False Dichotomies: Edison, Tesla, Jobs, Gates, AC, DC, Humanities, Science, And The Answer Is Always Both Innovation Method

I recently saw a cartoon extolling the evils of Thomas Edison in comparison to the wonders of Nikola Tesla. I have not gone back in time and I have not had the fortune to meet the 2 geniuses, so it’s hard for me to judge the character of either man, but what bothered me was one of the reasons given by the cartoonist for deeming Edison an ass: Because he had a business acumen and was good at promoting his products.

Given, Edison reportedly electrocuted dogs and cats in a PR campaign to prove that Tesla’s Alternating Current was dangerous is enough to deem him an asshole, and most probably he was, but the fact that he knew how to make meaningful products (the Pearl Street Station, the first central power plant in the US) and then promote these products does not make him any less important than Tesla, whose contributions are also important.

 The dichotomy the author of the cartoon was trying to achieve was geek (Tesla) versus non-geek (Edison) and the distinction might be important but very much overly simplified in the cartoon, because the world is better when geeks and non-geeks work together. The world is also better when we stop thinking in false dichotomies and look for those nuanced gray areas where the secrets of life really happen.

 I’d like to chew on the nuances in the space between geek and non-geek and other false dichotomies—Government/Business, Open/Closed Systems, Microsoft/Apple, AC/DC—and look at how finding some sort of middle ground in a spirit of collaborative competition is what makes innovation happen. This post was prompted by recent readings of biographies on Tesla and Jobs but morphed into a whole other beast as I sat down and wrote, so that’s why it might appear jumbled, but all of it revolves around the idea of how innovation happens in the gray areas.

 The times that Jobs and Tesla lived in are not that different. The Gilded Age Tesla occupied was a wild time with banks and railroads failing, the economy crashing, but even with all the chaos an Age of Invention was taking place. Sound familiar? The parallels between the late 19th century’s attempts at electrification and our own age in disseminating broadband are uncannily similar. Just as rural electrification took time (not until the 1940s did most rural areas have electricity, despite the US having a rural economy), now we are facing the difficulties of the digital divide and there is a notable disparity between those who have access to broadband and those who don’t.

 It’s strange that we always forget that necessity is the root of innovation. When we can’t rely on Big Government or Big Business, inventors make it on their own with really mad ideas. Even still, the dichotomy between Government and Business—just as real of a debate then as it is now—is a false one because being anti-government is most definitely not pro-business. The two behemoths work best in partnership and when little guys find their place in the space between the two. It’s sad that the current public debate has been debased and simplified so much that people actually think that being against the government helps business when so many of our innovations (electrification and broadband Internet are the first to come to mind) come from the great partnership between government and business, though surely there is a time when government needs to get out of the way and let business do its job. After sparking the innovation with research grants and the like, because businesses have a hard time working on their own when it comes to innovating for the long term or for longer out than the reporting of next quarter’s operating results, government needs to find a position that doesn’t stifle innovation. It’s also curious that Tesla and Edison operated in this strange space between Big Government and Big Business that was widened when both behemoths were failing. (But then Edison became Big Business and Tesla joined Westinghouse who became Big Business.)

Thinking about our geek/non-geek dichotomy, on the geek spectrum Steve Jobs falls into the non-geek area (but of course with a lot of geek creds). Like Edison, as a non-geek (he couldn’t program), a businessman first, asshole, his lack of geekiness in a milieu of geeks (computer programmers), combined with his innate business acumen and even his tendency to be an asshole, were what helped him to create great products that benefit society.

 Jobs pays homage to Edwin Land of Polaroid who made reference to the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences, which represents the San Francisco Bay Area of Jobs’s time, where you have engineers at Ames and the legendary Stanford Engineering Department but you also have a rich music and cultural scene that inspired creative thought and was really pushing boundaries. Jobs’s greatest contribution to world history was that he obsessed over being at the nexuses of sciences and the humanities, technology and liberal arts, commodities and art. And nobody capitalized on this important intersection more than Jobs, as the iPod perfectly exemplifies, and only Da Vinci did it as beautifully.

Not an engineering geek per se, what Jobs excelled at was obsessing over a product to the point where he made the product truly meaningful to human beings. Jobs’s father, a mechanic and hobbyist cabinet maker, taught him that you have to build the back of cabinets right even though you don’t see them, a classic wood worker’s mantra. This lesson from his father isn’t surprising given Jobs’s attention to detail on products. 

Having grown up in the Bay Area, I deeply relate to Jobs’s obsession with the elegant design simplicity of Eichler homes (Eichlers are the little details I really miss about home)—clean modernism made for the masses of engineers, doctors and professors, condensed along the 280 corridor, particularly in the South Bay Area. In many ways, the simplicity of Eichler homes became a model for the iPod and the first Mac. 

Working for a powering solutions company that makes power supplies for broadband applications, I appreciated Jobs’s obsession with power supplies as a way to improve product and the power supplies’ very importance in how Jobs innovated computing. Geeks like Wozniak paid little attention to the analog and very mundane power supply, but Jobs, because he was obsessed with detail, obsessed over the power supply in the Apple II. In particular he wanted to provide power in a way that would allow the Apple II to go without a fan, and this lack of fans is something that characterizes Apple products to this day. The less is better mantra makes Jobs’s products more useful. Jobs dropped by Atari where he used to work and visited Rod Holt, a chain-smoking Marxist who turned Jobs onto power supplies like those used in oscilloscopes, which instead of switching power on or off 60 times per second, switched power thousands of times in a second, allowing it to store power for a longer time and release less heat as a bi-product. Hence, Apple’s fan-less products created fans of efficient and beautiful products.

 For Jobs, packaging was key and he knew how to package from the get-go. Wozniak deserves the credit for the design of the Apple computer’s clean circuit board and related operating software, which was one of the era’s great feats of solo invention. But Jobs was the one who integrated Wozniak’s boards into a friendly package, from the power supply to the sleek case. He also created the company that sprang up around Wozniak’s machines while Wozniak was more like a goofy geek who just wanted everybody to have fun and not get caught up in Jobs’s tirades or the idea of making a profit from the enterprise. Noble but naïve ideas, but the world is better because Jobs promoted products with unique packaging.

