Tag: innovation

The Virtues of Standing-Up: In Meetings and Elsewhere

I was thinking back to some of the experiences I had over the last few weeks teaching classes to both Stanford students and executives, and watching some of my fellow teachers and colleagues in action. I realized that one of the hallmarks, one of the little signs I have learned to look for, is whether people are standing-up or sitting down. We all learn in school that being a "good student" means that we ought to stay in our seats and be good listeners. But I kept seeing situations where standing-up was a sign of active learning and leadership. To give you a a few examples, I noticed that when my course assistants stood up and walked around the classroom, they were more likely to be engaged by students and to create enthusiasm and energy. I noticed that student teams in my classes that stood-up when brainstorming, prototyping, or arguing over ideas seemed more energetic and engaged.

And I noticed when watching master innovation teacher and coach Perry Klebahn in action at the Stanford d. School that he hardly ever sits down for long, he is always on the prowl, walking over to members of his team to ask how things are going, to give a bit of advice, and to find out what needs to be fixed — and is constantly walking over to to watch teams of students or executives who are working on creative tasks to see if they need a bit advice, coaching, or a gentle kick in the ass to get unstuck. (In fact, that is Perry listening to David Kelley while they were coaching teams — David is the d schools main founder).

Of course, there are times when sitting down is best: During long meetings, when you want to unwind, when relaxed contemplation is in order. But these thoughts inspired a couple questions that many of us — including me — need to ask ourselves about the groups we work in and lead: Would it help if I stood up? Would it help if we all stood up?

This all reminded me of this passage from Good Boss, Bad Boss (from the chapter on how the best bosses "Serve as a Human Shield"):

In Praise of Stand-Up Meetings

I’ve been fascinated by stand-up meetings for years. It started when Jeff Pfeffer and I were writing Hard Facts, our book on evidence-based management. We often met in Jeff’s lovely house, typically starting-out in his kitchen. But we usually ended-up in Jeff’s spacious study — where we both stood, or more often, Jeff sat on the lone chair, and I stood. Meetings in his study were productive but rarely lasted long. There was no place for me sit and the discomfort soon drove me out the door (or at least back to the kitchen). We wondered if there was research on stand-up meetings, and to our delight, we found an experiment comparing decisions made by 56 groups where people stood-up during meetings to 55 groups where people sat down. These were short meetings, in the 10 to 20 minute range, but the researchers found big differences. Groups that stood-up took 34% less time to make the assigned decision, and there were no significant differences in decision quality between stand-up and sit-down groups.

Stand-up meetings aren’t just praised in cute academic studies. Robert Townsend advised in Up the Organization, “Some meetings should be mercifully brief. A good way to handle the latter is to hold the meeting with everyone standing-up. The meetees won’t believe you at first. Then they get very uncomfortable and can hardly wait to get the meeting over with.”

I keep finding good bosses who use stand-up meetings to speed things along. One is David Darragh, CEO of Reily, a New Orleans-based company that specializes in southern foods and drinks. They produce and market dozens of products such as Wick Fowler’s 2-Alarm Chili, CDM Coffee and Chicory, No Pudge Fat Free Brownie Mix, and Luzianne Tea. David and I were having a rollicking conversation about how he works with his team. I started interrogating closely after he mentioned the 15 minute stand-up meeting held in his office four mornings a week. We since exchanged a series of emails about these meetings. As David explains:

“The importance of the stand-up meeting is that it can be accomplished efficiently and, therefore, with greater frequency. Like many areas of discipline, repetition begets improved results. The same is true with meetings. The rhythm that frequency generates allows relationships to develop, personal ticks to be understood, stressors to be identified, personal strengths and weaknesses to be put out in the light of day, etc. The role of stand-up meetings is not to work on strategic issues or even to resolve an immediate issue. The role is to bubble up the issues of the day and to identify the ones that need to be worked outside the meeting and agree on a steward to be responsible for it. With frequent, crisp stand up meetings, there can never be the excuse that the opportunity to communicate was not there. We insist that bad news travels just as fast as good news”

The team also has a 90 minute sit-down meeting each week, where they dig into more strategic issues. But the quick daily meetings keep the team connected, allow them to spot small problems before they become big ones, and facilitate quick and effective action.

