>> Kirsten Wiley: So good afternoon and welcome. My name is Kirsten Wiley,
and I manage the Microsoft Research visiting speaker series. Today we
welcome Scott Berkun here to discuss with us the true origin of inventions,
discovers, and breakthroughs found in his book, the Myths of Innovation.
Through exploring the history of innovators Berkun demystifies the concept of
epiphany to reveal the through about how breakthrough ideas are generated and
evolve giving us the confidence against to seek true innovation and to solve
problems.
Scott Berkun is the best selling author of the books Making Things Happen and
the Myths of Innovation. His work as a writer and public speaker have appeared
in the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, MSNBC, CNBC, Wired
Magazine and other media.
He worked at Microsoft from 1994 to 2003, taught creative thinking at the
University of Washington and is a regular contributor to Harvard Business, and
he runs a popular blog at scottberkun.com.
So please join me in welcoming Scott Berkun to Microsoft Research.
[applause].
>> Scott Berkun: Thank you. Good afternoon. How are you doing? Good.
Okay. That's my robotic introduction. Now I'm going to have the fun introduction.
Hi I'm Scott. I'm before Microsoft so this feels kind of like coming home, so if I'm
sarcastic and act like I know you all and have been where you are, that's
because at least in my memory that's what actually happened. So I'm going to
talk to you about innovation for about 45 minutes and the stuff I'm going to talk
about, the stories are going to tell you they're actually mostly not stories that
show up in the book.
Has anyone actually read this book or a couple of you, some of you? Okay. And
the reason I don't actually talk about that much stuff in the book is I've had the
experience of going to see a lecture or talk, I'm like wow that's really cool and
you go and buy the book and it's actually the same. And I feel really
disappointed by that. It's not their fault because it's hard enough to write a book,
and it's not their fault because it's hard enough to give a good presentation, so
when you're asked to do both, you kind of overlap and try to reuse and be recycle
and be efficient.
These are the back door people, boo, they snuck in. Okay. Anyway, so I'm
going to talk about a bunch of stories and stuff that don't actually show up in the
book for the most part, but they're very much like the ones that do. So if I say
stuff that interests you or you like the way I think about things, the way I frame
the whole idea of innovation and creative thinking, I recommend you check out
the book. There's some for sale in the back, there's sample chapter that is are
available you can look for free up on the website. So I recommend that you go
and do that.
But before I actually talk about the book, she introduced me. That's pretty good.
The only thing you should know for reference later when it comes up in Q and A
is I'm actually really looking forward to Q and A with you guys. I'm a former
Microsoftee who has been out in the world for about five years. And I make a
living as an author and a public speaker and a consultant and a lot of what I
public speak, that's an effective use of English, public speak, a lot of what I public
speak and write about and consult about is project management, creative
thinking, innovation, how you manage innovation, and I spend a lot of time places
that are not here. But I used to work here.
So we can have a really interesting conversation if you guys want to about what
I've learned since I've left and how that compares to what's going on no, et
cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And one example I would love to talk to you guys
about Chrome. I used to work at Internet Explorer I really work on browsers
anymore but Chrome and IE and the whole great conversation we can have,
that's up to you.
You guys are going to be up to whatever you want to talk about in Q and A, we
will get to that. So I used to work in Internet Explorer that's the most important
thing that you need to know about in my history that has not been mentioned
before.
Now, before we start talking about innovation, I want to get us on the same page
a little bit about our points of reference in history. So I'm going to show you
pictures from the history of innovation and I want to call out the names if you can
get them of who is being pictured.
You guys are good. Van Gogh. Excellent. Here is a giveaway. This guy, a little
bit harder, anybody know? Not an artist. You can tell by the shirt and tie. Not an
artist. Doug Englebart, very good. The mouse is a giveaway. There's a
giveaway in most of these photos. Doug Englebart is the inventor of the mouse,
should be a household name, but for reasons we may talk about later he is not.
Tesla. Who said that? How did you know that? Are you like in the Tesla family
or something it's like in your family album? Yeah, Tesla, inventor of basically
wireless communication. So every time you connect to a wireless network you
have this gentleman to thank for that. Tesla.
>>: [inaudible].
>> Scott Berkun: You guys are good. You said Mary Curie. The only person in
history to win a Nobel Prize in two different sciences. Mary Curie.
And you don't know this one. Unbelievable. Anybody? If you work at night you
owe it to him. Edison. It's Edison. Young Edison. Yeah, there's no giveaway in
this one, because that would have been too much of a giveaway. Anyone
standing next to a light bulb kind of gives that away.
How about this guy? Bob Dylan this guy, Einstein. Okay. So we had six or
seven pictures of these people famous for being innovators in their fields. And I'd
like to ask you this question. What similarity they share. I'm sorry?
>>: Smarts.
>> Scott Berkun: Smarts, yes. Looking for less smart ones. Someone could say
I'll appear in your presentation. Yeah, that would be not that interesting.
>>: [inaudible] environment when they broke away from tradition.
>> Scott Berkun: Upset their environment, they creating disturbing, they were
disturbers.
>>: Eccentric.
>> Scott Berkun: Eccentric.
>>: Outsiders.
>> Scott Berkun: Outsiders. Bad hair. [laughter] not smiling, kind of depressive
looking people, don't you think except for Einstein of course. That's a very
unusual picture of him. He didn't like that way in most of his pictures.
The thing I'm looking for which is a key them and all of a sudden we're going to
talk about is that these guys were not A students in their fields, they were not the
people who followed all the rules and did all the things they were told to do.
They're largely violated principles, did the opposite of what their teachers or
instructors told them to do and they paved their own way.
And more specific to modern age thinking about creative thinking and innovation,
none of them took a course in creative thinking. None of them went to an
innovation seminar. None of them got an MBA with a concentration on
entrepreneurial venture capitalist funding projects. They just decided on their
own that they cared about an idea and pursued it to the detriment of their
finances, to the detriment of their family relationships, to the detriment of in some
cases their psychological well-being.
So there's traits here that can be pulled from any innovator you pull from any field
that largely hold together pretty well. They don't follow the rules. And the idea of
having a structured system of being an innovator, structured plan you can follow,
a play book, the seven steps to being the next Da Vinci is absurd and ridiculous.
So a lot of what comes up when you dig innovation history in any field,
technology field which we'll talk about a lot and software and hardware and
engineering, but also in the arts, in sciences, they all follow similar patterns of
following their own way. So the idea that you can find some structured system
for doing these things is contradictory. It's oxy moronic. It's a fundamental thing
that you should understand from the beginning. If you pick any famous
innovator, no mature how well you think you know what they were famous for
and dig into what they were doing at the time before they became famous, you
will find these patterns.
And those are the patterns that are the most useful to you if you want to be an
innovator yourself is to go and look at what are those patterns, what kind of
habits did they have, what kind of challenges did they put themselves into? Most
of these people were not asked to do the things they were -- became famous for
later. But the stories that we know, most of the stories that were told, the things
that we're told as kids, the thing that show up in media reports and on the cover
of Wired Magazine focus on epiphany, magical moments, the first day that
something happened, the first moment when something was invented, the first
day when the code ran.
We focus on the story when basically the thing is already done. We love these
stories. We're fascinated by them. But they don't really help very much and try
to become someone who has a famous epiphany story told about you. There's a
bunch of reasons for that. Before I talk about those reasons, I want to talk about
this story.
So who can tell me what's going on in this pictures? Famous, historical,
scientific, Newton and gravity? So who can give me the 10 second, 15 second,
TV commercial version of the story?
>>: [inaudible].
>> Scott Berkun: Apple falls from tree, discovers gravity. What's the moment
that discovers gravity?
>>: [inaudible].
>> Scott Berkun: Hits him on the head. Who has heard that story? Everybody.
Just about everybody. Where did you hear that story? Pretty much everywhere.
Where was the first place you heard the story? School. You went to public
school didn't you? [laughter].
>> Scott Berkun: So school house rock actually. I won't to public school, too, so
we're on the first place. But school house rock is the first place I heard the story,
school house rock being the cartoon that shows up between other cartoons that
injects a little bit of bogus history to pretend like you're getting an education while
watching ABC cartoons and watching ads for, you know, Transformers and Apple
Jacks and all those other things.