 The day Jobs got Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1979 to “open the kimono” and show him what Xerox’s West Coast skunk works division was working on was a historic day that put Apple on the map. Jobs instantly recognized that PARC was sitting on a gold mine and “borrowed” so many ideas that PARC was working on, like a GUI with a bitmapped screen and the mouse. Per Picasso: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” The difference is artists know how to package their theft well.

When people complain about Apple products, they complain about their tight integration and the notion that the products are packaged too well, as if it were a bad thing. It wasn’t as if Jobs just stole PARC’s mouse to commercialize it. He took an entirely theoretical idea with little to no practical application and made it user friendly. PARC’s mouse couldn’t drag items around on the screen and really couldn’t be used for anything practical when Jobs first saw it.

Jobs’s team ran with the desktop metaphor theorized by PARC and transformed it into virtual reality by allowing the user to directly touch, manipulate, drag, and relocate desktop icons. Using complex coding, they made regions in which windows could overlap each other, something that we take for granted now but was a big deal in its time. What makes Apple products is the tight vertical integration between application software, operating system and hardware device. Jobs was all about control and the closed system that Jobs championed is anti-hacker, anti-free spirit and against some of the espoused ideas of his 60s ideals. No time in our history represents such strange contradictions.

But Jobs was a man of many contradictions and that he could stand in between these contradictions is what made his ideas so innovative. As Walter Isaacson, author of his biography points out: Jobs “was an antimaterialistic hippie who capitalized on the inventions of a friend who wanted to give them away for free, and he was a Zen devotee who made a pilgrimage to India and then decided that his calling was to create a business. And yet somehow these attitudes seemed to weave together rather than conflict.” Once again, here we are back at the idea of false dichotomies and the notion that innovation happens in the gray areas.

In his dedication to tight integration, Jobs was so strong-willed that he didn’t want his creations mutated by unworthy programmers. As ZDNet’s editor Dan Farber said, tinkering with Jobs’s products “would be as if someone off the street added some brush strokes to a Picasso painting or changed the lyrics to a Dylan song.” Jobs instituted such practices as designing a case so that it couldn’t be opened with a screwdriver just to keep people from tinkering.

One thing I learned from reading about Jobs’s life was that we have to let go of the notion that for Apple to win Microsoft has to lose and the false dichotomy between Microsoft and Apple, and nowadays it’s Apple versus Google. Jobs and Bill Gates were tighter as friends and collaborators than I would have imagined. One of Jobs’s more humble moments comes when he convinced Gates to still design software for the Mac and got an investment from Microsoft in Apple: “Bill, thank you for your support of this company. I think the world’s a better place for it.” And it’s true that these 2 very different philosophies work better for everybody both when they’re competing and working in harmony at the same time in a sort of collaborative competition.

The Open and fragmented versus Closed and integrated question when it comes to operating systems and computing products will be a perennial one, but I’m a believer that the answer is always both. Advancement of humankind by putting the best tools in our hands only happens when we utilize the advantages of both these competing paradigms and what they have to teach us. The tidy user experience, unified field theory, a testament to Job’s control and belief in simplicity and unity doesn’t allow the tinkering and customizing a product might need for certain applications that a Gates-philosophy product would give us. The answer is always both, and both Jobs and Gates came to that conclusion in a 3-hour discussion they had near Jobs’s death after Gates walked through Jobs’s back gate. What surprises, even more than Jobs keeping a rather simple house instead of a mansion, just allowing Gates to walk in through the back door, is the deep friendship the two had, and the (dare I say it) heart-warming discussions the 2 purported adversaries had. 

Just like we have a Jobs because we had a Gates pushing him, and vice versa (coincidentally they were born in the same year), we have a Tesla because we had an Edison pushing him.

Much has been made of Edison not having invented the light bulb, an urban myth commonly repeated in polite conversation because nobody can think of the person who did. Let’s credit a number of scientists and inventors who either worked in unison or borrowed each others’ ideas in a spirit of collaborative competition, which also marks Tesla and Edison’s divisive but productive rivalry. In the end, Edison was the first to make a commercially practical incandescent light and the first to market the light bulb to households, but much credit must be given to his predecessors.

Edison was strong at promoting his inventions. Tesla worked for a time as a ditch digger because he could not convince others of the worthiness of his AC inventions while Edison furthered his campaign against AC. Tesla’s AC eventually won out in its time but there are a number of advantages to DC in certain applications: safer low voltage operation, increased efficiency, seamless transfer, use in electronics and battery applications. The competitive collaboration, because their lives did touch, though not usually in friendly ways, was what made innovation happen in power.

While Jobs found use for other people’s inventions, Tesla sometimes suffered when he experimented without thought for use of his inventions, which isn’t really bad, but just made it harder for him. Jobs made the important contribution of making technology more than just technology for technology’s sake but for real and practical use. Tesla, though genius, had a hard time crossing the dichotomy and finding the middle grounds between technology/invention/art and mundane human tasks whereas Jobs succeeded when he got that very subtle notion of not being a programmer/technologist or really a “true” businessman, but understanding the importance of being at the nexus between the two where creativity happens.

In the end, we have to let go of false dichotomies, which doesn’t mean we don’t fight for our ideals (which all of these innovators did). We just have to know when to concede and where to find the middle ground that is really meaningful. It’s hard work, but somebody’s gotta do it.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

The title of Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is so great that this review/reflection/summary of the novel will have no other name. 

As the title suggests, there are 2 stories that slowly but deliberately coalesce, one about a hard-boiled wonderland in a semi-futuristic Tokyo (and what Tokyo wouldn’t be futuristic for a Western American?) and the other about the End of the World, creation of the main character’s consciousness, a strange world where people seem to live eternally but without mind and without shadow. 

The End of the World imagined by the main character/narrator is not unlike a voyage I once took to the end of the world: Finisterre, Spain, which for a long time was literally the end of the known world for Europeans at this most northwestern point of the Iberian Peninsula. Prior to Columbus’s sailing for the New World, one would look out from a viewpoint and could only imagine a deep dark space filled with monsters of the unknown beyond the horizon. This not knowing, this battle with the unknown, eternal, but in a way peaceful, because deliberately there is a peace in not knowing, is like Murakami’s End of the World. “There is no beyond,” the librarian at the End of the World says to our protagonist. “Did you not know? We are at the End of the World. We are here forever.” 

Our protagonist’s job at the End of the World is to read Old Dreams that come in the skulls of unicorns that the Librarian hands him ad nauseam until his job is “finished.” 

