The Vine

“It’s one of my theories that when people give you advice, they’re really just talking to themselves in the past.”

So begins Steal Like An Artist, a rich and engaging book that Austin Kleon has penned—in words and playful illustrations—to his nineteen-year-old self. Stemming from a talk he gave to students at Broome Community College, Kleon shares practical wisdom about creativity and creative processes that he wishes he’d known when first starting out.

Now, if the notion of “stealing” other people’s work makes you feel twitchy, let’s first clarify that everyone does it—even the great masters of art and literature built on the works that preceded them—but not everyone does it well.

T.S. Eliot: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.”

You honor others when you steal from them authentically. And, let’s be clear, that does not mean skimming the surface, copying the veneer of someone’s work. (See Kleon’s chart of good vs. bad theft.) It’s immersing yourself in the body of work of a thinker who inspires you, internalizing his or her ideas, and remixing them in a way that’s uniquely your own.

“Don’t just steal the style, steal the thinking behind the style,” Kleon says. “You don’t want to look like your heroes, you want to see like your heroes.”

Next, he suggests, go find three thinkers who inspired your thinker, and repeat the process. Over time you’ll build a creative lineage to draw from—and add to.

“Seeing yourself as part of a creative lineage will help you feel less alone as you start making your own stuff,” Kleon says. “I hang pictures of my favorite artists in my studio. They’re like friendly ghosts. I can almost feel them pushing me forward as I’m hunched over my desk.”

Steal Like An Artist is a small, elegant book that’s packed with practical insights about creativity and creative habits—things like kindness, generosity, productive procrastination, and the importance of hobbies and working with your hands. It is a brilliant manifesto for successfully navigating this age of combinatorial creativity, where ideas are ubiquitous and value is created through synthesis and symphony.

As Kleon puts it, we are a mashup of the things we let into our lives, and “anyone can be creative if they surround themselves with the right influences, play nice, and work hard.”

My advice: Make this book one of the things you let into your life. Your inner artist will thank you.

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While we’re talking about books worth reading, here are a few more that have captured my imagination lately. All enthusiastically recommended.

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The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive
Brian Christian
Book description: Each year, the AI community convenes to administer the famous (and famously controversial) Turing test. Named for computer pioneer Alan Turing, the test convenes a panel of judges who pose questions—ranging anywhere from celebrity gossip to moral conundrums—to hidden contestants in an attempt to discern which is human and which is a computer. The machine that most often fools the panel wins the Most Human Computer Award. But there is also a prize, bizarre and intriguing, for the Most Human Human. Brian Christian, a young poet with degrees in computer science and philosophy, was chosen to participate in a recent competition. This playful, profound book is not only a testament to his efforts to be deemed more human than a computer, but also a rollicking exploration of what it means to be human in the first place.

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My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store
Ben Ryder Howe
Book description: It starts with a gift, when Ben Ryder Howe’s wife, the daughter of Korean immigrants, decides to repay her parents’ self-sacrifice by buying them a store. Howe, an editor at the rarefied Paris Review, agrees to go along. Things soon become a lot more complicated. After the business struggles, Howe finds himself living in the basement of his in-laws’ Staten Island home, commuting to the Paris Review offices in George Plimpton’s Upper East Side townhouse by day, and heading to Brooklyn at night to slice cold cuts and peddle lottery tickets. My Korean Deli follows the store’s tumultuous life span, and along the way paints the portrait of an extremely unlikely partnership between characters with shoots across society, from the Brooklyn streets to Seoul to Puritan New England. Owning the deli becomes a transformative experience for everyone involved as they struggle to salvage the original gift—and the family—while sorting out issues of values, work, and identity.

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Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian
Avi Steinberg
Book description: After defecting from yeshiva to Harvard, Avi Steinberg has only a senior thesis essay on Bugs Bunny to show for his effort. While his friends and classmates advance in the world, he remains stuck at a crossroads, unable to meet the lofty expectations of his Orthodox Jewish upbringing. Seeking direction—and dental insurance—Steinberg takes a job as a librarian in a tough Boston prison. The prison library counter, his new post, attracts con men, minor prophets, ghosts, and an assortment of quirky regulars searching for the perfect book and a connection to the outside world. There’s an anxious pimp who solicits Steinberg’s help in writing a memoir. A passionate gangster who dreams of hosting a cooking show titled Thug Sizzle. A disgruntled officer who instigates a major feud over a Post-it note. A doomed ex-stripper who asks Steinberg to orchestrate a reunion with her estranged son, himself an inmate. Over time, Steinberg is drawn into the accidental community of outcasts that has formed among his bookshelves—a drama he recounts with heartbreak and humor.