Stand-up meetings aren’t right for every meeting or boss. As we saw in the last chapter in the broken Timbuk2 all-hands meeting, part of the problem with that 45 or so minute gathering was there was no place for most people to sit, which fueled the group’s grumpiness and impatience. The key lesson is that the best bosses constantly look for little ways to use everyone’s time and energy more efficiently and respectfully. They keep unearthing traditions, procedures, or other things that needlessly slow people down. In many cases, these speed bumps have been around so long that people don’t even realize they exist or that they do more harm than good. Try to look at what you and your people do through fresh eyes. Bring in someone who “doesn’t know any better,” and ask them: What can I do to help my people travel through the day with fewer hassles?

What do you think? How does standing-up help in what you do? When is it a bad idea?

P.S. Check out this Wall Street Journal article on stand-up meetings as part of the "Agile" software development process, particularly the "daily scrum."

P.P.S. Don't miss Jason Yip's article on how to run a stand-up meeting and how to tell when it isn't going well.

April 3, 2012
Creative People Must Be Stopped! Dave Owens’ Great New Book Published Today

Dave Owens was one of my doctoral students about 15 years ago. He always amazed me with has range of talents. He was not only remarkably well-read and a great field researcher, he could build or fix anything. There was an interesting moment when he was doing an ethnography at a now defunct design firm. Dave met with me to complain that he kept going to one meeting after another where the development team brainstormed and argued and argued and talked and talked about what the prototype should be. It was driving Dave crazy because he had worked at IDEO as a designer for several years and has a masters in product design from Stanford — so he couldn't stand seeing talking as a substitute for prototyping. He told me had had the parts in his garage and could build a prototype in a day, two at most, and asked if he should. I discouraged him from doing so because it would compromise his objectivity and neutrality as an ethnographer. As I have looked back at that advice over the years, I still wonder if I was wrong. Indeed, the product development team was shut down when pretty much the same product they had been talking about hit the market. If Dave had built that prototype, they might have had a shot at getting to market. I also have wondered since then if there really is such at thing as an objective or neutral ethnographer.

In any event, Dave has taken those skills and gone on to quite career. He has been teaching creativity and innovation at Vanderbilt for years and students love him. He has worked with many organizations — from Dell to NASA to LEGO — as consultant and even took a break from Vanderbilt to serve as CEO of Griffin Technology. Dave has wrapped all that practical and academic knowledge into a great new book , Creative People Must Be Stopped. I love the cover. Dave has put together an information-rich website for the book. Dave does a great job of showing various impediments to innovation and then offering tactics and strategies for overcoming them in the book– he has an "Innovation Constraints Survey" you might check-out. The whole book is fun and useful, but perhaps my favorite chapter is "If it is such a great idea, why isn't our competitor doing it?" I can't tell how many times I have heard that creativity killer inside of large companies where people are punished for pressing original ideas.

Let me know what you think of the survey and the book. I read it in galley form and loved it, and i just ordered a copy from Amazon — I think Dave is sending me one because I did a blurb but I like to support my former students!

November 29, 2011
Andy Hargadon’s Brilliant Post On Jobs Versus Edison

Andy Hargadon, a Professor at the University of California at Davis, just wrote a fantastic blog post that compares Steve Jobs and Thomas Edison. Although there are many shallow comparisons of this kind coming out in the press, none are written by anyone who spent years studying Edison as Andy has done. Andy also worked at Apple as a product designer in the 1990s and still has connections to the firm; and in his book and articles often does a brilliant job linking the history of innovation to modern applied and conceptual problems. I couldn't help goading him to write something, and although he resisted at first, he couldn't help doing it — he just knows too much about the topic. Here is his full post. And here is a taste:

How both men dealt with their very public failures is a morality tale far richer in their differences than in the simplistic connections between them.