Our protagonist in the Tokyo of the Hard-Boiled Wonderland, whose consciousness is creating this End of the World, is a Calcutec who shuffles information and his shuffling password is “End of the World.” And we begin his story wandering through an infinite labyrinth of hallways—one imagines an MC Escher painting— in a skyscraper that seems to have no end and through a waterfall to the laboratory of an old Professor, who is the mad scientist responsible for rearranging our protagonist’s consciousness so that he can shuffle. In a mad experiment, Calcutecs, shufflers of information, maintain the sanctity of information, transferring it through the tubes of thought.

In his Calcutec training, our protagonist is told by the System: 

After a certain age—our calculations put it at twenty-eight years—human beings rarely experience alterations in the overall configuration of their consciousness. What is commonly referred to as self-improvement or conscious change hardly even scratches the surface. Your ‘End of the World’ core consciousness will continue to function, unaffected, until you take your last breath […] All efforts of   reason and analysis are, in a word, like trying to slice through a watermelon with sewing needles. They may leave marks on the outer rind, but the fruity pulp will remain perpetually out of reach. Hence, we separate the rind from the pulp. Of course, there are idle souls out there who seem to enjoy just nibbling away on the rind. In view of all contingencies, we must protect your password-drama, isolating it from any superficial turbulence, the tides of your outer consciousness. Suppose we were to say to you, your End of the World is inhered with such, such, and such elements. It would be like peeling away the rind of the watermelon for you. The temptation would be irresistible: you would stick your fingers into the pulp and muck it up. And in no time, the hermetic extractability of our password-drama would be forfeited. Poof! You would no longer be able to shuffle.

This whole description of shuffling and password-drama seems like a strange metaphor for being a worker bee in our current Information Age, shuffling through data on spreadsheets or in the infinite library and parallel universe unto itself, the Internet.

The mind goes when your shadow dies in the strange dimension that exists in our protagonist’s consciousness at the End of the World. When this happens, the shadow dying, the mind won’t matter, according to the Colonel who shares a room with our protagonist at the End of the World. “It will go, and with it goes all sense of loss, all sorrow. Nor will love matter. Only living will remain. Undisturbed, peaceful living.” Here is life’s great dilemma in a nutshell. We want peace but we only get peace when we are at war, struggling with life’s big ideas. It would be nice to not have a mind. Indeed, maybe peaceful. The mind is imperfect, “but it leaves traces. And we can follow those traces, like footsteps in the snow.” But where do they lead? To oneself. “That’s what the mind is. Without the mind, nothing leads anywhere.” The fear of losing oneself or one’s mind when the shadow dies elicits the question of eternality. And belief. Because “to believe something, whatever it might be, is the doing of the mind […] When you say you believe, you allow the possibility of disappointment. And from disappointment or betrayal, there may come despair. Such is the the way of the mind.” Which puts us in a strange position. Do we choose eternality, peace, and not having a mind? Or do we choose life and all of the inherent problems it presents? 

The End of the World is a visualization, a mapping of the mind, its core consciousness. As the protagonist creates memories, he’s creating a parallel world. Professor: “The best musicians transpose consciousness into sound, painters do the same for color and shape. Mental phenomena are the stuff writers make into novels. It’s the same basic logic. Of course, as encephalodigital conversion, it doesn’t represent an accurate mappin’, but viewin’ an accurate, random succession of images didn’t much help us either.” It would be amazing to transpose our minds into a world that others can see and hear, and this is what great art does.

The idea of shuffling shows the mind as a black box. As the Professor informs us: “Even without you knowin’, you function as yourself. That’s your black box. In other words, we all carry around this great unexplored ‘elephant graveyard’ inside us. Outer space aside, this is truly humanity’s last terra incognita.” The protagonist of the Hard-Boiled Wonderland thus becomes part of an information warfare as in his shuffling he carries the Professor’s data from experiments. The Calcutecs and the Semiotecs are at war and our protagonist’s mind is the booty, but the Calcutecs and Semiotecs are two sides of the same coin. One protects information while the other steals, and they’re like the snake that is constantly biting off its tail. Not unlike the debate we have today with our information, privacy and the NSA and Wiki-Leaks and everything in between. We want privacy but we choose a form of communication that puts our lives into a strangely permanent universe, preserving it for posterity and for everybody to see, if they can just get through a few clicks of a password-drama.

The Library of Babel

The Internet, the End of the World, is this endless circle of data, not unlike Borges’s ficción “The Library of Babel.” With the great power that the Internet bestows upon us comes great responsibility and great questions: Who owns this information? Who owns information? Does it really matter? Can you really own it? The Chinese don’t seem to think that you can own Intellectual Property, and they have a really strong point there, because you can avoid the drama of having your information stolen or having your privacy infringed upon. Because, really, Who owns information? Does privacy exist? Which is why so many open source systems seem to be taking off even in the West. You can avoid the whole drama of having your information stolen by making every piece of data “open” and forgetting this whole notion of privacy, which really was a fiction anyway. The information warfare continues, though, as information is the new gold in our Gold Rush. 

What we get in Murakami’s novel is a strange, complex, but really fun theorization of the mind and a look at life in the Information Age, and is highly recommended for those who love having their minds transported to other dimensions. 

Just Outside of Outer Mongolia: Paul Pena and Tuvan Throat Singing

I’m not one to repeat watching a documentary but, though the filmmaking process was kinda shoddy and unprofessional, Genghis Blues is right up my alley and for the second time in two viewings it brought me to tears.

 

The poster for Genghis Blues

The premise of Genghis Blues is the journey of blues man Paul Pena to Tannu Tuva after he learns the techniques of Tuvan throat singing, hearing it come in on a Moscow radio station on his shortwave radio but, like any great story, goes a lot deeper than that and hits me at an intersection of a number of my interests.

Firstly, the documentary strikes at probably one of my hugest passions: Music. Paul Pena was an underappreciated San Francisco bluesman who played with T-Bone Walker’s band and opened for the Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Band, and is probably most famous for writing “Jet Airliner,” made popular by the Steve Miller Band. He only really made 2 albums, the most famous being New Train, which has an upbeat barbecue rock sound perfect for happy picnics. Pena, though, could play a sophisticated blues infused with the knowledge of Jazz scales, and it’s tweaked a little bit. Just how I like it.