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A Year of Mornings: 3191 Miles Apart
Maria Alexandra Vettese and Stephanie Congdon Barnes
(This is a beautiful book made all the more special because it was a gift from a friend.)
Book description: On the morning of December 7, 2006, Maria and Stephanie each took a digital photo of everyday objects randomly arranged on their kitchen tables and, unbeknownst to one another, uploaded them to the website Flickr. Noticing a remarkable similarity between their images, they agreed to document their mornings by posting one photo to a shared blog every weekday for a year. A Year of Mornings collects 236 images from this uniquely 21st-century artistic collaboration. While clearly kindred spirits, the two women have met in person only once. Their friendship is maintained solely online, sustained by a shared love for moments of serenity, solitude, and peacefulness.

Last night, Dave Eggers was presented with the 21st Century Visionary Award by INFORUM, a division of The Commonwealth Club. In the Q&A that followed, he was asked about his creative process when writing.

Truman Capote wrote lying down, coffee and cigarettes always close at hand. Vladimir Nabokov wrote most of his novels on 3 x 5 index cards. Eggers, we learned, retreats to his writing shed, where he works in uninterrupted seclusion for eight hours—yielding, on average, about 45 minutes of productive output per day.

I was reminded that the walls of Eggers’ 826 Valencia tutoring center are papered with book drafts by authors like Amy Tan and Zadie Smith. The pages are filled with scribbled revisions, helping the students understand that writing is a grind, and frequently a painful one, even if you’re famous.

“Writing is not necessarily magic,” Eggers says. “That’s what I learned in journalism school—discipline and humility. You don’t have to be this gifted poet, wordsmith-type person. It’s will and desire and tenacity—and that’s the work ethic which I applied to teach writing.”

We like to think of talent and creativity as flowing (more freely for some than others) from a mystical inner fountain. It’s a romantic notion, and it lets us off the hook on the days when we’re just not feeling it. But it ignores the reality that bursts of insight are the product of a long, arduous slog. What is the What and Zeitoun each took three years to write, and 90% of the research that Eggers conducted never made it into the books.

As Hugh MacLeod has said, shortcuts are the enemy—especially when they don’t exist.

Photo credit: INFORUM

Joe Nocella is the owner of 718 Cyclery in Brooklyn. In the fantastic video below, “The Inverted Bike Shop,” he talks about co-creating with customers, bringing them into the design process, and even letting them participate in the assembly of their custom bicycles.

“I found that people really wanted to be involved in the process,” he says, “not just buy a bike.” And there it is.

People don’t want to “just buy a _______.”

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Eudaimonia is a Greek word commonly translated as “happiness” or “success,” but linguists seem to agree that a more accurate translation would be “human flourishing.” As Aristotle applied the term, it suggested finding one’s true purpose, fulfilling one’s promise and potential.

Great organizations can also be said to experience eudaimonia, both collectively and individually in their people. (Pixar, Patagonia, TOMS, Trader Joe’s and Southwest Airlines come to mind.) They bring their humanity to, and express their humanity through, their work.

That’s my take on it anyway. If this sounds a bit ethereal, management guru Patrick Lencioni offers a far more practical, grounded perspective in his excellent new book, The Advantage. Lencioni eschews the Greek in favor of a more modern concept, “organizational health.” And he argues that it is the single greatest competitive advantage in business today.

Organizational health, he says, trumps strategy, research, technology and brainpower. So what is it?

“At its core, organizational health is about integrity,” Lencioni says, “but not in the ethical or moral way that integrity is incorrectly defined so often today. An organization has integrity—is healthy—when it is whole, consistent and complete, when its management, operations, strategy and culture fit together and make sense.”