Once ousted, both men jumped immediately back into the arena, intent on proving their detractors wrong. And both failed again. Edison returned to an earlier project, the phonograph, but would soon become embroiled in, and ultimately lose, another standards war. In 1985, Jobs founded NeXT computer, describing in a name his desire for redemption. Interestingly, both invested in new movie technologies (Edison pioneering moving pictures with a system of film, camera, and projector; Jobs investing in Pixar and the development of computer animation).

Here, at the end of their second acts, our two heroes faced their greatest challenges and, here, their paths diverged.

Edison kept roaming. Whether by temperament or temptation, he kept pursuing the next great invention, investing his and investors money in ultimately fruitless ventures such as magnetic iron-ore mining and concrete cast-in-place houses (both doomed by a toxic combination of huge capital costs and his well-known predilection for experimenting).

Jobs returned to Apple. Clearly the wiser for these experiences, he discussed publicly the lessons he learned from his original ouster from Apple and from the failure of NEXT despite its brilliant technology. Even brief conversations with former colleagues told me he had brought a new humility to the company’s innovation efforts. Gone was the effort to prove Apple’s technical genius, or inventive power.

Great stuff, make sure and read the whole thing.

September 20, 2011
A Talk On Fast Innovation, All In One Great Picture

A couple weeks ago, I did a talk on "fast innovation" at IDEO. I gave the talk from a powerpoint deck, but at the same time, while the audience and I discussed the the talk, there was a guy named Kevin Bain who does this thing called
"graphics scribing." On a single big piece of paper, he drew images and a few words that summarized the main points. This is the the third or fourth time I have worked with one of these scribes. When they are good, like Kevin is, the interaction with the audience unfolds in an interesting and better way than a standard talk. You see the main points unfolding all on one piece of paper, every now and then the scribe will stop and summarize what he or she has been recording so the group gets a sense of where it has been, and at the end, you've got a cool summary of the talk for the group that is all on one place.

It is hard to see the details of the picture below, but if you click on it, you can see a bigger version that is easy to read. Regular readers of this blog and my books will recognize some of my standard themes, like creativity being about doing new things with old things, small wins, and the smart-talk trap. But I have never seen them put together quite like this, and while "you had to be there" to understand the full context, I am still rather amazed and humbled what a great job he did summarizing core ideas that have taken years for my co-authors and me to develop. Kevin's website is here if you want to see a few more samples and to contact him about his "graphic facilitation" services.

July 25, 2011
Little Bets: Peter Sims’ Delightful Masterpiece is Shipping

About 11,000 business books a year are published. Most of them aren't worth reading, either because you've heard it all before, they are badly written, not especially useful, and — perhaps the most common flaw — they are just no fun to read. But, even though they are business books, there are always a few gems that you owe it to yourself to read. Peter Sims Little Bets is one of those rarities. I was blown away when I was asked to write blurb for the book, as I wrote:

“Peter Sims buries the myth that big talkers with brains and big ideas move industry and science forward. This modern masterpiece demonstrates that the most powerful and profitable ideas are produced by persistent people who mess with lots of little ideas and keep muddling forward until they get it right. Little Bets is easily the most delightful and useful innovation book published in the last decade.”

As the book is now out, I took some time to visit with it again this morning – I remain impressed. Ye3s, Peter is a friend of mine, but most of my friends don't write books this compelling. The first thing that struck me was the power of Peter's writing voice. He exudes curiosity and optimism, which as I read the pages, provoked a feeling of joy that I've hardly ever experienced when reading a business book — I guess for me, Orbiting the Giant Hairball and The Art of Innovation had this effect, but it does not happen often.

