{"id":25,"date":"2005-11-08T03:58:49","date_gmt":"2005-11-07T22:28:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/book-reviews\/weird-ideas-that-work\/"},"modified":"2006-03-20T10:05:36","modified_gmt":"2006-03-20T04:35:36","slug":"weird-ideas-that-work","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/book-reviews\/weird-ideas-that-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Weird Ideas That Work"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>by Robert Sutton<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www3.addall.com\/New\/compare.cgi?dispCurr=USD&#038;isbn=0743212126\" target=\"new\">Find the best price for this book!<\/a><\/li>\n<p><\/p>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/customer-reviews\/0743212126\/ref=cm_rev_sort\/104-5661836-4048706?customer-reviews.sort_by=%2BOverallRating&#038;s=books&#038;x=8&#038;y=13\" target=\"amazon\">Read Amazon review (ordered by lowest reated to highest, since you just can&#8217;t trust all those 5-star cheerleaders&#8211;rah)<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>A light, fluffy read on innovative thinking, Sutton gives 11 \u00bd practices that can help stimulate creativity by doing exactly what conventional wisdom says you shouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t.  Each practice is described and illustrated with anecdotes.  These anecdotes are on the surface rhetorically powerful, but they are ultimately meaningless in terms of understanding how these \u00e2\u20ac\u0153weird ideas\u00e2\u20ac\u009d work or how to apply them in your situation.  <\/p>\n<p>Beyond the anecdotal, Sutton provides the reader with no hard evidence, theoretical framework or even comparison to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153control\u00e2\u20ac\u009d anecdotes.   In other words, the book is pure ethos rhetorical persuasion, rather than an insightful exploration of innovation\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s dynamics.  As such its value is almost entirely heuristic (which isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t necessarily a bad thing).<\/p>\n<p>Reading this book I was left with a growing discomfort:  perhaps all of Sutton\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s anecdotes are merely exceptions that prove the rule, and that for every success story he shares about a weird idea, there are I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m sure thousands of failure stories he conveniently ignores.  Yes Sutton starts off with a short cautionary about the risks and dangers associated with creativity and innovation, returning to it briefly on the last couple pages\u00e2\u20ac\u201dbut that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s it.<\/p>\n<p>Exacerbating my discomfort is Sutton\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s frequent reliance on example companies that have by now failed (Reactivity, Zaplet), shriveled in quiet defeat (idealab, palm) or companies that are the usual suspects (IDEO, Apple)\u00e2\u20ac\u201dsurely there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s more to innovation than IDEO and Apple.<\/p>\n<p>Furthermore, the weird ideas presented often contradict each other.  One tip suggests ignoring what other people think.  Another tip suggests mixing teams up so they don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get too close and start ignoring other people.  Frustratingly Sutton doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t even acknowledge such contradictions.<\/p>\n<p>Weird Ideas That Work is essentially a decent article blownup to fill an entire book.  As such you don&#8217;t need to buy it. It will be enough to merely read the short list of 11 \u00bd weird ideas, and consider what they mean for yourself.  That said many of the ideas do strike me as things that are well worth trying.  Innovation and creativity are a sort of alchemy\u00e2\u20ac\u201dso maybe we need to approach them counter-intuitively.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Robert Sutton Find the best price for this book! Read Amazon review (ordered by lowest reated to highest, since you just can&#8217;t trust all those 5-star cheerleaders&#8211;rah) A light, fluffy read on innovative thinking, Sutton gives 11 \u00bd practices that can help stimulate creativity by doing exactly what conventional wisdom says you shouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t. Each [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":23,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/ParCYG-p","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/25","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/25\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/23"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}