Think of it as a multifaceted process of alignment. It begins with a clearly defined organizational purpose, a set of values that you live by even when they’re detrimental to profits. It’s supported (or undermined) by decisions and behaviors that align (or not) with your purpose. IDEO general manager Tom Kelley likens this to verbal language and body language—what you say vs. what you do—and warns that if they’re not consistent, your body language is what people will interpret as the “real” you.

That integrity (or alignment) then promotes a culture of authenticity, vulnerability, trust, and willingness to engage in productive conflict, all of which are essential to unleashing creativity. Pixar president Ed Catmull attests to this in his fascinating article for the Harvard Business Review. When a crisis emerged during the making of “Toy Story,” the studio’s executives began to coalesce, through the crucible of healthy debate, into what is now a legendary creative community. “Since they trusted one another, they could have very intense and heated discussions,” Catmull recalls. “They always knew that the passion was about the story and wasn’t personal.”

Healthy, aligned organizations are characterized by high morale and productivity, minimal politics, ego and confusion, and low turnover among the best employees. What enterprise doesn’t want that? And why are they so rare?

Because the process is really hard. And really messy (humans tend to be that way).

Organizational health is about creating a thriving, supportive community. It’s about people and relationships, and it involves honest, subjective and sometimes uncomfortable conversations. It also requires standing for something—and being willing to polarize people who don’t stand with you.

The Advantage is a pragmatic, engaging and helpful guide for how to navigate this difficult but essential process. Lencioni is well known for his bestselling business fables (The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and Death by Meeting among them) in which he uses fictional narratives to illustrate powerful teaching points about teamwork, trust, communication, culture and other similarly elusive dynamics. This is his first nonfiction book, and although it covers a lot of the same territory as his previous offerings, it synthesizes the topics nicely while adding new perspectives on strategy and implementation.

If there’s anything Vine readers might find missing, it’s the element of physical spaces and environments, and how they influence interaction, collaboration and productivity. But given Lencioni’s forte as a leadership and management thinker, there’s certainly nothing wrong with focusing on his strengths and ceding design to designers.

I enjoyed The Advantage immensely, and my copy is now thoroughly marked with highlights and margin notes.

In the end, what better compliment could you give a book?

PCBC’s new tagline, The Art, Science + Business of Housing, reflects the convergence of disciplines at their annual tradeshow: builders, the design community, the R&D engineers, the money guys (they’re always guys), the product manufacturers, etc., etc.

(PCBC is the parent company of The Vine.)

It also, I believe, speaks to something deeper, which prompted me to sketch (crudely) the diagram that you see here.

There’s a magical alchemy in the blending of art, science and business, and I think the key lies in balancing—and honoring—all three. Diminish art and you lack the aesthetic value that drives emotion and desire. Diminish science and you lack rigorous, analytical, objective inquiry. Diminish business and you lack a means of creating tangible, economic value.

It’s not easy to nurture all three within an organization, but for those that succeed, the results are amazing. Apple. IKEA. Nike. Pixar. GE.

I don’t pretend to know how or when our country’s housing funk gets resolved. (Here’s a promising place to start.)

But I’m convinced the solutions reside within the intersection of these circles.

Each year on today’s date (8/26), and in the week leading up to it, the creative souls at 826 National promote National Youth Literacy Day through events and festivities—including eight-hour, 26-minute Write-a-Thons—at their tutoring centers around the country.

On July 11th, 7-Eleven stores give away free Slurpees (while supplies last)—and see a big boost in sales because of all the impulse purchases generated. Why, yes, I believe I will have a Slim Jim.

Math geeks—my wife is one, I’m allowed to say it—have claimed 3/14 as Pi Day.

Star Wars geeks—my wife is not one, but I’ll say it anyway—observe Star Wars Day on May the Fourth (…be with you).

These are simply dates on a calendar, of course. What gives them significance is that groups have claimed them to commemorate and to celebrate (and, yes, to sell) something. Something that others believe in, or want to support, or find entertaining, or simply crave. Or all of the above.

Maybe your brand doesn’t lend itself to a calendar tie-in (and if it doesn’t, please don’t force one). Maybe you find the whole thing a bit gimmicky (it is).

But there are serendipitous connections all around you. Just look for them. And when you see them, grab them.