The second thing that struck me was the range of examples and the deftness with which Peter applies them to make points about small bets and in his lovely chapters (I especially like "Problems are the New Solutions" and "Questions are the New Answers.") He uses everything from Chris Rock, to architect Frank Geary, to Pixar's Ed Catmull, to a U.S. Army General in Iraq, and many others. He does this with such skill that I occasionally had to stop and admire how he had written a sentence or paragraph — I struggle to do this kind of thing day after day,it is a lot harder than it looks.

Third, although Small Bets has many twists and turns, perhaps the core idea is the power of small wins, Karl Weick's powerful concept. This is a message that comes through in other business books (including Good Boss, Bad Boss — see this post – and in at least one other forthcoming business book I just read called The Progress Principle by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer). The power of small wins is not only supported by strong empirical research, it provides an antidote, and at times a useful companion, to all the management theorists who spew out stories of big hairy goals, bold vision, exciting futures, and all that without providing resources or specifying just what people need to do day after day to achieve such magnificent ends. Little Bets is so useful to read because it shows, on page after page, what you can do and how to think day after day about things like problems, solutions, failure, and fun to make great things happen.

I could go on and on… but you would be better off using your time reading the book than reading more of my words about it!

P.S. You might also want to check out Peter's website.

April 15, 2011
More Reasons Creativity Sucks: Creative People Seen as Having Less Leadership Potential

Ever since the days when I was writing Weird Ideas That Work, I have been careful to point out various ways that creative people suffer in comparison to their less imaginative counterparts. My focus has been largely on the differences between doing creative and routine work (see this post on why creativity and innovation suck). Much theory and research suggests a long list, including:

    1. Creativity requires failing most of the time; routine work entails succeeding most of the time. So doing creative means screwing up constantly, while doing routine work means you are usually doing things right and well. As Diego and I like to say, failure sucks but instructs.

     2. Creativity involves constant conflict over ideas, although that can be fun when it is done right, even the most healthy groups struggle to avoid having conflict over the best ideas turn very personal and very nasty.

    3. Creativity is messy,scary, and inefficient. Routine work is clean, comforting and efficient.

    4. Doing creative work right means generating a lot of bad ideas, it also means that most of your good ideas will get killed-off too.

I could go on and on. But the best quote I have ever seen on the probabilities and emotions associated with doing creaitive work is from James March (I quote this in Weird Ideas That Work), quite possibly the most prestigious living organizational theorist. Rumor has it that he has come fairly close to winning the Nobel Prize in Economics once or twice:

"Unfortunately, the gains for imagination are not free. The protections for imagination are indiscriminate. They shield bad ideas as well as good ones—and there are many more of the former than the latter. Most fantasies lead us astray, and most of the consequences of imagination for individuals and individual organizations are disastrous. Most deviants end up on the scrap pile of failed mutations, not as heroes of organizational transformation. . . . There is, as a result, much that can be viewed as unjust in a system that induces imagination among individuals and individual organizations in order to allow a larger system to choose among alternative experiments. By glorifying imagination, we entice the innocent into unwitting self-destruction (or if you prefer, altruism)."

I don't mean to bring you down even further, but a study with more bad news for creativity — actually an academic paper containing three intertwined studies — just came out by Assistant Professor Jennifer Mueller at the University of Pennsylvania. It is called "Recognizing creative leadership: Can creative idea expression negatively relate to perceptions of leadership potential?" The upshot is that people who are seen as more creative are judged by others as having LESS leadership potential than their unimaginative peers UNLESS they are also seen as charismatic.

This bias against creative people is first demonstrated in their study of employees of a company in India who were in jobs where they were expected to do creative work. It was then replicated in a controlled experiment, with about 200 students, half of whom were assigned to be idea generators or "pitchers" and half to be "evaluators." The pitchers were then divided into two groups. As the researchers, they were asked to either '1) prepare a creative (novel and useful) or 2) a useful (but not novel) solution to the following question: “What could an airlines do to obtain more revenue from passengers?"'

