Recent Readings

How Breakthroughs Happen was by far one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. It discusses the process of innovation and how to construct an environment that encourages it. I recommend everyone read this, especially if you’re a business owner or a creative. Random bits of knowledge:

• When we think of the great innovations, our minds typically jump to the inventor hero who redefined or created new industries with his revolutionary idea. However, history shows that most of these were the result of combining existing inventions and ideas in interesting ways, with many people involved in the process.
• Innovation is the result of synthesizing, or bridging, ideas from different domains. E.g., Henry Ford created the assembly line after observing sewing machines, meatpacking, and Campbell soup factories.
• Increase the potential for innovation by expanding the network that links people, ideas, and objects in ways that form effective and lasting communities and technologies.
• “Discovery is seeing what everyone else has seen but thinking what nobody else has thought” – Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, who discovered Vitamin C
• Valuable and novel information comes from weak ties; strong ties pass information quickly but it’s usually low value because the constant interactions lead to the same knowledge base (get out of the echo chamber).
• “A researcher builds the future 10 years from now; a technology broker [ or innovator] redistributes the future that is already here.”
• On collective effort: “Nobody is really sure who is the inventor because the inventions emerge in the interactions of the group.”

While reading the book, I saw many of these ideas reflected in coworking spaces like The Creative Space, and events like BIL. We need to ensure these spaces we are constructing connect new people working on different problems in different industries to keep ideas flowing between networks. Cody and I have become more involved in the Bio/Life Sciences arena recently, and have found ways to apply our existing knowledge in new and interesting ways.

Some other great books I’ve read recently:

• Enough – This book can best be summed up by the anecdote from whence it gets its title: “At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history. Heller responds, ‘Yes, but I have something he will never have… enough.’ ” It talks about how businesses need to refocus to serve customers, create value and focus on the long term, not short-term speculation. It’s directed towards the finance industry (which needs the most refocusing), but the novel is applicable to all businesses. (This was also the first book I read on my iPhone with the Kindle application. Worked great!)
• Scratch Beginnings – A real-life story of the American Dream. The author shows up to a town with $25, finds the local homeless shelter, and works his way up to a furnished apartment. Beyond the motivational story, it’s a great example of how your attitude and work ethic do more to shape your future than what you start with.
• Clueless in Academe – Describes how our current educational system makes the scholarly, learned life seem more unreachable by adding unnecessary barriers of language and structure. We leave it up to the students to ‘crack the code’ in higher education, and only a few do (hint: it’s all based on arguments; understanding how to properly take apart an assertion and create an argument will help you excel in any graduate or PhD program).
• Still Life with Woodpecker – Beautiful mental floss. Tom Robbins’ creative use of the English language will entertain you almost as much as the story itself.
• The Reasons I Won’t Be Coming – I haven’t finished this yet, but the short stories I have read have been great. The character development and internal dialogue remind me a bit of David Foster Wallace, without his length and ridiculously detailed tangents (see Growing Sentences with David Foster Wallace if you haven’t read any of his novels).

What’s up next in my reading list? My current “to-read” pile includes a bunch of old Vonnegut’s (Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons, Bagombo Snuff Box, and more (I’m trying to read all of his works)), some business books (Animal Spirits, The Age of Unreason…), and some fun ones (The Ethical Slut and Emergence: Contemporary Readings in Philosophy and Science).

Tagged as: book-review, education

Bill Erickson is a WordPress Consultant who builds custom websites using WordPress as a CMS and Thesis or Genesis as a framework. He’s a cofounder and resident of The Creative Space, and a cofounder of the BIL Conference (the open analog to the TED Conference).