Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books one does not discover how bad the majority of them are. In much more than nine cases out of ten the only objectively truthful criticism would be ‘This book is worthless’, while the truth about the reviewer’s own reaction would probably be ‘This book does not interest me in any way, and I would not write about it unless I were paid to’.

This reminded me of my experience at the radio station. I never fully appreciated just how much bad music was being made until I was Assistant Music Director and had to start sorting through all of it. It actually looks like Orwell formulated Sturgeon’s Law (90% of everything is crap) about 10 years before Sturgeon did. This is how Sturgeon phrased it:

“I repeat Sturgeon’s Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of SF is crud”.

I think this is a really important idea. One of the points I keep trying to get across in my teaching is that ideas are cheap. It’s executing ideas that has value. One of the reasons for this is that 90% of ideas end up being lousy. There are two problems with this. The first is that we usually don’t know which ideas are the good ones. We can usually filter out the really horrible ideas that we come up, but there will always be uncertainty about which are the best ones. Idris Mootee has a nice post about one way to combat this – experiment a lot, fail fast, and fail cheaply. This has been a persistent theme for Tom Peters as well.

But this leads directly to the second problem – if 90% of new ideas are crap, we’re going to fail a fair bit in trying to execute them, and failing isn’t always welcome in businesses. Wendy Waters, writing at Richard Florida’s Creative Class site, gets at this issue nicely. Here’s one of they key quotes:

“If you’re going to have an innovative culture, you must understand that that comes with the acceptance of failure. Innovation comes with a lot of mistakes.” [says Tony Champman, CEO of communications firm, Capital C]

People generally hate to hear this. But innovation is evolutionary – you need variety, selection and replication. Creativity leads to variety, which is where Sturgeon’s law comes in. Then you have to be able to select. This is nearly impossible to do a priori, which means you have to experiment. The last part is that the idea has to spread, which is a separate issue again. But the bottom line is that to innovate, you must fail. If every idea that you try works, you’re not trying out enough ideas.

Even though I talk about this all the time, it’s still a hard lesson to learn. And filtering my own ideas is one of the key areas that I have to get better at. That’s one of the benefits of blogging – it gives you a chance to try out a wider range of ideas than you can in academic papers. Some of them work, some don’t. Part of the problem though is that Sturgeon’s Law almost certainly applies to blogs too. And since the Kristin Hersh post was pretty good, what do the odds tell us about this one?