December 2, 2004
10 Lessons from History's Innovators - Part IX
Lesson #8 - SUCCESS IS RISKY.
Georges Doriot was fond of saying that the most dangerous moment in the life of a company was when it had succeeded. His experience told him that this was when the company would customarily stop innovating, whereas only continual improvement and innovation could protect it from imitators. Ken Olsen both taught and received the lesson. He kept innovating with his minicomputers so that when the imitative competition emerged, he was ready to leapfrog with a wholly new, less expensive design. Then he was blindsided by the personal computer. Similarly, CNN allowed itself to be overtaken by Fox News. And Edison got stuck on direct current and was overtaken by George Westinghouse. Large corporations are especially vulnerable because they are not natural risk takers. Gordon Moore, leaving Fairchild to start up Intel, thought of large corporations as oil tankers, very hard to turn on a dime. Bureaucracies breed elaborate defenses. Innovators are by definition barrier-breaking troublemakers. Every company needs them and few tolerate them.
From the book THEY MADE AMERICA by Harold Evans, with Gail Buckland and David Lefer. (c) 2004 Little, Brown & Co.
10 Lessons from History's Innovators - Part VIII
Lesson #7 - CROSS-POLLINATION WORKS.
Leo Baekeland borrowed from photographic chemistry to invent plastics. Raymond Smith borrowed from carnival techniques to make gambling a major American industry. Elisha Otis built his safety elevators using springs he had learned about making carriages. Wilbur Wright figured out how to turn an airplane by thinking about the way he turned a bicycle. Boundary transgressors are able to mobilize knowledge more flexibly and selectively.
From the book THEY MADE AMERICA by Harold Evans, with Gail Buckland and David Lefer. (c) 2004 Little, Brown & Co.
December 1, 2004
10 Lessons from History's Innovators - Part VII
Lesson #6 - NEW IDEAS DISTURB.
There are a hundred Cassandras for every change. Raymond Damadian was a “screaming lunatic” for thinking nuclear magnetic resonance might be used for medicine. Theodore Judah was “crazy Judah” for advocating a railway line over the High Sierra; Edwin Drake “crazy” for believing he could drill for oil. Giannini was a hothead (and worse) for thinking banking should be for the masses. The flat-earth dogmatists can never remember their predictions when success is achieved—but they serve a purpose. Something like 90 percent of new ventures do fail, so the odds are with the naysayers; they are only going to be disproved once in ten times. Ted Turner put it this way to me: “If you’ve got an innovative idea, and the majority does not poohpooh it, then the odds are you must not have a very good idea. When people thought I was loony, it did not bother me at all. In fact, I considered that I must really be onto something.”
From the book THEY MADE AMERICA by Harold Evans, with Gail Buckland and David Lefer. (c) 2004 Little, Brown & Co.
10 Lessons from History's Innovators - Part VI
Lesson #5 - NOTHING WORKS THE FIRST TIME.
An impatient society and media expect instant results. Wall Street’s fetish with quarterly earnings makes it worse. Georges Doriot, the founder of venture capitalism, observed that too many bankers and counselors had forgotten the history of our industrial giants. “The first fifteen years of companies and of human beings are very much alike— hope, measles, failures, mumps, reorganizations, scarlet fever, executive troubles, whooping cough, etc., are part of one’s daily life.” His question for bankers and brokers who told him he should sell an ailing company was “Would you sell a child running a temperature of 104?” USAToday, Amazon.com and CNN ran fevers for years but came good because the basic ideas were sound. Innovation is often cut off too soon because backers fail to appreciate that it takes time to work out the wrinkles. See the Wright brothers.
From the book THEY MADE AMERICA by Harold Evans, with Gail Buckland and David Lefer. (c) 2004 Little, Brown & Co.
November 30, 2004
10 Lessons from History's Innovators - Part V
Lesson #4 - DIFFIDENCE WON’T DO.
An idea may work only when pushed to its limits. Samuel Insull and Juan Trippe went to extremes in the size of the engines they demanded respectively for power generation and aircraft. Halfway measures would not have yielded cheap power and air fares. There is a parallel in some of the sciences. Nineteenth-century experimenters trying to make cheap polarizers from crystals found that small crystals crumbled, so they moved to larger crystals and still failed. In the 1920s the youthful Edwin Land succeeded by going entirely in the other direction to crystals of microscopic size. Rubber, that ubiquitous substance, was unusable for decades because on hot days it turned to a sticky, smelly goo. Charles Goodyear accidentally exposed a treated sample to prolonged heat in his wife’s oven, and vulcanization became a commercial prospect.