So as you may guess, given the context of my talk, this story is not true. It's very
far if the truth. It's also ridiculous story. It's a ridiculous story. Because Newton
was alive in the late 17th Century and we know for hundreds and thousands of
years we had a pretty good understanding of gravity. We built lots of things. We
engineered towers and weapons and castles that all required the understanding
of gravity in principal. So the idea that someone discovered that in a moment in
1680 is completely ridiculous.
But why is it a story that we like so much? There's a couple of reasons. There's
a pattern of story that I call a -- it's called the epiphany mythology where there's a
magic moment that is driven by forces that are out of our control. In this case
being the forces of nature. Newton's sitting under a tree. Who knows what he's
thinking about. We don't know. He's sitting there, he's basically slacking off,
right, sitting there under a tree. Something hits him, some act of God, some
thing from beyond him, strikes him and now we have gravity. How much
responsibility does Newton get in this story? Almost none.
Who is really the motivating force in the story? It's the apple, right, the apple's
really driving this -- come on. Figure out gravity now. It's hitting him on the head,
a violent act that's beyond his control. It's also these stories also make it easier
for us to feel okay about not being innovators or creators ourselves because
there's no outside force.
Now, the Greeks would call this the muse that there's these forces that we do not
control that exist outside of us. There's spirits that we pray to and beg to help us
out, to grant us the equivalent of being hit by an apple. But the whole -- the
fallacy, the stories or the popular -- the placating fact in here that we like so much
is if it doesn't happen to us, it's okay. I've sat under trees. I didn't discover
anything.
I did the same thing Newton did. Not my fault. Not my fault. I didn't get the
muse. Not my fault. It's a very passive idea of what creative thinking and
innovation is. Now, the true story, the short version, the true story is that even if
this moment did happen, which it probably did not what Newton became famous
for was the score and the proving mathematically of the theory of gravity. He
approved it mathematically how the system of this whole system works through a
mathematical set of functions to prove that gravity worked. Why the earth
actually moved the way it did in elliptical or bits around the sun or whatever
shape the orbits were.
And there's this huge book, a 500 page book that took him 15 or 20 years to
write. That's what he became famous for. And this was meant to be a symbol
that discovery but at the time we tend to be winnow down these frees which are
much more boring, 15, 20 years of work. I don't want to do that. I'd rather try to
get hit by an apple, right. I want to try to have lightning strike me, I want to try to
win the lottery. Much more interesting, compelling and relieving story that we
can all connect with that makes this story makes Newton seem like an ordinary
guy. 15 or 20 years of work is not ordinary. That seems like, wow, that's like a
lot of effort. That's a lot of time not spent under trees.
So here's another one, the last epiphany myth. We can talk a lot more about
epiphany myths because they're all over the place, but this is another one I want
to talk about. This is the telephone. Anyone know a story about the invention of
the telephone?
>>: Mr. Watson, come here, I want to hear you.
>> Scott Berkun: Mr. Watson come here, I want to here you. So give me like the
10 second larger version.
>>: Alexander Bell spills something, spills an acid, makes a connection, he yells
out to Watson in the next room and Watson actually hears him through the wires.
>> Scott Berkun: Great. Watson come here, I need you. Who here has heard
that story? So many of you have heard this story. So you know a story about
the invention of the telephone. Does anyone know any other stories about the
invention of the telephone?
No. No. Too late, sorry. Too late. If you want to get that in there, you've got to
get in there early. I had the whole factor, empty room. I'm not going to let you
ruin that for me. Okay.
So what does that story tell us about how to invent whatever's going to replace
the telephone?
>>: [inaudible].
>> Scott Berkun: Accident. Have a buddy name Watson that you yell at
sometimes. Be clumsy, right. Apple falling on tree spilling ink, these stories are
often ordinary stories that the only value they have are anecdotal over drinks.
Hey, do you know how the telephone was invented or do you know the first thing
that was said over telephone? You don't. It was Watson, come here, what,
what, what, you drink, you act like you know something and you seem smart.
But you don't actually know anything about that. There's nothing in there that
gives you a pattern to replicate, a habit to copy or a path to place your ambition.
So any time that you hear a story about some innovation or about creative
thinking, it almost always focus on a particular moment in time. The first day, the
first time, the first thing -- time this was used, the first time it was seen in public.
And those stories are useless. And in doing work on this book, I actually -- I
taught a course at the University of Washington creative thing. I have an interest
in creative thinking, I always have. I taught creative thinking, I'm working on a
book. I wanted to make sure I have a complete understanding of the latest
research in psychology about what creative thinking is, how toss it work, what's
going on in our minds when someone's creative?
So I asked these questions and the mistake most people make are focusing on
these moments. When all the data and the research that we have, the best
practical research about the difference between a creative person and a non
creative person has a lot more to do with patterns, habits. What do they do every
day? What things do they go through every day, what are their patterns, what
goes on five minutes before, 10 minutes before they get an idea? Those are
interesting questions to ask. So the first pragmatic thing I can give you is any
time in the course of your daily work or at cocktail parties where you're listening
to a blow hard tell you about the beginnings of something, what you want to do is
say, okay, well what was that guy doing 10 minutes before, an hour before, a
week before? What was he doing every day? What habits did he have or she
had that led to that moment being possible?
So in the case in Newton if you had say okay, maybe he did get hit by an apple.
But what was he doing the day before, the week before, month before? In
Newton's case, who is asking questions, who is the scientist? He spent his
whole life developing the skills for observing the world and say why does that
work that way, why doesn't the apple fall sideways? Why does it fall at that
velocity and not -- he was a question ask her every day all the time. So maybe
he was sitting under an apple tree, I bet it was not the first time. I bet while he
was under the apple team, you know, he wasn't smoking pot and reading Harry
Potter. He was like, you know, I'm looking around at the world like how -- how
does this work the way that it does? That's something you can copy. Why does
my code work the way that it does? Where are some other ways this could work.
I see this cool discovery that someone else has invented. Well, what are the
parts of that, what's the smallest component I could understand. Okay, once I
get this complete what's the next component work. You want to ask yourself
what happened before, a week before, a month before, where are the patterns.
Any time we talk generally in popular literature, this is true for magazine articles,
it's largely true on the web, the short attention span of bogging about creative
thinking and invention and entrepreneurship in the world today focus on these
moments to a ridiculously overdeveloped degree. What you want to do if you
want to become a creator, an integrator, a progressive person yourself, say wait,
there's got to be a pile of work, it's not sexy, it's not as exciting that made that
moment possible. And I want to become a student of this work. I want to see the
patterns so I can copy and emulate. And maybe I'll never be a Newton, but I'll be
a little closer to being creative and finding things that other people are less likely
to find.
So the second -- oh, by the way, you guys are free, if you want to interrupt me for
a question at any point just raise your hand, interrupt me, as long as you can
keep it kind of short. If you have a longer more complicated question, save it for
the end. Okay? Fair? Good. I have you guys like, too much information. Okay.
So the second pragmatic thing I'm going to tell you is this. The word innovation
is a buzz word. We use it all the time, we throw it around all the time. We've be
more innovative, do more innovation, innovation, innovation, innovation. It really
doesn't mean that much anymore. It doesn't it's a very easy word to say. It's got
ten letters in it. Letters are cheap to use. Anyone can use the word innovation
regardless of any application to reality or to any sense of progress or any real
thing. So the first thing I recommend that people do, if you want to make your
group the team you worked on more innovative, be more innovative on a project
that you were working on, innovation meaning significantly better new idea that
you're able to put into practice. All things start with some idea, some abstract
idea. And at the end of the day, when you become famous like Edison or
Einstein or Bill Gates or who else you want to name, at some point in time it
becomes an innovation.
The first thing you want to do is to break this down. This is a lot of work. I mean
in the case of like Newton, there's a lot of work that goes on in between
something being an idea and it becoming an innovation, meaning it was
accepted by the world as a progressive new thing. So a simple thing to do is to
break that down. Break it down. Here's one way to break it down. Any idea that
you ever have, the first thing that's going to happen in the working world, you're
going to have to pitch that idea to somebody you're going to have to pitch it to
somebody, convince it why it's worth their time.