The results are pretty troubling. In short, although the judges saw no significant differences in the usefulness of the ideas generated, and did construe that subjects who were instructed to generate creative ideas did, in fact, come up with more creative ideas than those instructed to come-up with ideas that were not novel, the judges also consistently construed the more creative subjects as having less leadership potential, measured with this 3-item scale: “How much leadership would this applicant exhibit?”, “How much control over the team’s activities would this member exhibit?”, “I think the applicant is an effective leader.” (α = .86).

The bright spot, or perhaps the warning, is that, int he third study, where the "charismatic leader prototype was activated" (this was done by asking judges to list five five characteristics of a charismatic leader), things changed. Here is how the researchers described their findings from this third study: "when the charismatic prototype was activated, participants rated the candidate in the creative idea condition (M = 4.08) as having significantly higher leadership potential than the candidate in the useful idea condition (M = 3.41; t = -3.68, p < .01). Conversely, when the charismatic prototype was not activated, participants rated the candidate in the creative condition (M = 3.08) as having significantly lower leadership potential than the candidate in the useful condition (M = 3.60; t = -2.03, p < .05)."

BNET asked first author Mueller to explain these findings, and I thought she came-up with a pretty good answer:

'Muller notes that leaders must create common goals so their groups can get things done. And the clearer goals are, the better they tend to work, which means leaders need to root out uncertainty. One way leaders can do this is to set standards and enforce conformity. But when asked to describe a creative person, words like “quirky,” “nonconformist” and “unfocused” often take their place right alongside “visionary” and “charismatic.” Says Mueller: “The fact is, people don’t just feel positively about creative individuals-they feel ambivalent around them.”'

Yes, this is one just paper. But it is done carefully and uses multiple methods. And it is instructive as I do think — and there is evidence to show — that our stereotypes of the hallmarks of creative people do often see at odds with our beliefs of great leaders. In particular, to add to Mueller's list, creative people are also often seen as inner focused (not just unfocused), inconsistent, and flaky. That is not the boss that most of us want. It is also interesting that charisma seems to be the path to being seen as both creative and having leadership potential. It certainly has worked for the likes of Steve Jobs, Francis Ford Coppola, IDEO's David Kelley, and Oprah Winfrey.

This research suggests that if you are a creative type, and want to lead, do everything you can to get your boss and other evaluators thinking about charisma — "activate" the charismatic leader prototype by talking about well-known charismatics, and perhaps engaging in actions congruent with the "prototype" of a charismatic person — articulate, inspiring, setting forth an emotionally compelling vision, and touching on themes and stories that provoke energy and passion in others.

On the other hand, there are plenty of successful creatives who have achieved leadership positions who seem to lack at leasst some of these qualities — Mark Zuckerburg, Bill Gates, David Packard, and Bill Hewlett come to mind.   And there are still other successful creatives who led wonderful and important lives despite having little if any interest in leading others — Steve Wozniak and Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman appear to qualify. Indeed, although we need great leaders, it seems to me that — especially at this moment in history — we need creative people even more.

To me, the upshot is that these findings are intriguing and some people may find them useful — especially creatives who are trying to get leadership jobs. But it also strikes me that presenting a false front usually backfires in the end, and perhaps the most important implication is that, if you are in a position to judge and select leaders, keep reminding yourself that you will probably be unfairly biased against creative people — unless you think they are charismatic (or you are just thinking about charisma), in which case you may be giving those creatives too much credit for their leadership potential!

I love a careful and creative study like this one.   No it is not perfect or the final word, no study is or can be, but it is pretty damn good. If you want to read the whole thing, here is complete reference, including a link to the PDF:

Jennifer Mueller, Jack Goncalo, Dishan Kamdar (2011), Recognizing creative leadership: Can creative idea expression negatively relate to perceptions of leadership potential?, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

March 7, 2011
Do you want to DO design thinking? Start with the d.School’s Bootcamp Bootleg

Last year, I wrote about the first Bootcamp Bootleg here, a compilation of materials and methods assembled by the team that teaches our introductory course on design thinking at the Stanford d.school, which we call Bootcamp. As with last year's model, you can download the latest version free, courtesy of the d.school. The team has outdone themselves this year, the content is just awesome — fun to read, detailed, useful, and great pictures and drawings to guide and inspire anyone who is applying design thinking (from novices to veterans).