What blew me away about the story told in the documentary is Pena’s enormous effort and passion put into learning not only Tuvan throat singing but learning the Tuvan language. If you’ve never heard of Tannu Tuva, it’s just outside of Outer Mongolia and was only a recognized country between 1921 and 1944, after which it was swallowed by the Soviet Union, and is now part of the Russian Federation. Like any country engulfed by an empire, its language, culture and traditions are threatened by extinction, a fact made starker by the Tuvans’ nomadic tendencies, which make it difficult to exist in our current world.

Tuvan throatsinging utilizes the art of hitting up to 3 notes at a single time in complicated overtones and strange pitches and harmonies, unrecognizable by the western musical language. Sonically, hearing the singing is like visiting another dimension. At one of the last Grateful Dead shows I went to, I was able to hear the Gyuto Order of Tibetan monks chant with their overtone chordal chant style of singing. And though it wouldn’t be something I’d want to listen to for more than a half hour, hearing otherworldly voices with 25,000 people was an extremely powerful experience. The Tuvan throat singing is also powerful but, in many cases, it’s just one singer who is making these strange sounds and the tones that the Tuvans can achieve are even much wilder.

Secondly, the movie hit me at my second biggest passion: Travel. Paul Pena is the perfect traveler. Pena is such a huge bear of a man and emanates an enormous warmth and kindness. Paul’s character is one that the Tuvans immediately gravitate toward because of his generous spirit. Pena is completely blind and has to be led around through the strange country by a wonderfully friendly and adventurous Tuvan guide, and you can see the strong bond that develops between the two in their travels. It must be so wild and difficult to travel through such a strange country in a world in which people get 95% of the information about their surroundings through their eyes.

 

Pena and Kongar-ol Ondar on a river, the subject most common to Tuvan throat singing songs

Tuva is about as strange as it comes in the world of travel. At a topical glance, the wild steppes don’t look too much different than Montana, but clearly we are in another world when we hear the strange languages and see the customs of the nomadic Tuvan people, who are made up of Uyghurs, Turks, Huns and other ethnics groups. It’s another time’s forgotten space, and produces a feeling I experience when I ponder the central steppes of Asia. If you’ve ever read Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, you know what I’m writing about. There is just something so otherworldly that it becomes almost like another planet. One imagines a world from a science fiction film the 1950s, but just a bit more weird.

Pena’s humility is such that people know that he is genuinely blown away that the Tuvans find him to be such an excellent throat singer, and it’s amazing that he has such deep appreciation for this random far flung place. The Tuvans respect his genuine passion for the music and the place because he genuinely respects them. This mutual respect is real and powerful.

 

The friendship develops between Pena and Kongar-ol Ondar, master Tuvan throat singer

Pena is versatile as a musician—his great ears are what allow him to learn both the Tuvan language and the strange singing style. I’m no expert in Tuvan throat singing, but it’s clear that Pena gets all of the little nuances that make it unique, and that is why he wins the throat singing contest. There’s something about his spontaneous demeanor, one that is so essential for a musician who works in improvisatory music styles, and this spontaneity also makes him a great traveler. He doesn’t break stride when his guitar string breaks on stage and he is handed a traditional Tuvan instrument that he plays as if he was born with it in his hands.

Pena’s generous spirit of adventure gave me deep homesickness for the San Francisco Bay Area, where people are so open to new experiences and different kinds of people.

Advice to College Students

I recently attended a Business Summit at Western Washington University, a school where I have been both an instructor and an MBA graduate. One of the discussions was on how students can go out and get jobs, an important discussion, especially in a time when it’s difficult to find jobs, and it made me pause a moment and think about what I would say to students nearing graduation. Here is a draft that I hope to re-visit and edit as I learn more, and I’m still working on my advice to myself, too:

Business is about relationships and solving problems.

Because business is about relationships and solving problems, focus on clearly communicating and looking for problems to solve as a way to start your day. Every great innovation starts with solving a problem. What good does it do to solve a problem and not be able to communicate the solution? In college, the best way to develop communication and problem solving skills is through practice, and you have plenty of opportunity to practice where the stakes won’t be quite as high as they will be post-college. So go out and practice!

To better communicate, assume the person you’re talking to doesn’t live in your world. Practice empathy by walking through a situation from another person’s perspective. Then, in your communications, avoid jargon and pronouns. Too often I see people entrenched in work who forget that other people are not in their worlds. The most successful people around me can communicate very clearly the complex world within which they live without intimidating their audience but also in a way that projects useful knowledge.

At Western, particularly in the College of Business and Economics, but in other schools, too, you have a great opportunity to engage with the so-called real world. And you should do that every time you get a chance. Do projects with local organizations, do internships, join clubs, participate in activities, especially those totally unrelated to business, and make sure to have an offline presence.

 At the marketing board meeting, a great deal of attention was paid to having an online presence. Great advice. Make a polished LinkedIn profile that is both professional and unique.Write a blog (only if you have something meaningful to say).  But in the professional world, the most important things happen in person. There are loads of techie start-ups that build apps and do fun digital stuff like that, and certainly having an “online presence” is essential for getting those jobs. But the reality is that most jobs are not digital or based on 140-character statements. There is no Google or Apple without the back-up power supplies that we make at the company where I currently work. We make completely unsexy products and though we have a Facebook page and a Twitter account (essential even for a company like us!), the products we make are not sold via Facebook or even via the web. They are sold by making deep and meaningful relationships with the people with whom we work. We know their names, their children’s names, we know if they like wine with dinner, or if they look forward to seeing their dog when they come home. And we learn these things not by reading their blogs, but by spending time with them face to face, where so much more can be communicated than by email, blog, phone or fax. It also bears remembering that most companies are not Google or Apple and not all digital. There are more companies, like where I work, for example, that make the basic, totally unsexy, but absolutely essential stuff we need in order to enjoy the Facebooks and the iTunes, etc., and these sorts of companies stick around a lot longer than the “hot” companies. Unless you’re totally set on working for a techie start-up, prepare yourself for making deep and meaningful relationships with people in person.

My point being: Although you need to have an online presence, don’t forget how to relate to people in person, where it’s even more important (even if you do work for a techie company). Working with people takes a lot of practice. Very few are the people for whom interacting with others comes easy. Most of us, like myself, a true introvert, need to practice. And in my experience, even those who are good at it, need to practice and reevaluate the message they are communicating to others. As my great Branding professor Ann Stone famously says: “Everything communicates.”