Maybe that's your manager, maybe it's a co-worker, maybe it's your spouse. You
have to convince someone of your idea. And it probably won't be that long in the
process of whatever grand scheme that you have that you're going to have to do
that to someone. So you have an idea, you got to pitch it to someone. Once you
pitch it to someone, say okay, spend the afternoon working on that, you got to
make a proof of concept. A sketch, a drawing, a white board diagram, say hey,
here's roughly how it will work. Then you have to use that to convince someone
to actually make a prototype, a rough version of the thing actually working, et
cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So you can break down any innovation from the first multi tasking operating
system to the first light bulb to the first suspension bridge and break it down.
Suspension bridges, I don't know who invented the suspension bridge, but I'm
thinking of Robling for some reason. Robling had the idea to the Brooklyn
Bridge, he had to pitch it to New York City. Had to build the model, proof of
concept, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Now all these skills now this becomes like real understandable work. You have a
great idea, so what. Convince someone of it. That's your first skill set you need
to have if you're an innovator. First skill set you need to have. Question? Yes.
>>: It seems like a lot. People that you've been talking about are kind of there's
a model of the single innovator kind of off in the woods doing their own thing. I
mean Newton have to go pitch his idea to go explore gravity before he just went
off and did it?
>> Scott Berkun: Great question. I've got to remember to repeat the question.
His question was a lot of the people I picked are lone psychotic Ted Kazinski
type innovators and he's saying what happens, what's the difference between
that or someone who works on a team or a corporation, et cetera.
In most cases the Newton case is interesting because he was actually most of
the people who are pinned as recluses, they kind of weren't. Newton was. Lived
alone in the woods partly because there was the plague, you know, so that kind
of made people, my house in the woods I'm going to stay there, but he had the
whole scientific community convinced of all his work. So the royal sons of
Britain, the royal sons of England I forget, there was a. He had a paper, he
showed them the paper, he basically pitched them the paper and they would vote
on it, debate on it to say whether it was valid or not.
So he had a community he had to vet his ideas through, but it wasn't at the
pitching stage, it was, you know, it would be later on.
But anyway, you're making a great point. In order for an idea to be accepted, no
matter how brilliant you are or whether you're working as a recluse, eventually
you need a customer. You need to convince your customer why they should
even look at what you've made. Pitching. Anyway, the exercise here is as
follows: If you in your organization you're saying, you know, if someone says we
need to be more innovative, we need to be more creative, more aggressive,
more progressive, the first question to ask is, wait, where in this scheme or
scheme like this do the ideas die? Where are they dying? And lots of
organizations they die before pitches get paid. Lots of people walking around the
organization with ideas who are afraid to suggest they're idea to somebody else.
If that's your problem, then don't worry about creative thinking classes, don't
worry about innovation, blah, blah, blah, you need to get people comfortable
talking about their ideas which is a completely orthogonal skill set to actually
being an intellectual, being a communicator to other skill set.
Very quickly in this chart we recognize your other skills that are not -- don't
require genius level intellect, don't require, you know, taking acid trips to whacko
new ideas. These are order skills that just need to be applied in sequence. So
the second pragmatic thing for you is ask yourself where in this process are
ideas dying?
Now, when I worked at Microsoft I saw lots of groups that would make it lots of
ideas, project teams that would make it to here. We'd have prototypes and
plans, acceptance of risk that when it came down to say, you know what, we
need to ship 20 developers off of version five, our existing product to go work on
this new thing, we fail. Unwillingness to actually fully accept the risk of taking on
a new direction. That's where we'd fail. Other groups at Microsoft or other
companies, hey, happens earlier on. People are not even free, they don't have
enough time or enough resurface available to make prototypes.
So break it down. Don't allow innovation to be this fuzzy thing. When someone
says we need to be more innovative say wait, do we need more ideas, do we
need more people pitching ideas, do we need more proof of concept work, do we
need more prototype? Now all of a sudden it's something you can talk about and
fight for.
I need my team to get 10 percent more time every month if you actually want us
to make more proof of concept designs. Now you're having a meaningful,
tangible conversation.
And the other thing they say about innovation is that it's such a buzz word, it gets
thrown around so often and lots of cases, groups are not ready, teams or
companies are not ready to be innovators. Innovation is risk taking. You have to
be really good at what you're doing if you're going to try to be progressive and do
something so much better. If a team isn't competent, can't even imagine to ship
crappy software on time, why are you even throwing down the I word? If a team
is poorly managed where portal is continually low, the quality of work out the door
is low, why would anyone ever throw down the I word.
In the case of all these people we talked about, they spend lots of time perfecting
their craft, becoming great at the basics of what they did before they ever
became people who would make thing that were breakthrough level things. Bob
Dylan, Van Gogh, you know what they did the for the first half of their career,
they studied the masters, the experts at what those fields experts in those fields
and they mimicked them and copied them.
You know, in the case of Bob Dylan, it's Woody Guthrie. He wanted to know how
does Woody Guthrie sound so good? What are the chord patterns he uses? He
would study and become an ex-expert in his field. I can make a very good
replica of a Woody Guthrie song and once he had mastery, then he started
thinking now I need to make a revolution, now I need something that's better,
progressive, change things because he had enough mass industry.
So the common fallacy I see today so it's so frequent. Innovation. Want to be
innovators. How good is what you're making now it's awful. How are you
possibly even going to conceive of making something radically better if you can't
make something that's half descent? Interesting question to think about.
Now.
>>: Question in.
>> Scott Berkun: Yes.
>>: [inaudible] innovation improving something, so you start with something
[inaudible] but you start the [inaudible].
>> Scott Berkun: The word innovation is a messy, sloppy word and there are
many definitions of it. I honestly don't like any of them. So as soon as you can
try to make a point or have a conversation without use of the word, you're better
off. So I'd use the word good instead, that, yes, you do want to start with
something, and yes, probably when you start off it's good to have low bars, you
want to say hey we're just going to try this out, great. But if the end result you're
not able to make something that's good, you don't feel -- you've released your
software to the web and you don't think that's good then the goal for the next
release should be to make it good, not to make it innovative, not to change the
world, not to change the industry. Make something good.
If you're failing to make something good, it's sort of like if you're failing to win a
silver medal. Why would you be talking about winning the gold. Set a goal that
you have some ability to prove your mastery, develop your mastery before you
set a goal that's that high.
So you're right at the beginning, you need a prototype, you need to make
mistakes, we'll talk more about mistake making in a second. But that's about at
the beginning. When you're shipping stuff that you're sending out the door,
you're unlikely to make something that's going to be a break through if you can't
make something that's even on the table. So we'll come back to that, though.
Speaking of mistake making, one of the fallacies we have regarding innovation
has to do with science. We're not doing science. Science is rigorous, science is
you do A, you do B, you get C. Very rigorous.
The scientists were taught in school you put this chemical in, you add this much
and poof now you get the thing that you know does the thing, right. That's the
science we're taught is understood and manifest, clear and logical. That's true
for science that's already been discovered. If you look at science and scientific
work of things before they were discovered, break through science trying to pave
new ground, it's entirely the option. And the best story I can refer to in that
regard, regarding mistake making is this story, the story of the discovery DNA.
Discovering DNA which happened in the last '40s or early '50s. Before this,
believe it or not, we had no real proof about the human connection to evolution,
we had no proof for any of these things. So these guys said you know we
believe it's a structure, genetic structure, we don't know what it looks like, genetic
structure that establishes evolution, establishes hereditary, we're going to prove
it.
They had no support, very little support from their universities, very little support
from science. They were again, be renegades and recluses. Of and this book is
their story of how they made these breakthroughs happen. And their story is a
very human story. It's a 120 page book. It's not that technical. I'm not that bright
and I understood it. You should be able to make it through and it's largely a
sequence of sequence like this. We kind of had this idea, not sure if it will work,
we tried it out. Experiment, fail. Oh, but we learned some new thing, a new
question. Let's try experiment with that. Oh, failed in an entirely unexpected
way. Not sure what to do. But wait, now's another thing that we see that we
could not have seen before until this failure, we have a new hunch, we're going to
make a whole new bunch of experiments that follow that, et cetera, et cetera, et
cetera.
It's intuitive process. Failure laden. Failure laden. Uncertain. And the key word
is experimentation. Experimentation, science experiment. And the proper sense
of the word. That you don't know what the outcome's going to be. That's the
only way that you could possibly find new ground to do something where you're
not certain of what the outcome is going to be.
This is a fantastic example of that story. Something we not take for granted, we
take as accepted that we do have a DNA structure that binds us and explains our
reproductive cycle, et cetera, et cetera. When the time was done, it was a set of
series of ad hoc experiments that led to that discovery.
