VirtualChaos - Nadeem’s blog

Made to Stick: Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck by Chip and Dan Heath is absolutely brilliant!

At many times in our lives and especially within the context of business at some point you will need to get a point across that is critical to your success and the success of those around you. If you are in a relationship the very same thing is true. That success comes down to your ability to create a compelling communication. At it’s core thats what this book is about - communication - and it provides many examples of how to successfully communicate ideas but also what makes them stick. Conveying a message well is good, but conveying that message and having people act upon it is better, and invariably that’s what makes ideas stick.

If you haven’t read this then you need to!

The Myths of Innovation by Scott Berkun is a small but powerful book about innovation.

Scott has a wonderfully engaging writing style - it’s friendly, conversational, full of humor and informative, which I found was extremely well suited to the task in hand. He provides examples of how innovation works, where innovation comes from, and debunks several popular myths of innovation, pointing out that whilst there is a ‘eureka’ moment, there’s a whole lot of hard work which lead up to it in the first place.

For me this was actually quite profound given that myself, Rob, Chris, Alan and Ross spent a month sequestered away working on developing a prototype - we were given the shortest of briefs a problem to solve and were asked to come up with something compelling and innovative - during the course of that month we had our own ‘eureka’ moments and we can certainly attest to the hard work that was involved before we reached that point. In fact it’s something I’ll talk about far more when I discuss another book: Swarm Creativity: Competitive Advantage through Collaborative Innovation Networks.

As for Scott’s book it really is well worth reading and I can’t help but agree with Don Norman who said this about the book:

The naked truth about innovation is ugly, funny and eye-opening, but it sure isn’t what most of us have come to believe. With this book, Berkun sets us free to try to change the world, unencumbered with misconceptions about how innovation happens.

I finally managed to finish reading several books. The first I want to talk about is The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom.

This is a excellent book that makes a very compelling case for decentralization in organizations and businesses. The authors contrast the Spider which represents top-down management, with the Starfish which is essentially headless … all its “legs” go in any direction it wants to … but the starfish still moves and is effective.

Whilst the first few chapters of the book present a couple of case studies and examples that serve to illustrate the main themes of the book. It’s really from chapter four onwards that the book picks up pace as the authors discuss operational principles behind decentralised organisations - the need for pre-existing networks as a substrate, the role of catalysts and champions to activate leaderless organisation, “circles” as their chief co-ordination mechanism, and “ideology” as the glue holding everything more or less together.

After reading the book I’m left feeling that the notion of leaderless organisations is unquestionably superior both morally and aesthetically - to centralised organisations. Partly because of their structural simplicity and elegance, but also, and more profoundly from my point of view, because they rely so openly on trust and the belief that man is fundamentally good and ultimately because they are capable of drawing the best from people and providing them with truthfulness, meaning and purpose in their life.

It’s interesting to also reflect on the fact that not only do organisations like Alcoholics Anonymous operate as a decentralised organisation, but also organisations like Al Qaeda, and it’s the very nature of that de-centralisation that makes them so difficult to contain.

As an interesting follow up to reading the book here’s a talk Rod Beckstrom gave at Next Web in 2007, that touches on the main themes in the book: