. I've become a bit of a fan of Gibson in reverse. I'd known about him for a while with the "invented the term cyberspace" plastered throughout almost everything written about him, but I didn't get around to reading any fiction by him. The nonfiction that I read was great, so one day I saw a discounted copy of All Tomorrow's Parties and I picked it up, but never got around to reading it. Then I saw Pattern Recognition which I bought since I browsed through it and couldn't put it down. I loved Pattern Recognition and started reading All Tomorrow's Parties right after I finished it. I like the idea (since I arrived late at this particular party) of working my way through his work backwards.
The other thing that I didn't do (which is a bit different for me) is research the book... when I like a film I'll find out a lot about it and then track down similar works or previous works by the director or writer or other members of the team behind the film. It's fascinating to find the patterns and connections between people, their work, their ideas and how it intersects with a particular time and place. This type of thinking and these themes are articulated by Gibson, so maybe that's why I consciously avoided that approach so I'd be a bit fresher when I experienced the work.
I'm glad that I did, since I think that I may have enjoyed the book more. What I found out when preparing this entry is that All Tomorrow's Parties follows on with characters from two previous Gibson books that are on my list... it was interesting to pick up the stories where I did. One character just showed up briefly near the end and I wondered why he was there... in reading an excerpt from Idoru I figured it out. Aside from that one blip, everything else worked great. The world existed and I loved how it felt real with a history. I think that where I latched onto Gibson will make me enjoy the direction that he's going in now. Two novels can be enough to determine the general trajectory of a writer and I like where he's going and I appreciate where he's been. What I find fascinating about Gibson's writing is the intersection between the characters and technology which is exactly where I am right now and what I love to think about.
All Tommorow's Parties focuses on an emerging nodal point where everything changes. It's the big change that everyone expected in 2000 that didn't happen and was only delayed. The whole Y2K thing is quaint now, but the fear and hysteria leading up to it was real and overwhelming for a while. It's a fascinating story of trying to make sense of a world on the verge of massive change. You know that something big is going to happen, but not exactly what it is. That's where we are now in the world.
I can't wait to see where Gibson's next novel takes place. I get the sense that as our mediated world becomes more and more surreal and the technology more ubiquitous that it's harder to writer about the future as that's where we are. The world is changing and it's more profound and moving to capture something that is real and close to now than it is to project something that will be in the future. All Tomorrow's Parties is set in the future, but it is a future that existed in the pre-millennial phase before the year 2000 and before the 11th of September signified so much more than a date. Things begin their movement towards anachronism now so quickly that the when and where of creation can be very significant.
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Bloomsday

Today is Bloomsday, the day that James Joyce's Ulysses took place in 1904. Sip (I'm enjoying a pint of Guinness right now). Ulysses is an amazing achievement, moving through various literary styles as Stephen Dedalus moves through Dublin. I've never been to Dublin (hopefully someday...) but the amazingly descriptive novel paints a picture that resonates. Joyce invented one of my favourite words that works on so many levels: "alcoherently", but in Finnegan's Wake, which I've only dipped in to from time to time. Tonight I think that I'll start to read Ulysses again.
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Pattern Recognition

One thing that I'm specifically trying to do is to read more books that aren't manuals or non-fiction. So I picked up William Gibson's Pattern Recognition a few weeks ago and started reading it. It's a bit embarrassing to admit it, but I haven't actually read a novel by Mr. Gibson before...I've read interviews, saw "Johnny Mnemonic", a great X-Files episode that he cowrote and, most recently, his blog, but never read the novels. It's one of those things that I've been meaning to do, but the longer it took, the more he wrote, and I delayed buying that first book. Being a lapsed SF geek is why I felt a twinge of guilt at not reading a bunch of the cyberpunk stuff... so what better place to start than with Gibson's latest, which isn't SF at all.
I'm about 3/5ths through it (squeezing in chapters whenever I can) and I love it. Gibson nails the texture, taste and feeling of online culture, which what you are reading is part of as well. A good novel (or film for that matter) will stike a chord with you when you recognize the elements of truth in it. The idea of a coolhunter who doesn't like having the ability is a great premise and it takes off from there. The obsessive nature of "footageheads" who seek out uploaded footage that is part of some larger and mysterious work runs through the novel as well and the intersection of our heroine and the footage is fascinating to me. The novel is making me think about my relationship with the online world, fashion, culture, etc. Maybe I like the idea of the novel because I love editing and editing a film (especially a documentary) is really about looking at a whole lot of material and recognizing patterns and then assembling them into a (hopefully) coherent whole.
I guess the other reason I'm enjoying the novel so much is that I identify with Cayce Pollard in some ways... seeing things emerge and recognizing what's coming up. My daughter Caitlin once said that I like things before they're popular. For some reason I seem to stumble into things just before they break into the wider world by noticing things that seem to fit together.
Why am I still writing? I have to go and read some more!
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The Conversations

I'm reading a book now that I absolutely love. "The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film" is a series of conversations between author Michael Ondaatje and editor Walter Murch. It's an amazing glimpse into the creative processes of both men and jam-packed with insights into editing. Every single time I open the book I learn something new. Both of them love telling stories and sharing them. Ondaatje is probably my favourite author with an ability to craft sentences and paragraphs that I just read over and over again. Murch is the editor who crafted the Godfather films, created the soundscapes in "Apocalypse Now" (and edited "Apocalypse Now Redux") and "The Conversation" as well as many others with Francis Ford Coppola. One of my favourite overlooked films is "Romeo is Bleeding" and I just found out that he cut that as well! I could go on and on about the book, but it would be faster for you to just get it and read it.
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MOMA Russian Avant-Garde Book Exhibition

The Museum of Modern Art in New York is an amazing place. While working on Echoes in the Rink: The Willie O'Ree Story we shot in New York and I was able to spend an hour or so quickly going through the MOMA. It was overwhelming and not enough time to absorb the massive quantity of material there. One thing that was particularly fascinating was a collection of Russian Revolution photographic prints. I've always loved that period in terms of writing and art and it was neat to see prints. I just recently found the Flash-based supporting Web site for an exhibition that took place from March to May of this year. "The Russian Avant-Garde Book 1910 - 1934" collects together books from that period. But how do you display physical artifacts such as books on a Web site using Flash? They have pages for view, but the neatest thing is the "Reading Room" where you can go through a series of images of a person wearing white gloves turning the pages of the books. It shows off the construction of the books. A great use of Flash and it gives me ideas for how to organize a large quantity of material efficiently.
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Souvenir of Canada

What does it mean to be Canadian? Or more to the point, how does it feel to be Canadian? In general I think that Canadians have a difficult time defining themselves--and that causes a lot of anxiety in Canadians. How can we explain ourselves to other people...we're different! Canadians seem to spend a lot of time struggling with the definition of Canadian identity...there is the usual listing of famous (usually in the U.S.) Canadians who most people (outside of Canada) don't realize that are Canadian. There are the statistics, but just before Canada Day (July 1) I bought the new book, Souvenir of Canada by Douglas Coupland (the Canadian and author of "Generation X") and it really clicks. As Coupland writes on the back of the book I wanted to give people a book that explains what it feels like to be Canadian. And I wanted to find a new way of doing this... If you look at the pictures on the site from the book and they mean something to you, well, you must be Canadian.
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