Master the meeting. A meeting should be more than a catch-up on where you’re at and what you’re doing. Time for meetings can be maximized when you focus on collaborating on new ideas. Which means even more preparation on being coherent when talking about where you’re at and what you’re doing.

Integrity. Integrity. Integrity. If you’ve got it, nothing else matters. If you don’t, well nothing else matters either. The world is small. It’s amazing how things come back to you, so just remember that the world is small and every touch you have with somebody else will have an impact.

Never send an email or post a Facebook status that you wouldn’t share with your mom, your boss, or the Supreme Court. Assume an email will be read by a court. Your email is owned by your company, anyway. And let’s be real. Privacy is a very recently invented and, dare I say it, artificial phenomenon. If you’ve lived in a small town or, even when I lived in Silicon Valley, where it’s like “Cheers” and  everybody knows your name, you know what I’m talking about. If you think you have privacy, either on your email, your social media, or in your offline life, you’re completely deluded and live in fantasy world that never existed and most likely never will. Bottom Line: Don’t be a dick. Or, don’t be a dick and think you’ll get away with it.

Be like Lincoln and master the art writing a memo or an email that you never send, especially when tempers are involved (see my post on Management Lessons from Lincoln).

Once you’re out of college, your grades don’t matter. Everybody starts tabula rasa. It’s amazing to see who rises to the top and how they rise to the top when you remember they were in school. A lot of those ones who got the good grades kinda disappear, and some of the ones who hated school start ruling the world.

I don’t regret for one second the time I spent not obsessing about my grades; it’s the time I didn't spend doing activities that would have differentiated me that I regret. It’s all about character. The best recommendation letter I ever wrote was for a student who got a B in my class. There’s a huge difference between being smart and being wise. Straight-A Ivy Leaguers are a dime a dozen, but students that are wise, have integrity, and are doing useful and interesting things are the rare charm that make being an educator worth all the sacrifice.  

Be reliable. Follow through. Even if it's the littlest thing. It's amazing how much relationship capital you can gain by following through with what you say you're going to do. Find a mentor. In fact, find multiple mentors whose views counter each other. See who you respect and why you respect them by observing what they do and pick their brains. Once you’ve figured out what you need to figure out, be a mentor.

Two of the most famous CEOs of our time are famously drop outs (Steve Jobs and Bill Gates), and it’s tempting to think: “Hey I didn’t learn anything in my academic career. Why don’t I drop out like they did?” This thought is terribly misguided. First of all, Jobs and Gates are meteors, titans that come along once in every 8 billion chances and they lived in a very unique milieu in which their sort of success was possible. I’ll go out on a limb here and state that there will never be CEOs quite like Jobs or Gates ever again.

I can’t repeat it enough: Do not look for direct knowledge at the university. There are some classes I took (Econ, for example) that at the time seemed entirely too theoretical. And even now, I can’t think of any direct use of Econ that I’ve done in my professional life, but having a good understanding of econ helps me to think like a more informed businessperson.  I can’t draw a quarter of the graphs I saw in econ classes, but because I’ve been exposed to them, I can understand the business fundamentals. 

Even if you’re not interested in politics, we live in a reality in which everything revolves around politics, and I’m referring not only to governmental politics but to interpersonal politics. Every company, organization, and institution has “politics” and a lot more than is detectable at first glance. The best advice I’ve heard about “office politics” comes from my current boss: When you are confronted with “politics” during difficult decision processes at the workplace, make sure you are guided by the tenet that you should always put the company first. Too often people are guided by putting themselves first, which might work out well in the short term, and certainly people make careers out of looking out for themselves first. Even if looking out for yourself first were to make you financially successful, is that how you want to be remembered? When you put the company first, you are ensuring that you are doing what the company is paying you to do.

Universities have a duty to prepare students not only for jobs, but for meaningful work and to be citizens that make valuable contributions to society. As you go through your academic career, take advantage of getting as much career advice as you can. I regret not doing this as an undergrad and felt woefully unprepared hitting the job market. But remember that universities shouldn’t teach you how to get jobs or even how to do things, but how to learn and think through decisions and then communicate these decisions. If you want to learn how to do things, go to a trade school or do an online course. There are plenty of online courses out there and they’re a lot cheaper than a four-year degree and in most cases they’re set up to more efficiently teach someone how to do a specific thing.

Too many of my students misunderstand this subtle distinction of learning how to do things versus learning how to learn. As a former language instructor, I’ll be the first to admit that there are much more efficient ways to learn how to speak a language than attend a language class. Language classes don’t teach students how to speak a language but how to learn to communicate in another language with a different group of people. A student leaving my class without knowing how to conjugate an imperfect subjunctive verb never bothered me. Students who left my class without realizing that the world is a large and complex beast and that there are many ways of thinking and communicating would make me revise my teaching activities. The same thing should go for an accounting professor. If you don’t believe me, go take a class with Steve Senge at Western, which you should be doing anyway.

Don’t get caught up in the idea that your education will directly teach you how to specifically do things. There is a great debate in academia about how close a relationship it should have with the professional world. This, I believe, is a healthy debate. There is a great amount that academia could pay attention to what’s going on in professional circles in order to better prepare students for their futures and great business schools are successful when they foster this relationship between university and industry. College is not all about just getting a job. It’s about learning how to be a better human being. Hopefully you’re getting good electives that are stimulating you to think deeper and think deeper not just about your potential future in industry. It’s not just direct learning (“Wow! I know what a value proposition is now. I know what cost accounting is. I can do financial projections now using the good Professor Fewings model.”) Certainly I can get this information off of Wikipedia or with a few searches on Google without spending a ton of money on a college degree. Wikipedia breaks down just about every business concept I’ve learned in class sufficiently well. What you are getting from your four-year degree, and certainly should be getting from your good profs at a school like Western, is a framework for thinking. And that’s where your real benefit comes. I get stuck every day and I go to Google or Wikipedia and I can quickly refresh my memory. Fortunately, the framework has stuck with me, even though my amnesia makes it difficult to quickly remember concepts from class.

A college education teaches you not how to do things but how to think critically, read and communicate. I use the word “read” here knowing that millions of first graders know how to read, but a university should teach someone how to read through the bullshit (not just print but things like people's gestures and different communication styles), and then communicate in a way that doesn’t get mired down with confusion.

