I just finished Little Bets, by Peter Sims. This book explores the similarities between a variety of creative processes. Sims examines stand-up comedy, pixar’s story boarding process, the agile software development process, and all kinds of other scenarios.
One thing that these processes all have in common, Sims argues, is failing forward. The key is iterative development. When developing new products at Proctor and Gamble, for example, designers will begin with rough sketches and low-quality prototypes. Once they get feedback from actual users, they can take that information and slightly improve their designs. Doing this repeatedly allows them to learn as they go, rather than designing a new product from the top down and then testing the market response.
I was assigned to read this book for one of my business school classes a couple years ago. I remember reading the first three chapters and being blown away by the ideas. I loved the way Sims drew together all of these different disciplines and showed that incremental, bottom-up creative thinking is universal and often superior to top-down plan-then-build creative paradigms.
On this read, I wasn’t nearly as impressed. Don’t get me wrong, I still think that iterative development is the way to go and an awesome tool, but Little Bets didn’t wow me the way it did the first time. Maybe the ideas about first defining a problem and then trying to solve it have become more widespread, or maybe I’ve just learned a lot since my first read, but this book isn’t nearly as groundbreaking as I originally thought it was.
More to the point though, Sims is not a great writer. He has a background in venture capital and entrepreneurship, so I’ll cut him some slack because he isn’t a professional author, but I still felt frustrated by the writing at times. I felt like he got lazy sometimes and would turn a chapter into a list of examples without very much cohesion or flow. As a power point presentation, you probably wouldn’t notice, but in a book, that kind of choppiness shows.
There’s a similar book that I like, Rework. I actually read it for week 6 of this project. I would want to read it again before I said that it was definitely superior to this one, but I know I liked it a lot better. For Little Bets, I like the message, but I’m not too happy about its delivery.
See the full list of books that I’ve read for this project here.
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