So another pragmatic question to ask, simple question to ask, if ever you feel like
you're being asked to be more innovative, you're asked to be more creative, the
first thing you say is where can I experiment, where am I allowed to experiment?
Okay, boss, you tell me you want my inner relation threshold numbers, whatever
metric you have to go up by 70 percent, okay, how many experiments am I
allowed to do every week? Well, none, because we want you to be efficient.
Done. Can't win. We'd have no DNA if Crick and Watson and I forget her name,
Rosalyn -- Rosalyn Quick?
>>: Crick.
>> Scott Berkun: Crick -- well, there's a third.
>>: Franklin.
>> Scott Berkun: Franklin, thank you. If the three of them, the three of them
were told to be efficient they never would have made the discoveries they did.
Experimentation and creativity are messy processes. So again there's a
connection. Ask to be creative, ask to be innovative, where are you allowed to
experiment? If the answer is nowhere, then innovation and creativity is
impossible. Impossible. Some recent examples of experimentation paying off in
stories we don't hear that often. So YouTube. Who YouTube. Many of you
great. Okay. So YouTube, [inaudible] Google, et cetera. The YouTube guys,
anyone know how they started their company, what their goal was?
>>: [inaudible].
>> Scott Berkun: I'm sorry?
>>: A game.
>> Scott Berkun: No. You're on Flickr, which we'll talk about in a second. Hot or
Not. Who knows where Hot or Not is? Come on. So hot or not is the website
where people put up pictures of people they know and then everyone else comes
by and votes on whether they are hot or not. That's the whole website. Makes
millions of dollars ever year. Don't you feel like an idiot now? Could have been
you. Right? Hot or Not.
Any way, the YouTube guys they saw this and said you know what, we can do a
video version of Hot or Not. We think we had the server, the server and
bandwidth issues, they were technical guys, they thought we could do a video
version of Hot or Not. So they started out building this thing that could be this
video dating, and pretty quickly in that process like you know, what, this Hot or
Not thing may be we could make this more general, a more general use for video
cheap easy video online. That's what set them on the path to YouTube. Hot or
Not. So they did something, it was an experiment, didn't work out the way they
thought but in doing the failed experiment, they found a new direction to go in
that led them to something that became a billion dollar company.
Flickr, which is the game story, Flickr, these guys started as a multi MMORG,
multi online role game player virtual, one of those things, and they were running
out of money. The game cast called never ending, never ending game, game
never ending. Anybody know in game never ending. Let's assume it was game
never ending. Anyway, six months, 8 months, 10 months, they don't have
enough money to make in the game. One of the features they had been working
on was a way to have chat in the game for two players of the game. And in this
chat, they want to be able to share footnotes with each other, because while
you're playing, hey look at my picture of my dog, oh, that's cool, look at the
picture of my cat, okay. And as they did this little thing, they realized, hey,
maybe shares, you know, this is kind of interesting tool, what if we designed it,
it's actually pretty need because they had a couple of URL designer type people,
pretty neat, maybe there's a more general purpose way for us to use this thing
we've made.
So they had a big, big discussion, they decided you know what, we're going to
take our remaining money and put it on NAT. What if we made a tool that was
truly about sharing footnotes. Boom. That's how thicker -- Flickr, not thicker.
Thicker is a who other thing. Thicker might be part of the Hot or Not thing.
That's how Flickr was born. So again, experiment. You could argue that every
startup company is a kind of experiment. There's many uncertainties in the
outcome that you cannot predict up front.
They start up going in one direction through the failure of that experiment the
game company was failing, the Hot or Not thing was failing, said you know what,
we now have an opportunity given what we've built that sailed in one direction
repurpose it and go another direction. So you need experimentation. And you
can look at all the other, you know, the famous stories that we have in our
industry, apple, these guys, the experiment they wanted to do, a Steve Wozniak,
who worked at HP at the time, he wanted to make a personal computer at
Hewlett Packard. He went to his boss said hey we should make a personal
computer, computers in your home, personal use. It's like no, that's -- HP, come
on, we're not going to do that. We don't ever want to make personal computers.
So he quit. Jobs and him got together through whatever the club was, that was
how they started Apple. So it was an experiment, something he tried to do, he
tried to pitch this idea to Hewlett Packard and was told no.
The Google founders, a similar story. They had this technology, they did not
want to start their own search engine company, they rent around to Alta Vista
and Yahoo and a few of the other players in the search engine game at that time
and said we've got this technology to sell you and they were told no. Search
engines can't make any money. Search engines can't make any money. That's
what they were told by every search engine vendor. And so their original plan
which was, to license it and sell it was a failure and forced them to start their own
company, et cetera. And I'm sure you guys know the rest of that story. So you
got to look for failures. They're always -- any innovation you find, no matter how
successful it was or amazing or perfect it seemed there's a failure and a set of
experiments that made that opportunity possible.
So lessons so far. Whichever you hear a magic story, an epiphany story that
talks about a magic moment, what happened five minutes before, 10 minutes
before, a week before? What were the patterns that were involved. How many
times did Newton sit under a free? How many startups did this company, this
guy start up? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What were the experiments that
failed that created this new kind of knowledge that led to success?
These are the interesting questions to ask, because they're behind every
innovation, success story that we have. Which leads us to this man. [laughter].
Now, I'm talking about the fictional man. The William Shatner we may be able to
talk about later, but we're going to talk about Kirk now. Kirk represents an
interesting thing about history. So one of the things that came out of this book,
all the research I did for this book, all these stories that I read was trying to get an
understanding of the breadth of the history of innovation, the patterns that get
repeated again and again when people try to do something new. And they run all
the way through from Newton, you know, the Apple guys, to Bill Gates, to the -runs all the way through.
And some of our understanding or our self deception about innovation comes
from this guy because there's a ton of relationships between exploration and
innovation. And exploration is all about discovering new places to go. We have
a map, we've been here, never been there, I'm going to go there. That's what
explorers say. And Columbus and Magellan, da Gama, all those people were the
first venture capitalists. They got money to go to places no one had been.
Venture capital. That's where the term I believe that's where the term comes
from. Venture capital.
The problem, though, is that the only story we really know about explorers is this
story, this fictional Star Trek late '60s weird '70s story about what goes on when
you explore. And it's a TV show. Not real. This is not how exploration works.
See in the real exploration, what I just described is a really ridiculous thing to say,
it's probably none of us would ever say in our life times that there's a map, it's the
map of the whole known world, and there's a spot on it that's blocked, that's
empty. And we're going to say to someone very powerful king, queen, whoever, I
want to go there. And I want you to pay me to go. And I'm going to bring back
more wealth than you've ever seen, I promise you.
It's a crazy thing to say. Because most of them died, explorers died miss -- this
is 1500s, 1600s, scurvy and you know the maps with the dragons, they believed
all this stuff. These boats were not built very well. They didn't have food and
preservatives. There was no microwave oven on these boats. This is not
Princess Line Cruise Ships. Most of these people died and were miserable. And
most of their time that was spent is there anything there? Okay. Day 2, is there
anything there? Day 3, anything there? Day 4, we're going to kill the captain
because we're going to die. Day 5, no. These are really depressing horrible
trips.
Now, this guy, our mythological view of exploration, episode opens up, joop,
joop, come out of warp drive, land on the planet, chaos, drama, civilization, war.
Commercial. Action all the time. Whoa, we got innovation happening all the
time, something's going on all the time. Guy in the red shirt's dying within five
minutes. All this action happening. Which is completely ridiculous.
This is meant to serve a narrative, it's a television narrative. Get enough action
going on she'll stay through the commercial. That's the goal of this story. And
that's the basis of our thinking of exploration. The real exploration again,
experimentation, high risk of failure, willingness to confront situations most
people would ignore, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The true story just to tie this
home to history -- the anybody know who this guy is? Tesla's uncle maybe?
Magellan. This is Magellan. What is Magellan moment known for:
>>: [inaudible]
>> Scott Berkun: Circumventing the globe. Didn't do it. Didn't do it. I would
never show you something that actually happened. That would break the whole
model. The boat did, but he did not. He died halfway through his trip probably
as a result of a mute any over fight over which way of the spot of the map that
was empty, which way off the spot of the map that was empty they should go.
