If you’ve ever wondered: the answer, according to a large pharmacy chain, is a mere four bucks, and that’s only after you make a $20 purchase.

One of the unexpected side effects of moving this blog to WordPress was easy access to real-time statistics. I could tell, pretty quickly, whether a particular post or type of post was getting picked up or ignored. It’s seductive stuff — as anyone who has followed his or her book- or record-selling stats on Amazon knows so well. The bad part, aside from the time-wasting, is that the easy access to stats makes a blogger think too much about audience before posting. Blogs, I believe, are supposed to be about unvetted expression, capturing a moment, embracing the amateur and enthusiast in you even if you’re a professional writer in your real life. I intended to title one of my previous blogs “Quality over Quantity,” to celebrate that, but as old-timers know, I committed a typo and wound up titling that blog “Quantity over Quantity,” an unintentional joke too amusing to fix.

Now I’m not so sure. It’s 2008 and almost everyone has a blog (or has at least tried):

Is blogging getting old? Over the past two years, Twitter and Facebook status messages have emerged as media for distributing thoughts deemed too evanescent for a blog post. And now there are so many such services that aggregators such as FriendFeed and Ping.fm have emerged. More are coming. Nothing is so mundane that it can’t be shared immediately via many media. As Philip Greenspun’s blog puts it in its tagline: “A posting every day; an interesting idea every three month.”

I am a bit too enamored with my own ideas, as are many of us. As Jane said to me once and probably thought many more times, “Tell it to your blog.” The blogosphere is a wonderful place, but it’s one by definition full of noise. Although I value that noise and revel in it sometimes, I think too many of my posts are mostly noise, little signal.

Sometimes statistics reveal a truth. The two posts here that received, respectively, the most traffic and the most pointers in recent weeks were Barack Obama, Rolling Stone, and the secret of one great magazine cover and Neil Young and Crazy Horse: Twin “Hurricane”s in Rio. They’re two of the more substantive posts here from the past month. Neither post will change the world and both of ‘em featured pointers to more interesting content elsewhere. But they both sought to do a bit more than point to something and say, “Cool.” So, as this blog trudges forward, I’ll stop posting just to post. If I have something interesting to offer, I’ll try to communicate it in a substantial and entertaining way. If I don’t, I’ll try to shut up.

So there we are, both of us sitting on her floor. I am typing on my laptop. She is supervising yet another wedding between Barbie and Ken.

Grace: What are you doing?
Me: Working.
[Grace stands up, walks behind me, and sees what's on the laptop screen.]
Grace: That’s email. You do work in email?

I think the reasoning goes something like this:

If it happens to three people, it’s a trend.
If it happens to two people and I know one of them, it’s a trend.
If it happens to me, it’s a trend.

Someone sent me a note about the post earlier today about “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”. The subject line of the note was “Prove It.” Well, OK, here it is. (Thanks to Eric Mongeon for digging up the file so quickly.)

For the record

June 4, 2008

In 2005, I was part of a team that launched a fine but short-lived magazine for Forrester. In the first issue, which came out in March 2005, we led one section with an article headlined “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Next month’s cover story in The Atlantic, written by someone who wrote a piece for the Forrester magazine, is entitled, of all things, “Is Google Making Us Stoopid.” Not for the first time (I’m thinking of one barely-permitted-to-be-published article, “How Apple Gets Away With It,” and one outright-killed one, “The Post-Microsoft Era”), I want to congratulate my esteemed once-and-future colleagues Harris Collingwood and Eric Hellweg for being consistently ahead of pretty much any technology or media trend you can imagine. Note to The Atlantic: If you’re interested in what will be important to your readers three years from now, you might want to give Harris or Eric a call.

Yes, I know I published this long post several months ago on my old blog. But, according to the WordPress dashboard, plenty of people are visiting this new blog looking for it. The posts from they old blog are not here yet, because I have yet to figure out how to make the Blogger-to-WordPress tool work. So, to satisfy those who might be interested, here it is. I gave a talk on “Why screwing up is the smartest thing you can do” at the “university” part of TED in late February and delivered a (not as good) stripped-down version of it a week later at ETech. I was asked by several Jewels and Binoculars readers who weren’t at either event to post the presentation as a blog entry. Here it is. I recognize that a flat blog post doesn’t capture the experience of a live presentation, but I want to get the material out here. And, as an added benefit, you don’t have to look at or listen to me present it!

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Being here first thing in the morning, I feel like the opening act at the beginning of one of those long package shows of rock bands. I feel like Yngvie Malmsteen, a godawful heavy metal guitarist not often celebrated at TED.

Indeed, “Yngvie,” as we all know, is Swedish for “opening act.”

So here we go…

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I edit Release 2.0, an expensive newsletter, so I hear a lot from readers. Sometimes they’re looking for rules, some secrets to guarantee success. I want to justify their investment in the newsletter, of course, so I tell ‘em what I’ve learned.

And what I’ve learned is that they should screw up.

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While anyone who’s spent time with any of the members of Guns N Roses might find them to be screwups, the reason you haven’t heard anything new and substantial from them on the radio for 16 years — 16 years! — is that they’ve committed the opposite of screwing up: overplanning. Since the mid-’90s, by which time every original member of the band except singer Axl Rose had left for one reason or another, Guns N Roses has been working on a new album called Chinese Democracy.

