Quotes from Scott Berkun

We all suffer wounds in our childhoods. We do what we have to do to protect ourselves, but we forget when we become adults that the armor made to survive our youth no longer serves us. It's for use in the last war, the struggles of childhood, not the war or the peace of the present and the future. Keeping that armor keeps us immature. We can't grow with it on. Yet removing it is painful. Taking it off means our true selves will be revealed.

Without failure, we forget, in arrogance, that our understanding of things is never as complete as we think it is.

An amazing thing about our digital age is that the person next to you at Starbucks might just be hacking into a Swiss bank or launching multiwarhead nuclear missiles continents away.

Taking responsibility for situations, regardless of who caused them, always helps to expedite resolving

Perfection is attained, not when no more can be added, but when no more can be removed.

Schedules are simply a kind of prediction. No matter how precisely they are drafted or how convincing they appear, they are just a summation of lots of little estimations, each one unavoidably prone to different kinds of unforeseeable oversights and problems.

Negotiation is useful not only in a crisis situation, but also in management. Good negotiators work from people's interests, not their positions.

While it's fun to be near someone interesting for occasional chats, being stuck next to a person who will not stop talking for nine hours is my idea of hell.

there are psychological benefits to making sure the people you are working with are well fed and associate you with good things.

It's often people whose jobs are abstractions that see a company as a zero-sum game where they have to fight and defend what's theirs to stay alive or get promoted.

It's a common weakness among creatives, whether a designer, a writer, or a programmer, to be shy about showing unfinished work.

Books about the future of work make the same mistake: they fail to look back at the history of work or, more precisely, the history of books about the future of work and how wrong they were.

it didn't matter if the sketches were "right"; what mattered was that his sketch improved the quality of the conversation,

When people are allowed to fail or make mistakes without taking responsibility for them, politics are inevitable. Without accountability for people's commitments, few will trust others.

You dramatically accelerate a team by putting its attention directly on the elements, factors, and decisions that are central to progress.

but I recognize the distinction between work that matters to me and work that doesn't, and the difference has defined the choices I've made in my career. What I've sacrificed in income has been compensated for in things money can't buy.

Isn't this concept—something I would rather not be doing—one of the most recognizable definitions of work for most of us?

Although he was not using these as a hammer to end arguments, he regularly referred to data as part of his thinking. He wanted a data-influenced culture, not a data-driven one.

Our larger culture, and our pesky parents, push us toward decisions that seem to score well but are blind to the most important elements of healthy careers and meaningful lives.

The popularity of Dilbert, The Office, and any number of other pop-culture windows on cubicle life attests to the dark absurdism with which many Americans have come to view their white-collar work."2 It has been only in the past hundred years that work has become this way. In the centuries of civilization prior, many more of us had crafts and skills that gave us pride.

Regarding clarity, most teams in the working world are starving for it. Layers of hierarchy create conflicting goals.

As superficial as public speaking can seem, history bears out that people with clear ideas and strong points are the ones we remember.

We all suffer wounds in our childhoods. We do what we have to do to protect ourselves, but we forget when we become adults that the armor made to survive our youth no longer serves us.

the saving question was always, "How will this impact the user experience?