Magellan did not make it. Captain Cook is actually the basis for a lot of the -apparently a lot of the historic trek model.
And the reason why the red shirts die all the time is the British red shirts, the
British red shirts are the marines. They were the first guys to go on land and
they were the first people to die. That's how the story -- that may be a myth so
don't quote me on that one.
All right. So what's it so far? You always want to dig into the first person
histories, the closer you can get to the people who were actually there, the less
prone the stories are going to be to mythology. Less. Sometimes people have
their own self interest involved and their stories are more mythological. But
generally it's less true. The stories that get told that are mythological and
epiphany base are often meaty stories, hype magazine articles where the goal is
to hype some abstract idea of what greatness and wonder is. So one trick in this,
one secret tactic in this to reveal what actually happened is to pick something
that you think is ordinary, pick something you already take for grand. And study
the day before that thing was invented. The chair. Telephone. The automatic
transmission. Study the day before it was invented and all of a sudden you're
like oh, my God, I had no idea. Because you'll be -- you'll find a connection to
these stories. Because I know my own story's working in corporations, working
with publishers is all these forces that resist change. They resist progress. And
you're trying to be a progressive person. You feel like you were the only person
in the world that's ever had to deal with that kind of conflict.
The truth is every innovation dealt with that kind of conflict, every innovation dealt
with that kind of a challenge that need to be overcome. So study the origins of
an ordinary thing.
All right. My last thing with you, I've got 10 minutes to go through this, is about
people and in particular management regarding innovation. People in
management regarding innovation. So my last -- this is my last history -- my last
black and white photo, I promise. Anyone know what this is a picture of?
>>: [inaudible].
>> Scott Berkun: Sorry?
>>: [inaudible].
>> Scott Berkun: Looms. Any loom majors here, textile majors? No?
>>: [inaudible].
>> Scott Berkun: I don't know what that is.
>>: Destroying the loom.
>> Scott Berkun: Destroying the loom. Love -- lovites. Okay. Anybody know
who the lovites were? I bet if I asked who the Klingons were, you'd all say I
know. But lovites, no. Yes?
>>: I wanted to go back to the hand ways of making [inaudible] machine entry
and industry becoming [inaudible].
>> Scott Berkun: Got it. And let me give you a slightly embellished version of
that story. The lovites, this is the industrial revolution England and a large part of
the population in this area of England, they made their living working looms.
Manual labor. They pushed these things back and forth and that's how these
textiles were made. Pushed these things pack and forth. Instrumental age,
steam power was becoming a force, this new way to make engineering work,
new way to make industry work and this textile mill decided to switch from
module labor to steam based labor. So these guys show up at work one day,
show up at work like, hey, I'm ready to get started, boss, and the boss is like,
hey, we don't need you. Sorry. Go home. Find something else to do. See you
later.
They were not very happy about this, so one of the guys, as the -- this mythology
embedded in the story, it's kind of hard to sort out exactly what happened, but as
the story goes a guy named Ned Blood which maybe a fictitious name picked up
a sledge hammer and beat the crap out of the loom, the theory being if he
destroyed the loom they'd need him again. Kind of a basic principal there. No
loom, they need me. Great.
He got a bunch of his other loomists or whatever they were called, professional
loomers, I don't know, and they got together, they were basically a gang and they
destroyed looms. They were eventually caught by the British government and
they were hung and that was the end of the story. But the world lovite lives on.
In fact, it's a word that many of you have heard because we use it as a slur.
Somebody who does not upgrade to Vista, lovite. You're resisting the future
right? That's what the word means. In common uses that's what the word
means. Which is fine because in a sense that's true.
But the other truth of the story that is more important, it's more important to you if
you're coming to a talk about innovation, is that the real part of the story has
nothing to do with technology, it has to do with human nature. So all of you are
here right now listening to me talk, you're falling asleep as I try to keep you
awake, you're going to go back to your office and imagine if when you go back to
your office, you go into your room -- or your cubical and on your chair there's a
little, there's a little machine, a little light that's going off, boop, boop, boop, kind
of like something out of Star Trek, boop, and you're looking at it and your boss
comes in and say hey, we didn't need you anymore. Sorry didn't you get the
message. We have an automated version of what you do that works twice as
half for half as much money. No health insurance and no performance reviews
required and nothing. So goodbye. All of you would have some kind of violent
emotional reaction to that box.
This box is now destroying your life. It means your kids are going to starve, you
have no health insurance anymore, this little mechanical box. That response has
nothing to do with technology, nothing to do with innovation, nothing to do with
creative thinking, has to do with human nature, resisting change. Once you have
something that makes you comfortable you do not want it to change. By and
large you do not want it to change. So when you create something, when you
innovate something, you make something new, some new release, some new
way to do something, a new algorithm, there's something, there's some group of
people in the world that are -- don't want your change, they don't. In fact, they
will work -- just like the example I gave you, they will defend the old position to
the death because they feel that everything they have been built depends on
their ability to defend it. And if you want to understand the story of innovation
that's a much worse angle why certain things were accepted in certain cultures
and certain things were not.
This theory, this theory is not mine, this theory is the version of the theory called
diffusion of innovation, diffusion of innovation. And this is a book by Rogers who
is an anthropologist, anthropologist being people who see the world from a
human centric view. The culture explains most of what goes on and why. And in
this book he documents, you know, why did the use of boiled water which helps
preserve, helps kill bacteria in food, it's a medical -- western world sees it as a
medical benefit it's a safer way to eat and live, why do certain cultures adopt that
and others did not? Same technology, different cultures. Why?
That point of view explains why some people are much more successful, much
more successful getting innovations adopted than others because they
understand the cultures they are in better. They don't walk into a room and say
my idea is five times better than the old idea when the person that they're talking
about is the VP of their group is the inventor of the old idea. This goes on all the
time. Because most people who are creative, who are intellectuals, who are
inventors, focus on the idea. They're like, yeah, I got the gem, I had the -- and if
I'm going to convince someone to make a change, I got to focus on this magical
thing I've made. Again, the epiphany, the magical thing.
When in the human view, the magical thing is irrelevant. The person in power,
what do you have to say to them to make them understand the value of what you
have? And talking with the idea first is probably not the way to do it. So you can
look at the why some great ideas in the world have failed, why the metric system
for example never took off in the United States. Honestly, it's a much better
system in many ways, has some limitations, much better, has a lot less to do with
the fact that the metric system is better or worse than the British system. It has
much more to do with the politics in American in the late 1780s. And who is in
power at the time and why, and what the issues that were on the table and why,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So a better question to ask if you want to be more creative is wait a second,
what's the culture I'm trying to be creative in, what kinds of persuasions and
pitches are useful in my culture that get ideas accepted or not. And this is not
orthogonal thing. This has almost nothing to do with your ability to be creative.
What can you do with your ability to come up with a radical new idea. It has to
do with your sense of people, your sense of sociology. And arguably your sense
of politics. Okay. How much time do I have left? Do I get a time check before I
keep rambling. How much time do I have?
>>: We have the room until 3.
>> Scott Berkun: Okay. So I'm going to go for another 10 minutes and I'll open
for Q and A. Is that good?
>> Kirsten Wiley: Yes.
>> Scott Berkun: All right. So I'm going to skip this thing about Taylor. I really
wanted to talk about Taylor, someone if you want to know about Taylor which
explains the horror and evil of management in the world, I will answer it Q and A.
But I can't answer it now. It's up to you guys. It's up to you guys. So last story I
wanted to tell you, I do a lot of history, I wanted to try to give you some pragmatic
pieces, some thing that you could hold on to and research maybe you could get
used to when you leave. I want history give you some perspective but I want to
use stuff you can use when you leave.
So the last thing I'm going to talk about is this basic model. The simplest model
of all the companies I studied, all the case studies I read, all the places I've been,
all the companies I've been to, et cetera, this is the simplest model and thinking
about managing innovation, the simplest model it's got three pieces to it.
Delegation, risk taking, which includes the experiment stuff we talked about, and
rewarding initiative. That's the whole thing, the three pieces. And the story I'm
going to use to illustrate this is about this company. So three. And who knows
what 3M stands for?
>>: Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing.
>> Scott Berkun: Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing. Who is from Minnesota,
anybody? 3M. Everyone knows that. Can anyone names a product that 3M has
made. Post-it note and scotch tape. You guys are good. You got two. All right.