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Rose and his co-conspirators have been thinking and recording Chinese Democracy for 14 years, gone through at least six producers, 17 band members, and $16 million in recording costs. It’s not out yet. They’ve waited so long, perfecting and planning, planning and perfecting, that the industry Axl Rose once ruled no longer exists. Democracy may arrive in China before Chinese Democracy arrives in record stores.

Oh — wait — there really aren’t record stores any more, either. Too much planning, too much process, means no art, no product, nothing.

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For a different approach, let’s consider the TV series Twin Peaks from the early ’90s. To refresh your memory…

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This man, Leland Palmer…

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…possessed by the spirit of a supernatural character named BOB…

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…turned his daughter, Laura Palmer…

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…into this.

But where did BOB, the conceptual lynchpin of the series, come to be? Surely he was there from the beginning.

No. His introduction into the series came as a result of an accident while the cameras were running.

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In a scene late in the Twin Peaks pilot, Laura Palmer’s mother experiences a vision while sitting on her living room couch. On the wall behind her, barely in the shot, there is a mirror. In the bottom corner of the mirror, there’s the reflection of Frank Silva, a set dresser on the crew, unaware he’s in the shot. You or I wouldn’t have noticed it unless we were looking for it — but on the set of a television show, there is someone whose job is to look for just such mistakes.

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After the take, that person alerted director David Lynch to the accident and began to set up a reshoot. Lynch stopped him. He spoke to Frank Silva, the set dresser in the mirror. “Can you act?” Lynch asked. This was Los Angeles, so you know the answer…

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…and the malevolent, mysterious character of BOB, the key to the weird mystery of the series, was born — from an accident.

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Many popular products, advances, and countless works of art have emerged from accidents. In the Internet world, we have Blogger and Twitter. And those two are just from one guy: Evan Williams.

Things may go better with Coke, but Coke was originally designed to go better with pain. It was intended to be a pain remedy.

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in 1928, Alexander Fleming, researching the flu, noticed that a mold had taken over one of his petri dishes. That mold, he saw, had stopped bacteria in the dish. Voila! Penicillin. Indeed, the very idea of vaccines was discovered by accident, when Edward Jenner noticed that people who worked with cows didn’t get smallpox.

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In 1894, John Harvey Kellogg left some cooked wheat to sit while he attended to some pressing matters at his sanitarium. When he returned, the wheat had gone stale. Because he was either cheap or broke — historians disagree — he tried to save the wheat by forcing it through rollers, expecting to get long sheets of dough he could use. Instead, he got … flakes. He toasted them. He served them to his patients. He got very, very rich.

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Post-It notes came to be by accident, too, but the story isn’t that interesting, so I’ll just mention it and keep going.

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This one’s more interesting. Fred Katz introduced the cello to modern jazz. One night in the late 1950s, during a break between sets while he was playing piano with a jazz band, Katz pulled a chair to the front of the stage and played some solo cello. When the rest of the band returned to the small stage, there was no room for Katz to return to his piano. Not sure what to do — the set was starting, the band was playing — Katz decided to play the piano lines on his cello. Out of his accident, his real, half-century-long, career began.

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Next time you enjoy some ferocious rock’n'roll encased in feedback, thank these guys. A spray of amplifier feedback at the beginning of The Beatles’ 1965 recording of “I Feel Fine,” an accident, sounded so unusual — and so great — that they kept it on the record. And, since I’m talking about brands favored by aging boomers…

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…Viagra was first thought to be a promising drug for angina. During 1992 clinical trials in a town in Wales, Pfizer researchers discovered that…

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…the drug had a different effect altogether.

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So mistakes can be great things. What do we do about ‘em? How do we harness ‘em? Well, if you’re the Harvard Business School, the font of management wisdom (and — disclosure — a client), you’re not quite sure. Sometimes they tell us to be afraid of mistakes…

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…sometimes they tell us we can manage accidents, thus making them not accidents. We might call this the Pee-Wee Herman “I meant to do that” theory of managing mistakes…

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..and, once, squeezed almost as an afterthought — or, maybe, an accident — as the very last entry in an issue of the Harvard Business Review, they celebrate it, thanks to a terrific, brief essay by Danny Hillis. I’m not trying to pick on Harvard. You can find similar advice from the other Ivy schools, even Stanford. But this is the conventional business wisdom. You can’t be built to last or go from good to great or whatever unless you’re careful to avoid mistakes, the thinking goes. Imagine the difference between the reaction if you tell your boss “I’m planning” and the one you get if you say, “I’m making mistakes.”

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Established institutions are in the business of supporting the status quo. And mistakes, if nothing else, go against the status quo, the conventional wisdom, the expected. As Esther Dyson used to sign her emails, “Always make new mistakes!” A key part of planning is being open to mistakes.

The unexpected kiss, the unpredictable punch line: they’re so much of what makes life worth living. Shouldn’t we let the unexpected into our business work as well? It’s by screwing up that we learn and discover. We can’t predict accidents. But we can take advantage of them.