There’s also a cliché piece of advice that you hear from professors and parents and just about all well-meaning people who say that you should follow your passion. In my more substantive conversations with successful people, none have said that they followed their passion, and I’d like to clear up the follow-your-passion piece of advice by making it known that it is a myth. Jobs don’t give you passion. You give passion to your job. And this is a subtle but important distinction. Remember: Passion is more than just what you see in the movies. Passion is blood, sweat and tears. Fear is passion, too, though it is misguided passion. You have to be able to give passion to whatever it is you do, and a lot of that passion is blood, sweat, tears and fears. Passion doesn’t magically appear from nothing. Passion comes from determination, commitment and action.

In other words, don’t do what you’re passionate about or, even worse, look for a career that you’re passionate about or where you think you’ll find passion. Be passionate about what you do. If you’re doing something that doesn’t make you give passion to it, get out of it. But don’t look for something you’ll be passionate about. Find something that you will give passion to. As Leonardo da Vinci said, “People of accomplishment rarely sit back and let things happen to them. They go out and happen to things.”

Lastly, a word about success. There are plenty of rich people who aren’t successful. Being successful isn’t driving a certain type of car. You should be the only one who defines what success means to you. If success means driving a fancy car, then go for it. But there are a lot of other ways to be successful. Personally, I feel most successful when I can bike every day to work. I’m successful when I have time to hike and travel and spend time with those who are important to me. I’m successful when I can leave a positive touch with everybody that I come in contact with and when I look for win-win situations for the people and organizations that I care about.  But you should define success for yourself.

This is the Holy Grail: Sunshine Daydream; 8/27/72, Veneta, Oregon

This is the Holy Grail. Not just for admirers of the Grateful Dead. But for humanity.  Sunshine Daydream, the commercially released audio and video recordings from the 8/27/72 Veneta, Oregon Springfield Creamery Benefit show, captures the Dead doing what they do best: Putting on a party with a family atmosphere. The Springfield Creamery Benefit was billed as a picnic, and when you see the footage from that day, it was in many ways a gigantic picnic--kids running around having fun, adults dancing naked in a total state of bliss, and general good-natured outdoor afternoon fun. 

The show was also a benefit, not just for a struggling creamery, but for humanity (those 15-20,000 people lucky enough to bask in the sunshine of the day at the show and those of us lucky enough to rely on the ingenious recording and re-mastering techniques of the Dead family's magicians who were able to create such a faithful document to the day that we can listen to and enjoy today). Asked about doing benefit shows, Jerry Garcia said, “When we do them, it’s usually for our friends [...]. The benefit for us is to be able to give people music, that’s a benefit, that’s the real benefit that we can provide.” What a deep benefit the Grateful Dead have left us with their 2,300+ shows, many of which are available commercially or for free through taping networks and websites. I can’t count the number of times the Dead have made me feel blissful and remind me of just how beautiful this world is, and Sunshine Daydream just might be the pinnacle of that expression. 

Jerry Garcia with his Sunburst Strat in Veneta, Oregon

In a time of government shutdowns, another Garcia quote worth remembering is from a conversation with a Yale law professor: “I’ve always thought that the Grateful Dead should be sponsored by the government or something. It should be a public service, you know, and they should set us up to play at places that need to get high.” The happiness the band left with attendees, particularly at this show, was extraordinary. And even when we struggle with the budget, one wonders just how much better the world would be with happiness brought to us by a house band--Lord knows we need it.

8/27/1972, otherwise known as the Springfield Creamery Benefit, played at the Renaissance Grounds in Veneta, Oregon, on a improvised stage put together with trees fallen by the Merry Pranksters of Ken Kesey fame, is 3 hours of happiness and rightfully one of the top 5 most requested Dead shows. But listening to this recording made me reflect on just how wonderful 1972 was for the Dead. I’ve already spent considerable digital ink reflecting on just how wonderful 1973 was, but 1972 is just as extraordinary and sets the tone for ’73. 1972 has more of the bluesy Americana sound while ’73 is more about what I’ll call the space jazz. The difference might reside in Jerry switching from his Strat to the custom-made Wolf guitar, which gave his playing and the band’s sound a more jazzy feel. 

Jerry Garcia in 1972 with the 1957 Fender Stratocaster "Alligator" that Graham Nash gave him. He's using his Sunburst Strat in the Sunshine Daydream concert

I originally fell in love with the Dead listening to the original ’72 Europe recordings. I still consider many of the songs on that album to be the definitive versions-- “Jack Straw,” “Cumberland Blues,” and “Sugar Magnolia” stick out, but we could point to many nearly perfect songs from that album. After going through other recordings from 1972, the 9/21/1972 show from the Philly Spectrum, captured on DP 31, really sticks out. As a review from the time indicated: “On a smoggy, soggy evening, in a large, darkened concert hall, the Dead managed to take every member of the capacity audience (17,500 people) to the top of a mountain on a bright sunny day. From a troubled city to wide open country.” The Spectrum has moments that might eclipse those captured on Sunshine Daydream. The 37-minute “Dark Star”--> “Morning Dew” is absolutely extraordinary and might even beat the stellar “Dark Star” from Veneta, but Veneta has many other moments worth remembering. 

Garcia in '74 with the custom-made "Wolf," with a more jazzy sound

Another indispensable recording from 1972 is Hundred Year Hall from a magical night in Frankfurt, Germany. If Beethoven died before composing the 9th, we’d still have one of the greatest composers of all time, but with the 9th he gave us something that is truly out of this world, as if it were written by a non-human entity, some deity from another galaxy. That’s how I feel about the “Other One” from Hundred Year Hall. The album is great and then we get to this 36 minutes of sounds from another universe, a peak into the Dead at a creative pinnacle. Parts of it are almost unlistenable for the uninitiated, but at 19 minutes in, we get a Space Groove Phil laying down a vamp that will propel them far. At 21 minutes out they’re a million light years from Earth. One worries that they’ve lost the song. It then becomes almost totally unlistenable, even for the initiated, but it goes further and further into other dimensions. At 32 minutes, they’re doing this insane polyrhythmic wildness beyond tribal and incorporating it back into the melody of the song which kicks back in again. No sane person would listen to this but that’s why I’m OK with not being sane. And I think most Deadheads that are fans of the Dead’s improvisatory prowess will appreciate this jewel.

