O’Reilly Master Class: Leading and Managing Breakthrough Projects Video By Scott Berkun

Summary: how to deal with innovators

I like Scott’s approach to giving lectures. He makes it half formal half informal and he has this “natural” flow when it comes to performing. It makes acquiring the knowledge easier. What you get here is the knowledge wrapped such way it is easier to swallow.

Leading and Managing is devoted to growing new and good at the same time ideas. Well, in fact how to manage people who are expected to invent “things”. In first part Scott presents the basics, he tries to define what good ideas are and how to distinguish them from bad ones. He tells quite interesting stories which will probably entertain you while at the same time provide with the knowledge. Succeeding parts are related to the topics that will help you manage the innovation process. Scott tries to provide you with a Swiss knife for inventor, well for the manager who works with inventors, as a matter of fact. You will learn how reducing team size may influence the process, how to protect the people and what does it mean to protect them, how to deal with authorities and how to choose right people for right tasks. Scott is rather pragmatic, that’s why he focuses on the experiment as a basis for any innovation. There is quite a bunch of people, mostly among the philosophers, who would argue with this thesis, but this is not that important. The part I really enjoyed was devoted to role definition. It’s good to know how roles may influence anything we do in a team.

There is a lot of material within this video – you have to have almost four hours to spend if you want to watch it through. But it pays of, I can tell. There is, however, one drawback. This is why I am not giving here maximum score. The sound quality is very poor when Scott’s audience takes over. Each time people in class spoke it was hard to follow – because of the volume, it was way too low.

As a side note, I really liked Scott’s question regarding bad day, or bad week. This was good one. You will know what I am talking about after you watch the video :)

Product page: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596804596