Category: Innovation

I got a note from a friend who was concerned that he had given a talk where he gave me credit for the term "attitude of wisdom," but when a summary was published, it was presented as his idea. It is great to have friends who give you credit for ideas and, as I think is evident in this blog, I try to take great care to describe the sources of my ideas (not only to give people credit, but also because readers may want to dig in deeper and may also disagree with my interpretation).  But my friend's note reminded me of something that I've thought a lot about over my earlier career as a pure academic and more recently as someone who tries to bridge the worlds of research and practice — the tensions and pitfalls around giving other people credit and claiming that one has an original idea.

On the one hand, as my friend was so careful to do, I think it is important to try to acknowledge where your ideas come from — for reasons already enumerated here, to give credit, because people may want to learn more, and because they may want to challenge your interpretation.  I also think it is important to acknowledge others because it reflects how the process of developing academic and applied ideas in the behavioral sciences operates: There are few if any new ideas, and creativity happens largely through moving old ideas from where they are known to where they are unknown and blending them in new ways (See Andy Hargadon's book to learn more).  So most claims — by academics or gurus — that they have developed entirely new ideas are suspect, and as James March once told, me, most claims originality reflect arrogance, ignorance, or both.  I got sufficiently tired of all the false claims of originality — especially among so-called  management gurus — that (both here and in Hard Facts) I once proposed "Sutton's Law" after the now defunct Business 2.0 was kind enough to call me management guru:

"If you think that you have a new idea, you are wrong.  Someone probably already had it.  This idea isn’t original either; I stole it
from someone else."

On the other hand, trying to figure where an idea came from — when it was first developed and who developed it — is often an impossible task.  The best (and most enjoyable) example of this challenge is seen in the lovely old book called On the Shoulders of Giants, where sociologist Robert Merton tried to trace the origins of the phrase " "If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." This is often attributed to Newton, but as Merton shows on his amusing and impressive scholarly journey, nailing down the origins of an idea is often impossible and (following March's comment and Sutton's Law) the only thing that is usually safe to assume is that if someone claims they invented an idea out of whole cloth, they are suffering from arrogance, ignorance, or both. 

So to return to my friend's concern about the phrase "The Attitude of Wisdom," I think I first saw it used by Karl Weick, who attributed a psychologist named John Meacham, who credited (among others) psychologist Erik Erikson and "Socrates, as expressed by Plato."  And on and on it goes. So I don't know where it came from, but I do know it wasn't my idea.

I am left with two practical lessons. First, trying to figure out the sources of an idea and taking care to give others credit for ideas leads you to think about an idea more deeply and protects you from arrogance (or being seen as arrogant) even if you may never find the real source. Second,  when it comes to the every day challenges of management, and life in general, perhaps the most important thing is to follow (Jeffrey) Pfeffer's Law:

"Instead of being interested in
what is NEW, we ought to be interested in what is TRUE."

As usual, Jeff cuts to the heart of the matter.

My two daughters, my wife, and I got to see a preview of the new Pixar film UP today.  I don't think I am supposed to write a review until the film comes out.  So let me leave it this.  We have all seen pretty much every Pixar film: My wife and daughters thought it was the best ever; for me, it was the second best, after Ratatouille. Pixar never ceases to amaze me. Their ability to capture the essence of human needs and to delight humans of all ages is something to behold.

Diego has posted this cool Steve Jobs video.  It fits a perspective that Andy Hargadon and I worked on years ago on knowledge brokering (notably in this HBR article) and he developed in his book How Breakthroughs Happen.  Essentially, Andy had done over a decade of research showing creativity is mostly about combining old things in new ways and/or doing new things with old things.  Of course, it isn't our idea, we moved it to some new places and recombined with ideas that we borrowed from others!

John Winsor is a deeply creative guy; he does wonderful work applying the lens of design thinking and raw creativity to advertising.  We are lucky enough to have him hanging around the d.school a bit lately, where he gave wonderful talk to the students in our Creating Infectious Action class, and yesterday, gave a great talk at our conference.  His blog Cultural Radar is fantastic, check it out. I was intrigued by everything he told us yesterday, but especially taken with how he is revising one his books, now called Flipped: How Bottom-Up Co-creation is Replacing Top-Down
Innovation. Check out his post about it. Reflecting the spirit of the book, he has the entire old book on a wiki and is inviting people to help him revise and update it.  John told me yesterday that he has already had 75 people sign-up and help.  So if you want to help co-author a book, check it out!