What does pose-it notes have to do with Minnesota or mining? Nothing, nothing,
nothing, nothing. So I'm going to tell you that connection. Because it ties a lot of
stuff we talked about already together. 3M started as a mining company in the
early 1900s, mining still being a huge industry, it was a growth venture capital
industry because we're still on the rise the industrial age. Bridges and sky
scrapers are going up now, so people need minerals, they need iron, they need
all these other things that you use with iron, I don't know what they are, but you
need all this stuff that comes from the ground. That I know. So these guys said,
hey, we're a bunch of young guys, get some money together, we're going to keep
this stuff out of the ground, we're going to sell it. 3M started as a mining
company. They built their first mine, being young, relatively ignorant men about
mining. They made a big mistake.
Turned out the stuff they were mining out of the ground based on all this
borrowed money from the banks was not iron -- I'm sorry not iron but not the
abrasive material that they were trying to dig up. It was the equivalent of fool's
gold. It looked kind of like the stuff they wanted but wanted and was kind of
worthless. So what did they do? Most of us would quit and go back to work at
some other company. They said no. We've learned something now, we are not
going to try to mine that thing, we are going to pick a more narrow kind of mining,
focused on sand paper, focused on making kinds of sand paper used to abrase
other things. Great. Focus on sand paper.
They built their second mind. About five or 10 years they started to finally get
some profit, started to finally pay back their lenders. Slow rise was not a
meteoric overnight success story. Sand paper business. Sand paper again
being a big industry at the time, you did not have Home Depot or lows where with
a sand paper aisle, right, they were one of the few companies that manufactured
sand paper. Now, one of the engineers, sand paper engineers, a guy named
Richard Drew was going to one of his clients, an automobile manufacturing
company and showing him models, prototypes of stuff he was making for sand
paper, showing him different versions all the time which we do all the time, site
visits and customers, same thing. And he noticed, he said, hey, he noticed that
one of the things they were trying to do with this car company was make two tone
paint for the car. Blue and green. And having trouble finding a way to reliably in
a manufacturing setting keep the two colors separate.
So he's sitting there looking at that going hmmm, I think I might be able to fix that.
I don't know. I have an idea. I have an idea. A thought that many of you
probably had at work or in a meeting where you see some problem that's not -you don't own it but you see the problem out there, you're like I might be able to
-- I'm curious, I'm going to go spend some time on it. So he did. Went back to
his lab, put some stuff together and had an idea he thought was interesting,
showed it to his boss. His boss said, Richard, smart guy, you've been an
engineer here for many years, I'm paraphrasing here by the way, this is not a
little transcript of what was said, but for entertainment purposes I will take that
liberty, he said look, it's interesting, but you know, Minnesota, Mining,
Manufacturing. Tape. You know this whole thing with the paint and the car, not
our job. So don't do that. Make more sand paper.
Richard said all right, hey, the boss said not to work on this so I won't. Goes
back to work on sand paper but that idea is in his head. He's so curious about it,
he said I could solve it, I could solve it, he spends more time doing it. His boss
finds out about it, again, they have the same conversation with more -- there's
more tension now, come on, Richard, focus on what you're doing. Happens one
or two more times. Eventually Richard Drew decides he's so close now he just
needs to make a couple of more prototypes. He knows his boss is not going to
support him on this, but he needs money to make the final prototype. So what
does he do? As an engineer, turns out he can write receipts or justify receipts for
50 bucks. Needs a thousand dollars or something to do it, so what does he do,
he makes up the receipts and buys the stuff that he needs and finishes the
project. And the project was masking tape. The birth of masking tape. He goes
back to the client, says, hey I got your solution here. You put this down, once it's
done, you pull it back off, boom, press to, manufacturing solution to two tone car
painting.
They're like hey, this is pretty cool. He showed it to William McKnight, they're
like, well, hey you know, I'm not a big fan of this idea, but if this one client likes it,
maybe there's more manufacturing clients that the like it, great, we'll make more
and off we go. Within a few years it was -- had the growth trajectory that was
greater than all their other products. Masking tape had all the uses they had
never anticipated. And the key part of the story is this. It's not about sand paper
or becoming miners or anything like that ->>: [inaudible].
>> Scott Berkun: Or fraud -- what's the fraud part?
>>: [inaudible]
>> Scott Berkun: Oh, the fraud, yes. Well, fraud, you know, you want to make
an omelette, you got to break some eggs. [laughter].
>> Scott Berkun: The key part is this. The boss, this is the key part of the story,
his boss, William McKnight he's got an interesting thing going on in his head now,
because there's this project that's quickly becoming the fastest growing product
that 3M has and it's a product he wanted to kill five times or four times or three
times. So he's like scratching his head like, you know, I kind of fucked up here,
had I killed this, we might still be making this model products with mining and
now that we've done this masking tape, you know, a few years later they had
cellophane tape which was this see through tape and all of a sudden he had this
brand explosion, this whole new line of stuff and [inaudible] the market.
So William McKnight asked the pivotal question here that's pivotal for all
managers or leaders or project managers or whatever, he said my management
the philosophy was an inhibitor of innovation and I want our company to continue
to grow. I see my job as a manager eventually became a chairman and a C level
executive, I want our company to grow, so my philosophy has to be something
very different than what it was. And he set about a program of managing for
supporting people like Richard Drew. Then instead of shutting them down or
making them work around the system, he wanted them to build the stuff in. Why
can't 3M support this kind of activity while at the same time supporting existing
product lines.
So that's how you get from mining to post-it notes. Because it was William
McKnight, the guy who played this pivotal role, this pivotal negative role in
masking tape that created a culture where innovation and invention was status
quo. It was expected if he was an engineer to do things outside of the
boundaries.
How did he do this? Well, Google these days makes a big deal about the 20
percent rule, 20 percent time, whatever they call it. That was a function, a
specific management rhetorical function that was created by 3M. They called the
5 percent time or 10 percent time, or you know with inflation, now it's 20 percent,
right. But back then it was something smaller. But the idea was exactly the
same.
And the idea is best embodied by this also speech. Now, I have heard so many
executive speeches in my life. I've been to many company meetings, Microsoft
company meetings and others and I hated them all. Because they're written and
described in this way that is so flowery and abstracted from reality that they're
difficult to connect with.
William McKnight wrote this three paragraph thing and in all the literature I have
read by active CEOs and chairman, every company in the world this is the best
piece of writing about managing innovation. I'm going to read it, don't worry, I'll
read it, you don't have to strain your neck. The best piece of writing I've seen on
this period. So I'm going to read it to you, it's not that long, and I'll talk about it for
a minute, and then we'll open for Q and A.
As our business grows, it becomes increasingly necessary to delegate
responsibility and to encourage men and women to exercise their initiative. This
requires considerable tolerance. Those men and women to whom we delegate
authority if they are good people are going to want to do their jobs in their own
way. Mistakes will be made but if a person's essentially right, the mistakes he or
she makes are not as serious in the long run as the mistakes management will
make if the owner takes and tells those in authority exactly how they must do
their jobs. Management that is destructively critical when mistakes are made kills
initiative and it's essential that they have many people with initiative if we are to
continue to grow. The three pieces I call out here, delegate authority and
responsibility. Instead of William McKnight saying I don't think you should work
on this, he should say I don't think you should work on this, but if you're really
convinced you should talk part of your time and work on it anyway, no matter
what I or any executive says. You're smart, we hired you for your intellect and
creative ability, do it anyway.
So the fraud thing, William McKnight will probably come back later and say that
was probably the right thing to do. There should be a budget for you to do that.
Maybe not a big budget but enough that if you have a really good idea you can
hack and fund your way to do it. Second, mistakes will be made. Mistakes will
be made. There's not a single executive budget in the world that says, you know,
10 million dollars for equipment, 20 million dollars for buildings, six million dollars
for mistakes. You don't see that. Mistakes -- this is like you've screwed up, you
should not be CEO if you're talking about mistakes. He says right here, mistakes
will be made. We know this. And this is good. Provided their interesting
mistakes like the ones we talked about earlier. The kinds of mistakes that say
give you a new kind of knowledge where you can ask a new question you would
not have found before. Mistakes will be made. And a managers job or a leader's
job is to support those mistakes. I'm not saying you should ship those mistakes,
I'm not saying release bad stuff, part of your development process should be
about experimentation and exploring and prototyping in a structure that rewards
you for doing that without a negative ramification on customer quality and
customer experience, which can be done.