I love the opening paragraph:

Check this out —
It’s the d.school bootcamp bootleg.

This compilation is intended as an active toolkit to support your design thinking practice. The guide is not just to read – go out in the world and try these tools yourself. In the following pages, we outline each mode of a human centered design process, and then describe dozens of specific methods to do design work. These process modes and methods provide a tangible toolkit which support the seven mindsets — shown on the following page – that are vital attitudes for a design thinker to hold.

Then the fun begins. Here is the crisp summary of the d.school philosophy:

Show don't tell. Focus on human values. Craft clarity. Embrace experimentation. Be mindful of process. Bias toward action. Radical collaboration

Then it goes through the fives "modes" of the design process (By the way, note the term "mode" rather than "step" or stage" is important here because we never mean to convey that this is a clean and linear process):

Empathize. Define. Ideate. Prototype. Test.

To me,while philosophy and process are important, the real stuff, the material here that really makes the Bootleg so valuable, are the dozens of methods it contains. These have been tried and fine-tuned for the six or seven years the d.school has been around, and for decades before that at places including IDEO and the Stanford Product Design program. In d.school speak, these methods help you DO TO THINK. Here are a few samples, there are many more:

Assume a beginners mindset. Use a camera study. Interview for empathy. Extreme users. Team share and capture. Journey map. Empathy map. Fill-in-the blank character profile. Why-how laddering. Point-of-view want-ad. "How might we" questions. Stoke. Facilitate a brainstorm. Bodystorming. Impose constraints.

Try the Bootleg. You will like most of it — and will probably get frustrated and fail along the way too. That's part of the process too. Please let us know what did and did not work for you. Let us know you changed or, as we say "flexed," these methods so they would work for you. And please let us know other methods you have used, and perhaps invented, to do design thinking

Once again, a big thanks to the team that developed the first cut at the Bootleg last year and the team that cranked0out this lovely revision.

February 25, 2011
Building a Better Boss: A Webinar With Polly LaBarre and Me

Polly LaBarre has been developing, sparking, and spreading ideas about innovative companies and people for about 15 years now, first as one of the most insightful (and downright fun) editors of Fast Company in its early days, then as a TV personality who did cool innovation stuff at CNN, co-author of Mavericks at Work, a great speaker at events of all kinds, and now at her latest adventure, the Management Innovation Exchange (or MIX) — which she is leading with Gary Hamel, Michele Zanini, and David Sims. I love the MIX Manifesto:

Why Not?

What law decrees that our organizations have to be bureaucratic, inertial and politicized, or that life within them has to be disempowering, dispiriting and often downright boring? No law we know of. So why not build organizations that are as resilient, inventive, inspiring and socially responsible, as the people who work within them? Why not, indeed. This is the mission of the MIX.

I've known Polly at least 12 years, as I was involved a bit in the delightful madness of Fast Company conferences and other things in its crazy early years, and she wrote one of the best stories on Weird Ideas That Work. Polly is also, as many of you will recall, the person who I learned the phrase "Jargon Monoxide" from, which I still love.

As part of the MIX adventure, Polly and I are doing a webinar on bosses on this Thursday, December 9th at 11AM Eastern. The basic plan is that I will spend about 25 minutes or so presenting core ideas from Good Boss, Bad Boss. Then Polly and I will spend 15 or 20 minutes have a more rollicking a no doubt less linear conversation about it, and then the last 15 minutes or so will be more general Q&A. Polly is fun and always imaginative; I hope you will join us — and yes, it is free! Once again, you can sign-up here.