Closing thought…Somebody somewhere declared March 10th to be (I’m not making this up) the International Day of Awesomeness. Why wasn’t it long ago claimed and owned as a major event/ceremony/fundraiser for the March of Dimes?

Photo credit: Steve Rhodes

Walker Smith makes the simple (but all too often overlooked) observation that consumers will use a product when—and how—they’re ready to.

As an example of this he cites the tablet computer. Apple tried (and failed quite famously) to deliver one in 1979 and then again in 1993. In 2001 Bill Gates predicted that tablets would dominate the PC market within five years. It wasn’t until 2010 that the iPad came along—and even then early reviews criticized the device for not functioning the way tech pundits thought tablet computing was “supposed to.” Thirty million (and counting) sales later, some experts now believe that the iPad will kill the laptop.

It was eye-opening when the National Association of Home Builders recently reported that 53% of U.S. for-rent housing is comprised of single-family detached homes (27%), duplexes (6%) and townhouses (20%), traditionally the domain of for-sale development.

When a majority of the nation’s rentals have crept into buyers’ territory…when so many households struggle to even qualify for a mortgage…when a generation questions the fundamental mindset of buying and perceives homeownership as a form of debtors’ prison…

This may be the market telling you how they want to use your product.

You can get frustrated that they’re not using it in the way they’re “supposed to.” You can, to use the tech analogy, continue trying to sell them a laptop.

Or you can find a way to adapt and give them the iPad they’re lining up for.

Photo credit: waferbaby

As Brent Herrington commented at PCBC last week—and Hugh MacLeod nails in the cartoon here—a team of the same people thinking the same thoughts shaped by the same shared experiences will doom any efforts to change.

I’ll tag on. If everybody in the room helped define your current strategy, platform, way of doing things, et cetera, you’re in trouble. (You’re emotionally vested in the status quo.)

If everybody in the room voted for the same presidential candidate (either side), you’re in trouble.

If nobody in the room watches movies (or listens to music, or reads blogs) that you’ve never heard of, you’re in trouble.

If nobody in the room is under 40 (30?), you’re in trouble.

If nobody in the room thinks you’re sometimes full of shit (and will call you on it), you’re in trouble.

Time to get some new voices in the room.

The New York Times Magazine has a fascinating article about Geoffrey West, a theoretical physicist who set out to study cities—specifically, whether there might be fundamental laws governing their patterns and growth.

“We spend all this time thinking about cities in terms of their local details, their restaurants and museums and weather,” West says. “I had this hunch that there was something more, that every city was also shaped by a set of hidden laws.”

As it turns out, apparently they are. The article elaborates:

“After two years of analysis, West and Bettencourt discovered that all of these urban variables could be described by a few exquisitely simple equations. For example, if they know the population of a metropolitan area in a given country, they can estimate, with approximately 85 percent accuracy, its average income and the dimensions of its sewer system. These are the laws, they say, that automatically emerge whenever people ‘agglomerate,’ cramming themselves into apartment buildings and subway cars. It doesn’t matter if the place is Manhattan or Manhattan, Kan.: the urban patterns remain the same.” (Emphasis added.)

Without giving away too much of the article, West’s findings reveal (in his interpretation, debated by others) a bit of an urban Gordian knot: The denser we are, the more innovative and productive we become. The more we innovate and produce, the more resources we consume, and the harder it becomes to sustain that growth. Unless, of course, we innovate our way to new resources.

Cities, West concludes, may be the only solution to the problem of cities.

Two talks from the recent TEDGlobal conference set the broader context of this topic perfectly. Both are highly recommended.

Ethan Zuckerman points out that even as the web makes our globe increasingly interconnected, most of us still source information and ideas from people who are just like us. (And he offers some suggestions and tools for how to change that.)

Matt Ridley demonstrates how, throughout history, the meeting and mating of ideas has massively accelerated productivity and innovation. As he puts it, more tantalizingly, this is what happens when ideas have sex.

Jonah Lehrer’s latest blog post, The Secret of Successful Entrepreneurs, brings this all into a modern business context.

In a 2007 study at Columbia University, executives were invited to a cocktail mixer and encouraged to network with new people. The vast majority of participants even declared that their primary goal was to meet “as many different as people as possible” and “expand their social network.” Not surprisingly, however, birds of a feather drank together. Investment bankers clustered with investment bankers, marketers with marketers, and so on. According to the researchers, “the only successful networker at the event was the bartender.”