From the book THEY MADE AMERICA by Harold Evans, with Gail Buckland and David Lefer. (c) 2004 Little, Brown & Co.
10 Lessons from History's Innovators - Part IV
Lesson #3- IT’S OK TO STEAL.
The corollary to item 2. More innovations come from borrowing and combination than simple invention. Henry Ford said, “I invented nothing new. I simply assembled into a car the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work.” The imaginative association of ideas previously considered separate is a hallmark of innovation. Jean Nidetch did not invent the diet she used for Weight Watchers. Nolan Bushnell did not invent the first home video game. Lewis Tappan, a model of moral probity, did not start the first credit agency. Ruth Handler stole the Barbie doll from a German sex doll named Lilli. “Good artists borrow, great artists steal,” said Picasso, who may have lifted the quote from someplace else.
From the book THEY MADE AMERICA by Harold Evans, with Gail Buckland and David Lefer. (c) 2004 Little, Brown & Co.
November 29, 2004
10 Lessons from History's Innovators - Part III
Lesson #2 - FIRST ISN’T ALWAYS BEST.
John Fitch was the first to operate a steamboat service, not the commonly presumed Robert Fulton. But Fulton learned from Fitch’s mistakes and triumphed on a different river at a more propitious time. Similarly with Henry Ford, who was late to automobile production, Charles Goodyear with vulcanized rubber and Isaac Singer and his sewing machine. Mark Gumz at Olympus has the point: “Understanding comes from failure; success comes from understanding failure and acting upon this knowledge.” The path beaten to somebody’s door will reveal the potholes.
From the book THEY MADE AMERICA by Harold Evans, with Gail Buckland and David Lefer. (c) 2004 Little, Brown & Co.
10 Lessons from History's Innovators - Part II
When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him. — Jonathan Swift
Lesson #1 - MAKE NO ASSUMPTIONS.
Edwin Armstrong was constantly trying to do things in radio circuitry he was told by the experts were impossible. He kept reminding them of one of the sayings of Henry Wheeler Shaw (1818–85), the Lanesboro, Massachusetts, lecturer and humorist known as Josh Billings: “It ain’t ignorance that causes all the trouble in this world. It’s the things people know that ain’t so.” Time and again in this study we find that breakthroughs come from the discarding of assumptions. Ignorance that ignites curiosity is a better starting point than half-knowledge. “No man becomes a fool,” said the immigrant electrical engineer Charles Proteus Steinmetz, “until he stops asking questions.”
From the book THEY MADE AMERICA by Harold Evans, with Gail Buckland and David Lefer. (c) 2004 Little, Brown & Co.
10 Lessons from History's Innovators - Part I
They Made America
by Harold Evans
Little, Brown - October 2004
496 Pages - ISBN 0316277665
Summary:
Developed in tandem with a four-part PBS series to air in November, Evans's profusely illustrated and elegantly written book offers the same breadth and scope as his previous bestseller, The American Century. Evans, former president and publisher of Random House, profiles 70 of America's leading inventors, entrepreneurs and innovators, some better known than others. Along with such obvious choices as Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and the Wright brothers, Evans profiles Lewis Tappan (an abolitionist who dreamed up the idea of credit ratings), Gen. Georges Doriot (pioneer of venture capital) and Joan Ganz Cooney, of the Children's Television Workshop. From A.P. Giannini (father of consumer banking) to Ida Rosenthal (the Maidenform Bra tycoon), Evans shows innovation as both a product of and a contributor to the grand apparatus of American society. And his spotlight is on the true American elite: the aristocracy of strategic visionaries, creative risk takers and entrepreneurial adventurers thriving in their natural environment, the free-market democracy of the United States. Evans doesn't neglect the latest generation of innovators, among them Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin. He concludes with a note of caution, pointing out the nation's recent loss of dominance in the hard sciences. But just as Edison was inspired by popular biographies of innovators before him, so might the next generation of scientific and commercial explorers find guidance in Evans's exciting survey.