December 6, 2010
Innovation Will Always Have Messy Parts: Wisdom from IDEO’s David Kelley and 3M’s Bill Coyne

After all these years that I've studied and taught creativity and innovation, I am starting to believe that one element of the process is tougher for many people to accept than the rest — that it is a messy and uncertain process and efforts to make the early messy stages more rational, safer, and generally neat and clean comforting get in the way of the process.

I confess that I suffer from wanting to get rid of this messiness now and then too, and in fact, during the early days of the Stanford d.school, I went to our founder and inspiration David Kelley and asked him to make things less confusing and upsetting, and in the nicest possible way, David said he couldn't, that we were involved in messy process and if I couldn't deal with it, perhaps I should do something else. I see the same instinct in how some university administrators and faculty react to the d.school, in that the love the innovation and creativity, but the physical messiness and lack of orderliness disturbs them. Now, we have developed techniques to help people navigate the messiness more effectively (notably the Bootcamp Bootleg) but the process is still messy and uncertain.

I was thinking of this because I was reading an article by Bill Coyne, who led R&D at 3M for over a decade. I met Bill about ten years ago, and he is very wise And he understands both the messiness and misguided impulse to clean it up. I loved this quote:

Finally, don't try to control or make safe the fumbling, panicky,
glorious adventure of discovery. Occasionally, one sees articles that
describe how to rationalize this process, how to take the fuzzy front
end and give it a nice haircut. This is self-defeating. We should allow
the fuzzy front end to be as unkempt and as fuzzy as we can. Long– term
growth depends on innovation, and innovation isn't neat. We stumble on
many of our best discoveries. If you want to follow the rapidly moving
leading edge, you must learn to live on your feet. And you must be
willing to make necessary, healthy stumbles.

Given all this, innovators still are often surrounded by people who want to give their process "a nice haircut." How can this be stopped? And perhaps I am being to closed-minded. Do any of those haircuts ever work?

June 5, 2010
Assholes Who Turned Out to Be Right and Other Thoughts About Creative People

In the fog of my first couple weeks after surgery, I missed some intriguing developments. Thanks to you folks who read this blog, I got some great emails to help me stay in the loop. As I was wrestling with my email inbox last night, I found a note from Patrick with a link to a fantastic — troubling, enlightening, and funny — story at cracked.com (which looks to me like a cross between Mad magazine and The Onion, but is more fact-based — they apparently have been around since 1958) on The Five Biggest Assholes Who Ever Turned Out to Be Right, which was posted on April 23rd.

I was taken by the post because the author, Dan Seitz, did such a great job of finding people who were annoying, nasty, stubborn, mean-spirited, and otherwise socially inept or personally despicable, but had championed unpopular but good ideas (or in some cases, ideas that were just different from the prevailing wisdom but they were dismissed because the ideas were advocated by an alleged asshole). I urge you to read this quite detailed story, where you can learn about the exploits, quirks, and ideas of alleged assholes including baseball player Jose Canseco (he claimed that many stars, including himself, were using steriods, which turned out to be true), scientist Peter Duesberg (very unpopular because he claimed that AIDS is not caused by HIV, which made him so unpopular that his colleagues and others have — until recently — been ignoring his potentially breakthrough work on the causes of cancer), Harry Markopolos (who admits that he combines the worst characteristics of a math nerd and frat boy — but spent 9 years pressing his accusations that Bernie Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme).

My favorite asshole who was right, however, is Fritz astronomer. See this description from the American Museum of Natural History for more details.   But as Seitz tells us:

To give you an idea of how charming Fritz Zwicky was, when he was
working at Aerojet, a bunch of customers from the military, including
two admirals, showed up for an appointment to check on his progress.
Zwicky met them at the gate demanding that they leave
because they weren't scientists and were therefore absolutely
unqualified to look at the stuff they were, um, buying. Outside of work,
his solution to winning arguments was to try and punch people, which
was mostly found adorable because he was a little old man who could be
pummeled easily. It became less adorable when he said things like "I myself can think of a
dozen ways to annihilate all living beings in one hour," and his
scientific partner was afraid Zwicky was out to kill him.