To demonstrate the tangible benefits of a diverse social network, Lehrer cites a separate study by Princeton sociologist Martin Ruef. Interviewing over 700 Stanford Business School grads who had gone on to start their own business, Ruef noticed that most of these entrepreneurs had very homogenous networks—but a small subset had significantly expanded their circles.

“They didn’t just hang out with colleagues and close friends,” Lehrer writes. “Instead, [they] maintained a large number of ‘weak ties’ with people at different companies and from different backgrounds. Their social networks were varied and undirected, full of surprising interactions and ‘informational entropy.’ These entrepreneurs made a habit of hanging out with people who told them unexpected things; they chatted with acquaintances and struck up conversations with random strangers.”

Here’s where it gets really interesting. When Ruef analyzed the innovation levels of all the subjects (measured by patents and trademarks, with bonus points for entering an unexploited niche or pioneering new marketing methods), he found that those with wider networks were three times more innovative than their narrower peers.

By interacting with a wider range of contacts, they were exposed to a wider range of ideas and what Lehrer calls “non-redundant information.”

He concludes:

There is something unsettling about Ruef’s data. We think of entrepreneurs, after all, as individuals. If someone has a brilliant idea for a new company, we assume that they are inherently more creative than the rest of us. This is why we idolize people like Bill Gates and Richard Branson and Oprah Winfrey. It’s also why we invest in the meritocracy: We believe that we can identify talent in isolation.

But Ruef’s analysis suggests that this focus on the singular misses the real story of entrepreneurship. Unless we take our social circle into account – that collection of weak ties and remote acquaintances who feed us unfamiliar facts – we’re not going to really understand the nature of achievement. Behind every successful entrepreneur is a vast network.

If you don’t already have a “collection of weak ties and remote acquaintances” feeding you unfamiliar facts, you might want to think about cultivating one.

No one sees the nuances of culture quite like the native who returns after spending time abroad. Peter Hessler brilliantly captures this experience in a funny and fascinating piece for The New Yorker (free subscription required to access the article). Witness too David Brooks’ Bobos in Paradise and Bill Bryson’s I’m a Stranger Here Myself.

Jonah Lehrer, writing for McSweeney’s on the cognitive benefits of travel, helps explain the neuroscience behind why this is so.

New research indicates that getting away, regardless of where you go, stimulates creative thinking. It allows us, as Proust would say, to “see with new eyes.” This is because when we’re in our day-to-day environment, we tend to contemplate our circumstances in concrete, fixed ways. Problems that seem close, whether physically, temporally or emotionally, have a way of constricting our thoughts and limiting our range of potential solutions.

Conversely, the experience of travel—of escaping our familiar environment and all of the associations that we attach to it—frees up ideas and possibilities that we’d previously (and unconsciously) suppressed.

Lehrer writes:

“The experience of another culture endows us with a valuable open-mindedness, making it easier to realize that a single thing can have multiple meanings.

Seasoned travelers are alive to ambiguity, more willing to realize that there are different (and equally valid) ways of interpreting the world. This, in turn, allows them to expand the circumference of their ‘cognitive inputs,’ as they refuse to settle for their first answers and initial guesses.

This increased creativity appears to be a side-effect of difference: we need to change cultures, to experience the disorienting diversity of human traditions. The same details that make foreign travel so confusing—Do I tip the waiter? Where is this train taking me?—turn out to have a lasting impact, making us more creative because we’re less insular. We’re reminded of all that we don’t know, which is nearly everything; we’re surprised by the constant stream of surprises. Even in this globalized age, slouching toward similarity, we can still marvel at all the earthly things that weren’t included in the Let’s Go guidebook, and that certainly don’t exist back home.”

Lehrer suggests that we are an innately migratory species. According to the U.S. Bureau of Transportation, the large majority of trips over 50 miles are non-business, ie they’re taken by choice. So why is it we’re voluntarily subjecting ourselves to cramped airplanes, long security lines, surly TSA agents and lousy food?

“We travel because we need to,” he concludes. ”Because distance and difference are the secret tonic of creativity. When we get home, home is still the same. But something in our mind has been changed, and that changes everything.”