You never know where a mistake is going to lead. Maybe nowhere, maybe somewhere. But it’s definitely nowhere if you don’t at least lean forward and peer down the road after you screw up.

You want the secret of success that my newsletter readers want to know? It’s no secret. It’s that, chances are, whatever you’re looking for — that’s not what you’re going to find.

Thank you.

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“You know you’ve crossed some frightening chasm into true middle age when it’s no longer babysitters and young children that are good excuses to exit social gatherings, but dogs, cats and aging parents.”

“Beige Mischief” on Amy’s wonderful blog

Thanks for the nice sendoff, Brady.

It was an honor being part of the Radar team. I hope, over the long term, that this is not what I’m remembered for.

Gotta have a system

May 30, 2008

One of the projects I worked on at O’Reilly was a joint report with another company that produced research reports. Among other things, it was a great way to learn how other businesses managed their processes and methodologies. The report came out well, but there’s one thing our prime contact at the other company said that, I hope, will stay with me.

“If we lose our way,” he said, “we always go back to our framework.”

We all want to be agile. But it’s easier to respond to anything if you have a starting point. Having just an adequate framework, I’ve found, might be almost as good as having a great one. Having thought about it for a while, I think simply having a framework is more important than which framework you have. Why look for the perfect system for writing a novel or getting in shape when any of them is probably better than just bumbling in the dark, which is what most of us do most of the time? A framework has to be unusually wrong to hold you back.

That’s new thinking for me. For a long time I didn’t trust explain-it-all systems. Until recently, I made fun of people who adopted GTD with an almost-religious fervor. Yet, after flirting with GTD for more than a year, I’m following it, too, although not with quite the fervor you’d expect of the recently converted. Even if it’s not a perfect system, it is a good system, and I’m starting to believe that’s almost all that matters.

And now, on to my GTD weekly review

I’m a twit, for now

May 30, 2008

I am, against my better judgment, experimenting with Twitter. Please don’t subscribe. What I’m doing there is boring. Not sure that a format that’s even more evanescent than blogging will work out for me, but all my cool friends are doing it and I suppose the answer is yes, apparently I would jump off a bridge if all my friends asked me to. But you have to worry about a form that, in such a short time, has annoyed people so much that there’s a need for an app like this. On the other hand, many of the “tweets” I “read” are about the service being down, so my testing may be short-lived.

I have a new job

May 29, 2008

Starting Monday, I’ll be executive editor of MIT Sloan Management Review.

A modest question

May 29, 2008

On Facebook, I only accept “friend” requests from people I know. And even then, I don’t accept ‘em all. So why do I have many more friends on Facebook than I do in real life?

Jimmy Guterman's Facebook profile

I just checked my email and I realized what my favorite email subject line is:

“Meeting cancelled”

He shows up!

March 21, 2008

How bad has service gotten in our so-called service economy? So bad that just showing up for an appointment is now considered a business-defining competiting advantage:

WeShowUpPic

NYer dog blog cartoon

Jimmy Guterman’s Jewels and Binoculars will return on Monday.

Thirteen years ago, when I was working in Cambridge for a doomed online service owned by Rupert Murdoch, I used to get early-morning calls from one of my bosses. He lived in California and he would bark instructions to me via a shaky mobile phone connection while he drove via the Pacific Coast Highway to his pre-dawn surf group. Usually, he would suggest I do whatever he had just thought up in the car. He’d never remember after the call was over, I’d never follow up, the next day he’d have another idea, and the pattern continued for months until my job moved to Manhattan and I didn’t. My colleagues and I would call these ideas “Pacific Coast Highway Ideas,” notions that seemed like genius for a brief moment, then something else would come up.

I had what I think was a Pacific Coast Highway moment today. The past few weeks I’ve been listening a lot to a great obscure soul singer and songwriter whose work I love (and have celebrated in print — and, long ago, on this very blog) and whose work, recorded over more than 40 years for what seems like more than 40 labels, really deserves to be collected in a thoughtful, fun box set. While I was in the car this afternoon, I heard, unexpectedly, a fine profile of that singer on public radio. It was, I determined based on mere coincidence, a sign that I needed to produce that box set right away. Within the hour, I called a few people for advice, connected with a likely record company, and found the guy’s email address. (Yes, obscure soul singers do have email addresses.)

I just told some of this to Jane, who — while being generally supportive — pointed out that producing another box set, while satisfying, would be easy compared to the novel I’m trying to write. The book I’m constructing from scratch; the box set would be made of materials someone else has created over a long, fascinating career. The hard work would have been done already — by someone else. Most of the creativity involved in the project would have been expended long ago. Maybe I’ll do the box set someday, maybe I won’t. But, thanks to Jane’s 10,000th intervention, tonight I won’t let a Pacific Coast Highway Idea get in the way of a riskier but potentially more fulfilling creative endeavor. And now it’s time to stop blogging and start real writing.

Spam header of the day

October 26, 2007

“Vampire Tapestry Horse Leg Carrot Sandwich Train”

Turned out to be a stock tout.

Heard in a meeting

October 16, 2007

“The snowball is gathering some moss.”