BUT he was right in serious ways, even though it took decades for his colleagues to find that out because they thought these were just wacky ideas from "Crazy Fritz" (pictured to the left). As Seitz tells it:

Needless to say, the whole "total lack of people skills" thing made
him so popular and beloved he got the nickname "Crazy Fritz." So it was
easy to ignore Zwicky while he was off doing crazy things like inventing
most of modern astronomy.
The term "supernova"? He invented it.

Plus:

He also developed the theory that allows us to know how old the
universe is. Dark matter? He was among the first to theorize about it.
Gravitational lensing, i.e. using stars to look at other stars? He laid
out the theory 40 years before it was actually proved correct. Zwicky was so ahead of his time, and so annoying, that it was
basically routine in the 70s to say "Yeah, Fritz Zwicky thought of this
40 years ago but nobody took him seriously because he was a crazy
douche."

Stories like these, especially the one about Fritz, are important to remember because — although people who are stubborn, trample over everyone else, are unable or unwilling to use the most basic social graces, and treat others like dirt clearly deserve to be called assholes and may not be worth the trouble no matter how brilliant they are — they are less burdened than most of us by pressures to think like everyone else. They may be in a better position, as the first scientist to isolate Vitamin C — Albert Szent-Gyorgi — famously suggested (I am paraphrasing), "To look at the same thing as everyone else, but to think of and see something different."

I wrote a lot about people with this talent in Weird Ideas That Work, especially in the chapter on "slow learners." I would also add, however, that there are many people who think for themselves and stubbornly stick to unpopular ideas regardless of social pressures and prevailing wisdom, but aren't assholes. A good example was Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman, who did irritate people by pushing ideas they disagreed with, but was known as usually charming and well-loved. He won a Nobel Prize on Physics and many experts believe he deserved one, possibly two, others (e.g., Feynman solved a problem that another researcher won another Nobel for years later — but the paper with the solution just sat in his drawer for many years because he never got around to sending the paper to an academic journal).

He also "went rogue" as member of the Rogers Commission that investigated the explosion of the Challenger Space Shuttle — and despite pressures to stop from the head of it — did his own interviews with NASA scientists and engineers that led him to believe that the explosion was caused by O-rings that failed under cold temperatures.   If you have never seen it, his demonstration to congress (which some members of the commission tried to stop) that when an O-ring was put in beaker of cold water, it became brittle and more likely to break, was the pivotal moment in the investigation — it is a beautiful example of breaking down a problem to its esssence. Feynman's role on the Rogers Commission is instructive because, although he fought with the head of the commission William Rogers about the independent action he took and was famously called "a real pain" by Rogers, he wasn't doing it to be an asshole. He was doing to get to the truth. Rogers probably thought he was an asshole, which reminds me that it is label that people should hesitate to use and accept as true, because it is often applied simply to people who disagree with us, are more successful than us, or who simply act or think differently than than us.

If you are in a group or organization where people who simply look, think, or act differently than everyone else are labeled as assholes, and the best you can be is a perfect imitation of everyone else around you, well, the odds are no one is thinking very much and there isn't much original thinking going on.

In short, although being oblivious or indifferent (or naive, by the way) to what others thing can help people see and develop new ideas (and is a hallmark of assholes at times), I think it is important to keep in mind that not all original thinkers are assholes (the trick is to see things differently and not to cave in when people don't like your "different ideas"). I should also point out that not all assholes are original thinkers. There are plenty of mean-spirited jerks out there who mindlessly follow the crowd and are incapable of original thinking.

P.S. Also note that the post at Cracked reminds us of another cost that assholes inflict on themselves and others — if you are branded as an asshole, people are more likely to reject your ideas, even if they are right. The negative reactions they have to YOU color their reactions to your ideas. One solution, by the way, is if you are an asshole with good ideas, you might work with a more socially adept partner who is more skilled at selling your ideas.

May 23, 2010