Photo credit: danorbit

Here’s a fantstic video introducing Youngme Moon’s soon to be published Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd, which is described as “a book about realizing the true meaning of a word that has lost all meaning.” (An excerpt can be downloaded here.)

Dr. Moon is an award-winning Harvard business prof whose marketing courses are among the school’s most sought after. She makes a compelling argument that in many product categories, competitive differentiation no longer exists. Or, to be more precise, the distinctions are so nuanced and insubstantial that they’re no longer perceived by consumers.

Product proliferation has not led to product diversity, but rather the opposite: Sameness.

She writes, “[A]s the number of products within a category multiplies, the differences between them start to become increasingly trivial, almost to the point of preposterousness.” (Well of course our homes are different…our elevations are Northern Tuscan!)

When this happens, “[T]he category has reached the point where it is possible for product heterogeneity to be experienced as product homogeneity. Which is not to say that the distinctions between products are not real; it is simply to say that they are real only in the same way that synonyms have discrete connotations.”

Moon likens this to a competitive treadmill—a cycle wherein businesses are, unintentionally and unknowingly, running a race to nowhere.

“In category after category, companies have gotten so collectively locked into a particular cadence of competition that they appear to have lost sight of their mandate—which is to create meaningful grooves of separation from one another. Consequently, the harder they compete, the less differentiated they become.”

If the book is as thoughtful and insightful as its preview, it’s well worth ordering. I did.

Dev Patnaik makes an excellent case here for the virtues of hybrid thinking, a discipline he describes as “the conscious blending of different fields of thought to discover and develop opportunities that were previously unseen by the status quo.”

He cites the widely celebrated transformation of Procter & Gamble from a 200-year-old consumer products manufacturer to a world-class design innovator. Much of the credit is attributed to Claudia Kotchka, P&G’s VP for design strategy, and her success is heralded as the power of design thinking applied to traditional business models.

Except Claudia’s background is accounting, not design. In fact, Patnaik asserts, the key to her success is that she isn’t a designer. Instead, she immersed herself in the world of design and blended in her previous experience in accounting, marketing and other fields.

It strikes me that Dev is speaking to the very reality of our industry today. With staffs now stripped to the core, it’s unlikely that anyone in your company is doing just one job (or two, or four). Everyone on your team is multidisciplinary—and that’s to your great advantage. Hybridity is precisely what you need, Dev suggests, because the challenges you’re facing are too great for any single skillset to solve.

Taking it a step further, he writes:

“Hybrid thinking is much more than gathering together a multidisciplinary team. Hybrid thinking is about multidisciplinary people … folks who can connect the dots between what’s culturally desirable, technically feasible, and viable from a business point of view.”

Granted, this housing collapse and the dismantling of our organizations has been painful. But the recipe for growth and reinvention and discovery of new opportunities—previously unseen by the status quo—calls for precisely the conditions we have today.

We already have the hybrid people. Now let’s engage them in hybrid thinking.

Caterina Fake—cofounder of Flickr and Hunch—offers this great perspective on work, productivity, clarity, and purposeful meandering (contradictory as that may sound).

She writes:

“Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on. Paying attention to what is going on in the world. Seeing patterns. Seeing things as they are rather than how you want them to be. Being able to read what people want. Putting yourself in the right place where information is flowing freely and interesting new juxtapositions can be seen. But you can save yourself a lot of time by working on the right thing.”

Amen.

Ann Oliveri points us to an intriguing (and counterintuitive) perspective from IDEO designer Patrice Martin: Powerful individualism is often what leads to strong communities.

See the article: The “I” in Community

With examples ranging from Yelp to Pixar to BRIDGE Housing, Patrice shows how the unique, creative expression of individuals can contribute to a stronger identity and deeper engagement of the community.

“As we strive to move away from cookie-cutter sameness, individuals’ opinions, points of view, or unique thoughts can spark connection,” she writes. “We see it across all types of communities, whether grassroots or corporate-sponsored, virtual or rooted in physical space. The more eclectic and interesting, the more it thrives. Funny how an emphasis on ‘I’ leads to a more coherent sense of we.”

(Patrice, btw, will be one of the designers leading our November 17th salon at IDEO headquarters in Palo Alto)