The Dead understood timing. A pinnacle moment with "Dark Star" played at sunset

What sticks out from Sunshine Daydream is the visual documentary from the show. Prior to making a film of the Dead, Garcia asked why would anyone want to see a movie of us. “We just stand there.” But there’s something striking about the loose, family atmosphere that the band create on stage. My wife and I were lucky enough to catch the film of the show on the big screen at the annual Deadhead Meet-up. The visuals really capture the mantra oft-repeated: “There is nothing like a Grateful Dead concert.” Besides images of the blissful Deadheads dancing, what sticks out from the show is Garcia’s picking on “Dark Star.” Technique-wise, Garcia had one of the best right hands that I can think of and his missing finger made his picking styles really unique. He truly was a banjo man playing an electric guitar and that made his sound so unique, so Americana. 

The loose atmosphere created on stage at Veneta, Oregon

There are clips of Garcia in the midst of some deep, profound, introspective and dazzling technical guitar licks that counterposes with a hippie hanging naked from a pole behind the stage, deep in a state of trance, totally mesmerized by the band’s playing, looking almost like Jesus hanging from the cross. This image says a lot about the band, Garcia, and the hippie movement, already in a state of decadence in 1972; yet, here on the Renaissance Fair Grounds in Oregon on this hot day, this was the time’s idealism at its most perfect state, a truly beautiful capturing of what was beautiful about the Deadheads. 

You can see the naked Jesus just above Garcia's left shoulder

I’m much more interested in the Dead’s music than in the scene that developed around the band, which unfortunately unraveled in a number of hypocrisies, but when it was good, it was really good. The Deadheads brought a warm environment, based on communal sharing, and a spirit that was genuinely driven to create a better world. At its worst, Jerry suffered the same fate that Jesus did: Too many of his followers misinterpreted the message and used it for evil rather than good. And evil isn’t really the right word here, but more of a misguided close-mindedness might hit closer. Which is also part of the naive experience that the spirituality of a Dead show or a religious experience can do to people.

The Veneta show could be any show from 1972, good but not any better from the year, until we get to the “China Cat Sunflower--->I Know You Rider,” in particular the bridge between “China Cat” and “Rider.” Phil starts the first song with a really loose and huge slide down his bass that gets the selection off on the right foot, but it’s Bobby’s “rhythm guitar solo,” a lead solo played by and like a rhythm guitarist that triggers Jerry’s virtuosity on a lead guitar solo that streams so smoothly and elegantly that it takes the listener to a far-off better place in only the way that the Grateful Dead can do. As drummer Mickey Hart said, the Dead aren’t in the music business per se, but the transportation business. Their music is the perfect traveling music--nomadic, wandering, deeply western in its looseness and themes of rambling gamblers and old West shoot outs. So far West that it goes East in its spacey mysticism. It moves and it moves the listener. The music transports the listener to other times and places. This “China-Rider” is just as good as it gets. I’ve always thought the 1972 versions of the selection were the best with the 1973 space jazz transition into the funkier, almost comic book-like or cartoonish, decadent “China-Riders” of 1974 were also profoundly amazing. 1972 is the year when it’s clear that Bobby can carry his weight. Fired at one point because he was always late on the chunk of his rhythm guitar playing, Bobby has slipped into his role and he starts leading the band at points. When the Dead as a whole are really on, it’s Bobby’s  playing that adds that extra spark.

The Veneta versions of “Bird Song” and “Playing in the Band” are definitive. “Playing in the Band” has become the soundtrack of the Adventure Buddies, what I call my wife, 2 dogs, and myself, and here the song is in its most adventurous incarnation. It’s almost as if it’s a game for the band to see how far they can take the song out as far as it can go into spooky spaciness and then somehow they bring it back and slowly work the melody back in and bring it back to the head. This really is the holy grail.  

The Veneta version of “Bertha” is lively and colorful. The images of the tie-dye shown during the movie will forever be ingrained in my head when I hear “Bertha;” they’re really done so well.  

In between selections, we get water reports (“save your water, it’s hot!”) and the report of a fire truck coming to spray water on the crowd in 100+ degree heat, which gets a huge rise from the crowd. We also get reports on lost kids and kids missing their parents. What’s special about a Dead show, which is really more an experience or a jubilee, the town dance, a spectacle, is that the Dead experience is all about a family atmosphere. 

The liner notes include the petition that Deadheads signed requesting that this show be released. Though now regarded as a legendary show, what’s truly spectacular is that this was just another show during that year. That similar enthusiasm, similar energy was brought by fans coming to the Renaissance Fair Grounds. But like several other shows from 1972, the 8/27/72 show stands out as one of the best shows the band ever played. It just might be the holy grail.

Drinking Forests and Walking Through Tea: The Importance of Drinking Real Tea and the Quest to Find It

There is a moment in Les Blank’s film documentary, All in This Tea, when German filmmaker Werner Herzog sips some tea and says that the experience is not unlike walking through a forest. He imagines a lush and verdant landscape where the tea takes him, and he says approvingly, “It's all in this tea.” This experience, of walking through a forest, is precisely what I try to replicate every time I drink quality tea, and there are certain teas that have helped me attain this calm, serene state, not unlike wandering through a damp forest after a rain and kicking up pungent leaves.  

Herzog’s poetic, tea-fueled description comes as a retort to the subject of the documentary, David Lee Hoffman, who says that we don’t have the vocabulary to describe tea, which is also deeply true. 

The documentary follows Hoffman, a tea importer from California by trade, in his quest for finding “real” tea to bring back to America. More than a tea importer, Hoffman is really a tea adventurer, a happy traveler that lived a nomadic existence in Asia during the 60s and 70s, just drinking tea all day with the people he came across, people like the Dalai Lama and nomadic shepherds of the Himalayas. 

Hoffman is also a visionary, an idealist, and a man on a mission to change the way we approach tea and food. Years ahead of the goofy “local,” “organic” foodie movement, which is really just a pretentious way of saying that you eat “real” food rather than food created in a sterile laboratory with ingredients barely recognizable by the average human being or harvested at such an extraordinarily large scale that the flavor has been bred out of them, Hoffman is passionate about the importance of earthworms in agriculture. 

It’s sad that most Americans don’t know what real tea is. Tea is pleasure. Tea is ritual. Tea is for welcoming guests. Tea is for sitting around and chatting. Tea is for relaxing. Most of tea is water, which is why you need good, clean water with which to make tea.

There is nothing wrong with Lipton tea bags, and I’m the first to order some iced tea at a restaurant, but tea is so much more than that. 