 I wonder if this is the first crowdsourced book?

Update: Stephanie points out that it is not the first crowdsourced book, apparently that title belongs to We Are Smarter Then Me.

Many of you may have heard of Esther Dyson, who is well-known for her investments in technology firms and being a bold and creative voice. Esther also just spent the last six months in Russia getting cosmonaut training, and is looking for financing to fund a space trip. I also just learned that she is quoted on the refrigerator magnet above.

As regular readers of this blog know, I have a bit of an obsession with failure — although I would much rather talk about it than do it.  My main motto (stolen from Diego Rodriguez) is failure sucks but instructs, but we also had a great discussion and debate a few months back called Eleanor Roosevelt vs. Randy Komisar on Failure. I contrasted, and then we debated a bit, between the Roosevelt quote: ""Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself" versus Komisar's argument that although there is value in learning from others' failures :"the only way to really, really get your money's worth, is to do it yourself" because "nothing else creates that hollow feeling in your stomach." 

Dyson's refrigerator magnet adds an essential point to the debate — if you keep making new mistakes, odds are you are learning new things.  If you keep making the same mistakes again and again, it is a sign that you are stuck in a destructive rut. You can buy it here.

Portfolio has an article estimating that Steve Jobs adds 30 billion a year to the economy. I agree that Jobs is enormously talented, but giving him 50% the credit for what Apple does and 50% of the credit for iPod and iPhone ecosystem strikes me as a classic case of the "romance of leadership;" there is a lot of evidence that leaders get too much credit and too much blame .  CEOs matter less than observers usually think –this well-documented  "overattribution" seems to be happening in this article too. In Apple's case, for example, much of the creative work is done by others in the company (including the magnificent Jonathan Ive, who leads design) and hardly anyone talks about how well they manage their supply chain and how brilliantly they control other costs — that is a big part of their success. 

Yet, even though I talk about Jobs in my "Virtues of Assholes" chapter, I do love Apple products and experiences (the stores are wonderful and seem to be getting even better), believe Jobs is a genius, and wish him good health and would love to have him back in the saddle. Yet, regardless of what happens, it is clear that Jobs will go down in history with the likes of Thomas Edison.  The two are similar in that, their technical talents, marketing, creating excitement, and managing the business of innovation were perhaps their greatest skills. Edison had a quite an impressive "reality distortion field" himself. Indeed, one of the biggest differences is that Edison wasn't great technically, at least according the biography in the above link.  Edison's men joked openly about what a lousy inventor he was — no one jokes about Jobs' technical skills, he understands the details, and even when he drives his people crazy, they respect his knowledge.

In any event, it is fun to read the article and argue about Jobs' value. For example, they could have added billions more if they had included Pixar in the count — Jobs was CEO and sold to Disney for a fortune. If you read The Pixar Touch, you will see that although the leaders of the culture and technical focus are Ed Catmull and John Lasseter, the huge haul from the IPO was all Jobs. As I recall, everyone (including investment bankers) thought he was nuts when he started pushing for the IPO because Pixar had a pretty thin track record when they went public. It was IPO, making Jobs a  billionaire for the first time.

P.S. Dave, thanks for the tip!

Yesterday, I put up a post about Tina Seelig's new book What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20. I sang the book's praises and listed some of the crazy chapter titles I loved.  But as I was re-reading the book, I realized that I could give readers a better sense of how fun, useful, and life-affirming the book is by printing a little excerpt. Recall that one of the chapters is called "Turn Lemonade Into Helicopters."  Here is the story behind it, and it is SO TINA.  Here it is:

Being
observant, open-minded, friendly, and optimistic invites luck your way. Take
this simple story: several years ago I was at a small local grocery store
frequented mostly by those who live nearby. A man and his young daughter
approached me in the frozen-food aisle and politely asked how to prepare
frozen, canned lemonade. The man had an accent I couldn’t identify, and I was
pretty sure he must be new to the area. I told him how to prepare the lemonade
and asked where he was from. He said Santiago, Chile. I asked his name and
what brought him to our town. I had no ulterior motive. I was just curious. He
told me his name was Eduardo and that he and his family were in the area for a
year so he could learn about entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. He was in line
to run his family’s business and was in search of tools to make it more
innovative. I told him about the entrepreneurship program at Stanford’s School
of Engineering and said I’d be happy to do what I could to be of help.
Over the next few months I introduced Eduardo to various people in the
entrepreneurship community, and he expressed his thanks for my assistance.

Fast-forward
two years. I was heading for a conference in Santiago and sent Eduardo a
message asking if he wanted to get together for coffee. At the last minute, he
wasn’t able to make it, but invited me to go to a specific location in downtown
Santiago with a few of my colleagues. We showed up at the office building and
were led to the roof, where we were picked up by Eduardo’s family’s private
helicopter for a simply spectacular ride above the city, up to the surrounding
mountains, and over his family’s ski resort. It was incredible! And to think
that it resulted from helping him figure out how to make lemonade. Of course, I
didn’t help Eduardo because I wanted a helicopter ride. But by putting myself
out there, being open to helping someone, and following up years later, I
became quite “lucky.” Earlier I discuss the art of turning lemons (problems)
into lemonade (opportunities). But luck goes beyond this—it’s about turning
lemonade (good things) into helicopters (amazing things!).

Diego just put up an absolutely inspired post over at Harvard Online about Travis Pastrana.  Who cares about the MBA debate when there is innovation stuff  like this to think about!  Really, what degree you have doesn't matter, and having a degree does not even matter in many cases, it is what people do and think that counts. Diego's Harvard MBA has apparently not hurt him one bit.  Read the post and watch the film with it.  He uses a 28 second video of a crazy stunt to extract some "metacool" lessons for our time.  A taste:

2. Use planning to minimize the stupid risks. even
Travis is wearing a helmet for this one. And notice that this is his
third-time-charmed attempt. Now more than ever, when the price of
failing is so high, it's a good idea to minimize secondary risks even
as we embrace big leaps. That might mean building an extra prototype,
running another market test, or getting out in the field with customers
more than usual. These days your big or small leaps really need to
work, so a little extra midnight oil is probably worth it. There's
enough risk out there as it is, why not cut out all the dumb risks to
better focus on the big ones?

Diego over at Metacool is — appropriately enough — going through a meta exercise where he is iterating different definitions of prototyping.  I love the latest:

As you make a prototype, assume you are right and everyone else is
wrong.  When you share your prototype, assume you are wrong and
everyone else is right.

Check out the evolution over at
Metacool. Suggest the next iteration — or do you have a whole different take?

I was reading back through the interview that we did with Academy award winning director Brad Bird for The McKinsey Quarterly last year, and came on this wonderful quote from Brad about his boss at Pixar, John Lasseter.  I found it when searching on the word "quality" in the transcription, and realized that during the 90 or so minute interview we did with Bird, "quality" and "ideas" were terms that he used over and over, sometimes together and sometimes separately. And when he talked about money, he emphasized that, although it was necessary, no matter how much money you throw at an idea, if the concept is flawed in the first place, you end-up with high quality but dull movies — which had helped cause the decline of the Disney Animation studios.  As Bird described his brief career there: "I went to Disney at time where they were doing really beautiful quality of really boring ideas.  That was right after the great masters had left and I basically got fired for, quote, rocking the boat."

Interesting stuff. And a reminder that the greatest innovators are willing to fight for their ideas, something I have been worrying is stifled in these tough times, that innovation and entrepreneurship are slowing down.  I did feel a little better the other day when a sharp Stanford student  argued to me that, since jobs are so hard to come by, he figured it was a great time to start his own company.  He also figured that the stigma of failure is at an all-time low, because it is happening so widely.  How is that for a twisted but weirdly logical reason to take a big risk? He figures that if he succeeds in this economy, people will be REALLY impressed, and if he fails, well, it won't reflect badly on him at all because so many great companies and people are struggling.