And the last part is about rewarding initiative. Rewarding people who do it
anyway, finding a way, which is this is the most difficult thing to do, because
managers are taught the authoritarian centric model that I am the captain of the
ship, I am Alexander the Great, if I say go west, everyone should go west.
This is saying when I say everyone should go west, I mean most of you but those
of you who have a really good idea and can justify it themselves that it's worth
your time should go northwest, southeast and do their own thing, which is a very
difficult thing for manager to maintain because for an insecure manager this is
disrespecting their authority. Disrespecting of their authority. So bound from that
tension you're running against the opposite of what your average MBA school
teaches you what you're supposed to be doing as a middle manager. It's very
difficult to maintain. However, this is the core thing he's got them in three
paragraphs, tell education, finding a way to fund mistakes and support mistakes,
rewarding initiative. And the kicker to all this for me is he wrote this in 1948. He
wrote this 60 years ago. And the number of companies who have managers that
on average live up to this today is very, very small.
And instead of all the attention we put on technology, what technology are you
using or some new innovation method or project manage, agile method or
whatever thing we do that's going to do it for you? No. Delivering on these core
values. People want a play book for being more innovative as a leader or
manager or when you're talking to your boss as to what you need from them in
order to innovate or create for them, it's going to come from stuff derived from
this kind of source. So I am out of time. These are the photo credits for the
photos that I used, and if I don't get time for your question, I'd love questions, so
please take a moment afterwards an send me an e-mail to Scott, I thought your
talk sucked because you didn't talk about blah, can you talk about it in an e-mail,
and I'd be happy to do that. So thank you. Thank you for coming and listening.
Thank you.
[applause].
>> Scott Berkun: Okay. Questions. Yes, sir.
>>: You say something about Chrome.
>> Scott Berkun: Chrome. Well you got to get me something to work with here.
What do you want to know? I wrote a review of it, so you want to hear my take
on Chrome go to my website and search for Chrome. I wrote a two page review
on it. I thought it was interesting. There were things about it that I liked. I
thought that anytime that browser design gets interesting, I'm a happy guy. I
worked on browsers for a long time, I left Internet Explorer right when the
browser war ended and there was a period of like four years when nothing
happened which depressed me to no end and then Firefox came along and I was
happy because now there's something to work with. And Microsoft, I know from
my own experience, needs somebody to [inaudible] with, you've got somebody
that's got to be in there. The best -- it's a funny story, true story. When I worked
at Internet Explorer the best way to justify, it's kind of depressing but it was true,
the best way to justify a new feature in Internet Explorer was to claim you had
proof that Netscape was going to do it. Claim you had proof. And in fact, there
were many ideas that we had that we talked about and debated we put on the
shelf and then as soon as Netscape's shipping it, we're like there we go. Okay.
That's the proof. We know it's going to be approved. That's human nature and
psychology and you know, Internet Explorer is actually probably the best set of
experiences I had working for other managers. I had some fantastic on Internet
Explorer, guys like Joe Bell Fiori [phonetic], Heidi Pertovi [phonetic], who I don't
think is around anymore, Chris Jones, there was a fantastic group of people that I
learned a lot of whatever -- however good I became as a program manager came
from working for people who I thought embodied a lot of what I am talking about
in a practical way.
So I had a great experience there. Questions for me? Yeah.
>>: You talked about innovation [inaudible] environment [inaudible] ideas
[inaudible] heard about, I can see from [inaudible] Galileo before him and
[inaudible] ->> Scott Berkun: So the question is what's the importance of environment?
>>: [inaudible].
>> Scott Berkun: Okay. So ( environment's everything. It's not everything. It's
underrated as an important part of the process. You take any protege level
person, take a Mozart, Da Vinci, an Einstein, Edison and you put them 200 years
in the past, they're born 200 years earlier than they were, you wouldn't know their
name. You would not know their name. Mozart was born in a time when you
know it was the hot artistic prospect in the world. Music. Certainly for the
wealthy classes in Europe. He was born at the right place in the right time. He
also happened to be born by someone who is a musician. You know who
Picasso's dad was? A painter.
Now had he been born to someone else, some other person, whatever
prestigious thing we think is really gifted to them, not true. There's also a
community, there's always a network. It's not to discount the role of the
individual, but there's always someone who is older or more experienced or
established in the community at some point has to accept or acknowledge what's
going on for it to work. And the same thing is true at work. Same thing is true at
work. If let's say this gentleman were to go bake out of this discussion he got a
brilliant idea for his team, fantastic breakthrough idea. Fantastic. Here we have
to go back he might be an executive, I don't know. He could be. Right? He
might be. Some day. There's hope, light. You're a young man.
He would have to go back and convince at least one person that his idea made
sense. He would have to. It might even be the person who works for him to
convince him a good job on, there's always other people involved. And the
successful places that we liked to hold up on the pedestal, the Pixars and the
Apples, some film directors, they build communities of people they work with
regularly that they have been understanding about how to help each other
develop their ideas. How to help each other develop their ideas. There's a
chapter in the book that's all about culture, culture of ideas. And what a good
manager recognizes that his influence is only one thing. He wants to build a
community of people who are all actively trying to help each other make their
ideas better. Whether that's through criticism, through shared brainstorming,
through -- but the goal is everyone to try to get the best ideas possible into the
pool that makes it out the door. That they are orchestrators rather than dictators.
So culture is huge. And establishing culture is a large part of what managers and
executives of successful creative organizations do. Yes?
>>: Where did you learn to be such a great speaker?
>> Scott Berkun: Oh, thank you. I'm not prepared to answer that question. How
did I learn? Practice and experimentation. And the secret. The secret, I've done
this a lot. But the secret is I took a class on memory. Memory is also important.
I took a class on improv, improv class. Not like a for theater people, it was for a
community college class. Took it as a joke with Vanessa Longacre [phonetic],
who still works at Microsoft, and Ixa Juxel [phonetic]. Two friends who worked
together. We had a -- what's the craziest thing we can do together. We're like
already, we'll do that, and it turned out to be fantastic. Because much more
comfortable with being interrupted which is good for difficult smarts crowds. You
guys weren't difficult today, but Microsoft can be difficult crowds. And just being
more open to what people are saying and following the flow of the room. So lots
of practice.
The other tip is watching yourself on video. Which is painful. So you should get
like a bottle of scotch or whatever your favorite thing is and watch it, oh, my God,
but then you do it again the second time you get a little bit better and you get
better and more comfortable.
And the last thing is if I come up here acting like I'm going to have fun then it's
easier for you guys to maybe have a little bit of fun. If I get up here like this is
horrible, I -- then it's never going to work. Because you guys won't have any fun
either. So. Yes, sir?
>>: What are your comments on Steve Jobs who is renowned as the biggest
asshole?
>> Scott Berkun: Okay. Great question. All right. So one thing I didn't say -- so
to repeat the question, what are thing Steve Jobs who many believe is the
greatest asshole on the planet? Right? Question?
>>: A terrific product guy.
>> Scott Berkun: Yes.
>>: From a management standpoint ->> Scott Berkun: Yes. You're totally right. So one thing I should say. I'm
offering one point of view. I read a lot of history and have some experience.
One point of view. There are lots of other points of views that may be equally
valid for you and your context and make this stuff not work for you at all. So
another point of view which I don't talk about that much, I'm less of a fan of, is the
authoritarian dictatorial model which if you studied the arts has a lot -- there's a
lot of successes to be said for it. So Steve Jobs falls in that category. He's
someone who is tyrannical, he has a reputation for being abusive and
confrontational and dictatorial and centralized power. Not someone who has like
this open model where people can suggest ideas. No. Very small group of
people with a lot of power.
My opinion of him is exactly what you said. I don't think it would be -- he would
be someone I would want to work for for a long periods of time.
>>: The ultimate IC.
>> Scott Berkun: Yes, the ultimate IC. But he's been incredibly successful and
to a point of level of success that it's difficult to criticize his methods if you judge
him based on the results. The whole story behind him leaving and what
happened to Apple and him coming back there aren't that many stories like that
in the history of corporate American. Lot of credit. But personally I don't think I
would want to be in that environment, unless I had almost had as much power as
he did. Yeah. But my point is, though, there is a lot of merit if you look results for
people who have destructive or abusive managerial styles and the film world is
notorious for this. The film world is notorious for this with film makers who are
abusive and cruel and vicious and treat people so poorly and they justify it on
their talent. Which makes for some good art, but again I'd rather watch those
films then work on those films. Yeah?
