A key to effective creative effort: copying. Or “don’t reinvent the wheel.”

A genius with whom I once worked, Gene Anderson, ran our firm pursuant to “10 principles” (there were more than 10, but that discrepancy was entirely consistent with the principles). An important one was “don’t reinvent the wheel.” You’re job is to represent the client as well as you can, and that means as efficiently as you can. If someone else has written the great brief on the point you’re arguing, start with that brief (even if it was an adversary’s). As I’ve written in an article to be published, this notion is entirely consistent with legal authorship. More importantly by far, it is good business. So Scott Berkun is acting wisely in his most recent Bloomberg Businessweek column, “Stop Trying to Reinvent the Wheel,” in which he identifies ignorance and the over-valuing of novelty as the principal reasons for failing to appreciate the utility of recycling:

The key reason people look to reinvent things is that they don’t know what’s already been done. Ignorance, one way or another, is the leading cause of wasted effort everywhere. People who don’t spend time studying the problems they’re trying to solve are bound to reinvent something, and likely not nearly as well. There are only so many ways to design a website, a marketing campaign, or even a product strategy. Instead of driving minions into further brainstorming sessions, it would be wise to ask: Who else has tried to solve this problem? Can we learn from what they have done?

The second reason for reinvention pertains to ego and rewards. In many corporations there is more prestige to be gained for making something new than for reusing work done elsewhere in the company or industry. This is true even when the newly made thing is much worse that what already existed. An executive might proclaim the wonders of the new (worse) thing to his division without encountering anyone willing to stand up for the old (better) thing. It’s harder to inflate the importance of one’s own work if the key decision was to buy or borrow from elsewhere. The verbs “make,” “invent,” and “create” lead to more promotions than “reuse,” “borrow,” or “convert.” In Pavlovian terms, if a culture rewards unnecessary reinvention more than it honors wise reuse, the ambitious will follow suit. Asking people to behave one way while rewarding them for another has predictable results. The counter notion to NIH—”PFE,” or “Proudly Found Elsewhere”—has been talked about before, but I’ve rarely seen it thrive.

Street Smarts, Book Smarts, and Making them Work Together

Scott Berkun compares “book smarts” to “street smarts” and concludes: “street smarts kicks book smarts ass.”

I agree, though, as does Berkun, in saying so I do not intend to demean the importance of book smarts. Street smarts, as Berkun explains, is the knowledge born of experience:

To be street smart means you have situational awareness. You can assess the environment you are in, who is in it, and what the available angles are. Being on the street, or in the trenches, or whatever low to the ground metaphor you prefer, requires you learn to trust your own judgment about people and what matters. This skill, regardless of where you develop it, is of great value everywhere in life regardless of how far from the streets you are.

Most important perhaps, being street smart comes from experience.

To me the most compelling part of Berkun’s post is his insistence that to be street smart is to rely on your own judgment, not the answers someone else has set out for you and you’ve found:

The prime distinction between street smarts and book smarts is who is at the center of the knowledge. On the street, it’s you. In a book it’s you trying to absorb someone else’s take on the world, and however amazing the writer is, you are at best one degree removed from the actual experience. Street smarts means you’ve put yourself at risk and survived. Or thrived. Or have scars. You’ve been tested and have a bank of courage to depend on when you are tested again.

I would only add that making your own judgment the center of book learning will make the book learning itself more effective. And you don’t need the experience of decades to do so. If you read to find answers without evaluating, trying out, and considering alternative to those answers, the answers are just so many abstract symbols that are virtually impossible to translate into future action. But if you do bring your own judgment and imagination to reading, you can make your street smarts improve your book smarts, and those improved book smarts will in turn improve your street smarts.

How to come up with new solutions: try out new ways of using old ideas and take chances.

From Guy Kawasaki’s interview with Scott Berkun, author of The Myths of Innovation:

Question: Where do inventors and innovators get their ideas?

Answer: I teach a creative thinking course at the University of Washington, and the foundation is that ideas are combinations of other ideas. People who earn the label “creative” are really just people who come up with more combinations of ideas, find interesting ones faster, and are willing to try them out. The problem is most schools and organizations train us out of the habits.

Question: Why do innovators face such rejection and negativity?

Answer: It’s human nature—we protect ourselves from change. We like to think we’re progressive, but every wave of innovation has been much slower than we’re told. The telegraph, the telephone, the PC, and the internet all took decades to develop from ideas into things ordinary people used. As a species we’re threatened by change and it takes a long time to convince people to change their behavior, or part with their money.

Question: How do you know if you have a seemingly stupid idea according to the “experts” that will succeed or a stupid idea that is truly stupid?

Answer: Don’t shoot me, but the answer is we can’t know. Not for certain. That’s where all the fun and misery comes in. Many stupid ideas have been successful and many great ideas have died on the vine and that’s because success hinges on factors outside of our control.

The best bet is to be an experimenter, a tinkerer—to learn to try out ideas cheaply and quickly and to get out there with people instead of fantasizing in ivory towers. Experience with real people trumps expert analysis much of the time. Innovation is a practice—a set of habits—and it involves making lots of mistakes and being willing to learn from them.