Quotes from Scott Berkun

Schneider and Mullenweg went to great lengths to keep support roles, like legal, human resources, and even IT, from infringing on the autonomy of creative roles like engineering and design. The most striking expression of this is that management is seen as a support role.

Either we don't read the things we claim we do, or we read them with incompetence, preventing ideas in the book from changing our behavior.

It's design, not functionality, that determines if people will succeed or fail in fulfilling the promises products have made to them.

And the more you do to force it in, the less of what you wanted to acquire in the first place remains. The vast majority of acquisitions fail for this reason.

In anthropology terms, this superficial mimicry is called a cargo cult, a reference to the misguided worship of abandoned airplane landing strips among tribes hoping for the goods that airplanes had delivered to return.

But the problem isn't functionality. Functionality means a piece of software is capable of doing something. Merely having a function doesn't say anything about how many people can figure it out or are even interested in trying.

An epiphany is a powerful experience, but the myth of epiphany is that it alone is all you need.

Merely having a function doesn't say anything about how many people can figure it out or are even interested in trying.

the broken window theory, the idea popularized by Jane Jacobs in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities.1 She examined why some neighborhoods in New York City were safer than others and concluded that neighborhoods that were well maintained by their inhabitants, including small things like picking up trash and fixing broken windows, tended to have less crime. In other words, by regularly fixing small things, you prevent bigger problems from starting.

diligence wins battles.

While most software is copyrighted and closed, Cafelog had different rules. It did not have a copyright. Instead it had something called an open source license, or a copyleft.

Asking the user experience question is the ultimate way to prioritize engineering work, as it shifts the perspective back to where it belongs: the impact that decisions will have on customers, not engineers. Both matter, but the customer matters more.

A wise person should be learning more all the time, which will require him to develop new ideas and opinions, even if they contradict ones he had in the past.

To understand who people really are, start a fire. When everything is going fine, you see only the safest parts of people's character. It's only when something is burning that you find out who people really are.

Artists are often victims in a way of their own perceived quality gaps. They struggle to match the ideas in their minds to what they can manifest in the world.

If I Skyped someone to say, "How are you doing?" and he said, "Fine," and then I said, "No, really, how is everything?" even if he volunteered more, it'd be an answer I forced, different in nature from something I observed by being around them.

Developing new ideas requires questions and approaches that most people won't understand initially, which leaves many true innovators at risk of becoming lonely, misunderstood characters.

Of course, it's wrong to set a fire on purpose, but if you have a small fire already burning, let it burn and see who, if anyone, complains, runs away, or comes to help. Similar truths are discovered by breaking rules: you need to break some to learn which are just for show and which ones matter.

I call this the challenge of indifference. As we grow up we're taught self-control, how to focus ourselves, and how to tune out things that are "wrong" or "juvenile" or "wastes of time." We become indifferent to the whims of the child mind, trading it in for suits and resumes—the tools of success in the adult world.

I'd used open source software before when studying computer science in college, including countless caffeinated hours writing code in EMACS, a brilliant editing program made by Richard Stallman (who coined the term copyleft). I used other tools that were open, or free, or in the public domain, but that was rarely the reason I chose them.

Adherence to checklists implies that there is a definitive process that guarantees a particular outcome, which is never the case. In reality, there are always just three things: a goal, a pile of work, and a bunch of people.

If you make it clear that you are dead serious and will fight to the end about a particular issue, you force more possibilities to arise.

I couldn't help but consider what Washington Roebling, one of the engineers of the Brooklyn Bridge, once wrote: "Man is after all a finite being in capacities and powers of doing actual work. But when it comes to planning, one mind can in a few hours think out enough work to keep a thousand men employed for years."2

You need to have strong faith in the next draft, that you will be a little smarter and wiser by the time this draft is finished and your only responsibility is to get there. In a way, the draft you write now is a gift to the future version of you.