>>: You told us can you tell us about the managerial environment at Xerox Park
and how that might have affected demand with the mouse and the and the
Windows.
>> Scott Berkun: Yeah, so the question was at xerox park, which of those you
don't know Xerox Park is one of the great stories of uncapitalized innovation in
the world, the development the of the Gooey interface, the laser printer, Ethernet
all came out of xerox park and xerox got almost no revenue out of those three
things. Those pivotal. Anyway. I know bits and pieces of the story. They're all
secondhand. Some people who I know who actually worked for -- there was one
I can't give you a good answer to this, but I do know there was one manager,
Robert -- there was one manager. If you ask me the name, I can dig it up. There
was one manager who was in charge of the research group for eight or nine
years, and he was the guy who was in charge during that whole time. And a lot
of mixed things said about that guy, which I really feel bad I can't remember his
name. But there are a lot of mixed things said about him. On the one hand he
did create an environment where it was egalitarian intellectually. The poem had
lots of ideas, there was lots of discourse, sometimes are confrontational but the
idea was we want the best ideas to come up. His own tactics for management
and who he word and didn't, there's some questions as to how fair manager he
was.
But on the whole if I had a list of criteria for what great managers of innovation
are supposed to do, he'd probably score relatively well. He'd probably score
relatively well. Some people didn't like him but in terms of the quality of people
who were there and stayed there for years, another good sign, Allen Kay and
who was the Ethernet guy? You had a whole bunch of high powered people who
stayed there for years, people who had choices for other places to go. If you can
retain those really good people of options you're doing something right in your
management and culture to maintain them. Yes?
>>: There's kind of inherent paradox at what you're saying in the beginning of
your talk about it being ridiculous to try and process science innovation and let
and I think you're right when you talk about how [inaudible] successful innovators
have for patents and [inaudible] when you [inaudible] organization [inaudible] I'm
sure you think their behavioral processes that you can cultivate in that team.
How [inaudible]?
>> Scott Berkun: Okay. It's a great question. You're totally right, I confess. I
have paradoxical suggestions. If I were to try to clarify the distinction, it's in the -it's in the necessity for uncertainty. You can have a process provided you
recognize how uncertain your outcomes are. If you're able -- so if you're able to
sit down every stay and say, you know what, this is actually what I do as a writer.
I know I have to sit down every day for an hour to write. I don't know how many
writing I'm going to get done, I don't know how good it's going to be, but I'm going
to sit for an hour and try to write. So I have a process but there's this huge
variable. I would never promise someone I am going to give them 300 -- I would
never -- I would never promise someone based on those outputs. So that's part
of the distinction I'm saying.
If you want to be creative, you have to recognize that there's certain -- there's
inputs that you can commit to, but the outputs are always going to be uncertain.
And if you look at these environments, these structures, if your research groups,
research groups are structured the same way. They have goals and objectives
but they recognize how uncertain the outputs are going to be. So that's really
what I meant to say at the beginning. You cannot -- you cannot guarantee
outputs if what you are doing is creative, much less innovative or break through
or all the buzz -- radical, game changing all those like stupid words they use.
There's no way you can control that. So if I were to try to clean it up a little bit,
clean up my -- you know, take apart the paradox a little bit that's how I would do
it. You can't have structure but it's not going to be about the output. Yes in.
>>: [inaudible] example of the lovites raised some really interesting questions for
me. It seems that any big innovation has impacts way beyond what it -- what you
could easily anticipate on the people who create it but also on the people who
build it, the consumers, society beyond that and a physical world. What do you
think can be done in two when you're in the process of innovation to anticipate
the effects? What's the responsibility. Is there a way to build that into the
innovation?
>> Scott Berkun: Okay. So the question was given the negative effects that all
change is going to create what can you do to mitigate that or balance it out?
There are a bunch of books that have been written about this topic. I'm trying to
think of a couple to mention. Across in the chasm by, what's his name.
>>: Jeff Moore.
>> Scott Berkun: Jeff Moore. He's a marketing angle on that, but he's talking
about exactly that. There's some gaps and getting people to move from one
thing to another. I'd recommend it just because if you pick up that book, you'll
find all the other books that take on the same line of thinking. Another thing that
comes up a lot is finding easy transition points. You're never going to
revolutionize things all at once. So actually getting back to the Chrome thing,
one funny thing about Chrome is a perfect example of like the inflation,
epiphanary nature of the media that was a release, now it's like the new
operating system. It's like the new -- all of a sudden, you know, 500 million
installs are going to disappear and all the people who haven't upgrade their
machines in 10 hears are going to do it now. It's like no. These transitions are
slow. They're much slower than we like to admit, certainly than the media or the
news or bloggers are prone to want to acknowledge because they want to talk,
oh, it's the most important think ever happening. So transitions are slow. And if
you know that you want to pick a certain slice of the user base so you know what,
these 10 percent are most vulnerable to adopting this new thing if we can solve
this one problem. It's not going to -- I'm not going to -- I don't want to, you know,
fire a million people all at once. I want to find the 100 people who are thinking of
quitting anyway. Loomers, here, loomers who don't like their jobs, right? How
can I make something for them that they're going to let willingly go. And then
once -- so you're looking for these like not inflection point, but you follow what I'm
saying, right? Okay.
>> Kirsten Wiley: One more question.
>> Scott Berkun: One more question.
>>: You did talk about Microsoft as a company that [inaudible]. Haven't worked
at Microsoft and now being out of Microsoft, do you [inaudible] you truly think that
it's set up for innovation?
>> Scott Berkun: Great yes. The question was Microsoft has a reputation for
being an imitator and not an innovator and what's my opinion? The more history
you know, everyone's an imitator. Everyone. The only people who call people
innovators or imitators are people who are not really even in the game. They're
not even -- they're the commentators. So perfect example. Apple, right? They
didn't invent digital music players. They didn't invent the PC. They were
involved, but they didn't invent the PC. They didn't make, they didn't invent the
mouse, do you go interesting did. So were they imitators, yeah, in a truly logical
view? Yes. They make great products. And honestly that's really the important
thing. How good is it what you made for the people you're trying to sell it to?
Whether you were first or last or third or second, the -- no one cares, the
customers don't care, right? Because I have one of those crappy MP 3 players,
creative labs, whatever, CZ 520, can't even get the name right, how are they
going to get the product right. It's horrible, right. You had to do this word thing,
skip a song, it was retarded. They were first. Did I care? No. So the right
conversation to have is what you're making good. How do you make it really
good. The people love it. Whether you're first, last, third, or whatever. Microsoft
innovator, it depends on your perspective. If you've never used a Gooey before,
which a lot of the world, the DOS world never had, Windows 95 was just -- not
Windows 95, but Windows 3.0 that was a big step forward for them. So from
their perception it was innovation. If you're Doug Englebart or the people at
Xerox Park it's trivia. So it all depends. Innovation in general is a very relative
speculative framework for thinking about things.
And I very rarely recommend people talk about it. Make something really good.
It's a much easier line to follow. Make it really good. Make it so people love it. If
you have to borrow, okay. And Picasso, all the artists they talk about stealing all
the time. All the time. You cannot if you're Picasso or your Da Vinci, whoever,
how do you think they learned how to paint? They looked at all the other
paintings and they copied them. They copied them. Picasso's quote, which I'll
probably butcher is good artists borrow, great artists steal.
>>: [inaudible].
>> Scott Berkun: I'm sorry?
>>: That's Stravinsky.
>> Scott Berkun: Stravinsky? Okay. Picasso borrowed it from him probably.
See. There you go. [laughter].
>> Scott Berkun: So that would be my answer. Are they or not? Maybe there's
some validity to that that Microsoft enters markets late, but most successful
businesses do enter markets late. So Google is entering with a web browser
right now. Are they imitators or not? Web browsers have been around for 14
years now. So why aren't they called imitators in some of what they're doing is
imitation. I'm sorry. Out of time for official questions, but I will stick around for
unofficial questions.
[applause].
>> Scott Berkun: Thank you, guys.