At Opex Analytics, we successfully used two of Austin Kleon’s books. The books were Steal Like an Artist and Show Your Work!
Both books are nominally for artists. However, the lessons apply to any creative worker, including technical. This includes data scientists, decision scientists, operations researchers, and engineers.
The main lesson of Steal Like an Artist was to “steal” (borrow) ideas from others and combine them in a way that makes sense for your work. Technical workers tend to want to build everything. This book showed that we could create more value for our customers by combining proven ideas rather than recreating everything from scratch.
Show Your Work! is something I advise all technical people to do. Technical people err too far to the side of not sharing anything.
Show Your Work! is a short book (200 small pages with lots of diagrams) full of great ideas. The ideas work for sharing both internally and externally.
Here are five lessons
One: Your “work doesn’t speak for itself.” Many technical people think that if they do great work, everyone will know. This isn’t true.
There is a management lesson here: since technical people tend to dramatically under-share, seek out who is doing great work. You might uncover a lot of hidden greatness.
Two: Embrace writing. This wasn’t in the book, but to share your work, you have to be willing to write about it. You’ll also find that writing helps clarify your thinking and better understand your work. Writing about your work is a form of teaching. And there is no better way to learn than to teach.
Three: Sharing helps you connect. This was a big theme throughout the book. Sharing invites people to comment and give you ideas.
When people shared their work at Opex Analytics, it created opportunities. It allowed others to contribute to improve it, it allowed us to connect different people doing similar work, and it allowed us to share new ideas with clients.
Four: Make it a habit. The book suggests a daily dispatch. Daily might be too much, but technical people want to wait until something is perfect before sharing. The problem with this is that perfection never comes.
We had someone who worked at Opex Analytics who would share what they worked on every week. As a manager, this was helpful. We didn’t always react to it, but it often led to something valuable.
Five: Share the process, not just the finished product. This was a creative idea. Our instinct is only to share the finished product. However, there is a lot of knowledge in how you approach a problem, what obstacles you encounter, and what techniques you try. In other words, share your progress along the way.
I found the book full of many more inspirational ideas, and it was fun to read again.
(Edit: here is a link to the follow-up blog post)
(This article was also posted on Writing for Data Scientists and LinkedIn)
Great insights. They were critical lessons I learned early in my career when I joined IBM in 1977 from seasoned and successful folks doing work in analytics. Two lessons Peter Norden taught regularly were:
Use long meaningful titles - this is often an executive will initially read
when presenting to Executives make two assumptions: they are incredibly bright, but no nothing about the subject you are presenting. Gear your writing and presentation to this audience.