My tea obsession started when I grew tired of coffee. I’ve enjoyed (and still enjoy) coffee since I was probably 13 years old, and I like a wide range of coffee—dark roasted Colombian coffee, Turkish coffee, Vietnamese coffee, the light, delicate Kona coffee, or even mass-produced diner coffee—but there is a point when I realized that the energy coffee gives me is mainly jitters. I still like the jolt of a coffee every once in a while, but I appreciate the deeper, calmer energy of tea. I then started getting into green and oolong teas. My wife and are obsessed with a tea called Waterfall, a high mountain oolong tea that we get at Silk Road, a tea store in Victoria, BC, and the experience it approximates is not unlike coming across a hidden waterfall in a forest. I then went to China for a friend’s wedding and knew that I wanted to discover new teas. With my limited Chinese and still budding tea knowledge, I tried a tea called pu’erh, and it blew my mind. Fortunately, I had enough experience with tea that I wasn’t taken aback. Pu’erh isn’t for everybody. It is strong, complex, and isn’t easy to get a hold of at first. I bought a cake of pu’erh and brought it home, and I still had no idea how to properly prepare it, but my wife and I savored it every morning that we drank it, a special treat that was deeply important for us. 

Pu’erh is a fermented and oxidized tea that has been around since 700-900 AD or maybe even before, and comes in bricks, balls, and cakes. And pu’erh is perfect for aging. Like a cabernet, a pu’erh can be overwhelmingly strong when it is young, and then mellows with age, releasing a wonderful array of complexities, and can be great at 40-50 years old if stored properly.

Once I saw the beauty of pu’erh, I was hooked. We couldn’t find a tea store where we live that sold “real” pu’erh. Too many of the tea stores we went to sold these fruity, flavored teas, and most of the people we talked to didn’t know what I was talking about when I asked them about pu’erh. In a desperate quest to find good pu’erh, I found an herb store in Vancouver’s Chinatown and bought a pu’erh cake. I wasn’t sure of the quality. We walked around in Chinatown for the afternoon and just about made it back to our car when I spotted The Chinese Tea Shop. This is what we were looking for! 

There, Daniel Lui prepared gong fu cha pu’erh for us, and this was the beginning of a beautiful relationship. Gong fu cha means good skills tea making. Not a ceremony, like the Japanese tea ceremony, gong fu cha just means using the right skills to infuse a perfect cup of tea. What is important to remember is that every infusion, every cup of tea is different, and there are many variables to making a good cups of tea. When prepared correctly, you can get 15 or more infusions from a good pu’erh tea, and it changes, releasing new flavors and essences, so you can literally spend all afternoon drinking tea, feeling Zen-like, and having profound revelations while reading or writing, each infusion giving a slightly different flavor and layer of complexity.

Daniel waiting for the gongfu cha pu'erh tea to infuse at The Chinese Tea Shop

We try to visit Daniel Lui in his Chinese Tea Shop every few months to learn more and every time I sip down new teas that take me to other places. Daniel is generous with his knowledge and his enthusiasm for tea is contagious. He had a likely and willing counterpart in myself, as I had already loved tea when I met him, but he made me realize just how much more there is to discover about tea. And what a beautiful world it is. If you want to know more about tea, you need to see his website, which is an excellent source of tea knowledge.

There is a tremendous variety to teas that I have only begun to explore, as the world of tea is not unlike the world of wines, another world that you could easily spend entire lifetimes walking through. Like wine, what you taste, as Herzog poetically observed, is a terroir. When you taste a good tea, you taste the 10-day lifespan of the tea leaf and all of the weather it experienced. You can taste the fragrance of orchids that grew around an oolong. You can also taste the altitude of where the tea plant was located. For example, I really like a high mountain oolong. Like the winemaker’s art, one is observing the whole experience when drinking tea, which means taking in fragrance and color of the leaves. You are literally tasting the earth where the tea or wine grapes were raised. Like great wine or food experiences, drinking tea is also about creating and re-creating memory. You are drinking an essence of a time or a place.  

Lately, my favorite tea is a shou pu’erh. Shou pu’erh is the less common black version of pu’erh tea (most are green and known as sheng pu’erh). Low in caffeine, shou gives a calm, tranquil and transcendent energy that is perfect for rainy afternoons. My penchant for shou and obsession with it is not unlike my obsession for leather goods (like my belts and boots) and mushrooms. A fine shou tastes somewhat like how a very high quality leather smells or a freshly picked boletus, morel or chanterelle mushroom tastes after delicately sauteing it in a pan with nice olive oil or a creamy sauce. This is a flavor that I attempt to replicate at any moment that I can because, like walking through the forest, it is one of the pinnacle experiences of being on this planet and truly living. 

When I drink tea, it is like I am mushroom hunting or adventuring. I’m searching for a flavor, really an experience, that is almost unattainable.When you bring a wild mushroom into your kitchen, you’re bringing in the forest and you have to respect it. I do my best to always respect the tea as well. Which makes me worry because so many of the places in China where it is grown are threatened by environmental calamities. The soils are depleted. Nevertheless, the optimist in me hopes that tea is resilient. Some of the tea I drink comes from 800-year-old trees. 

In Russia, where mushroom hunting is an age old sacred pastime, parents tie bells on their children to keep them from getting lost. They say that when you walk through the forests during the mushroom season, you hear tinkling, as if the forest is full of fairies. There is something special and unique about tea that when you drink it, a forest comes alive, and it’s full of fairies searching for the pleasurable essences of forest, be it in mushrooms, kicked up leaves, or the taste of a 700-year-old tree that has seen the test of time to give great experiences. 

I imagine things like walking through a forest, 

leaves on the ground

And it just had rained but the rain has stopped.

It’s damp and you walk

And somehow

It’s All in This Tea.

Werner Herzog (upon sipping good tea)

Notes on Innovation: Looking at Bell Labs and Stella's Farm

Lesson 1: Change is inevitable.

Lesson 2: Change requires new thinking.

Lesson 3: An idea is just the beginning. Meaning that innovation is a long process and ideas are part of a larger network that I will delineate throughout this post, which is essentially a brief history of innovation, with a particular focus on  The Idea Factory, by John Gertner, a history of Bell Labs, and some notes on approaches to innovation in current organizations as learned in How Stella Saved the Farm by Chris Trimball and Vijay Govindarajan. Bell Labs operated in a different climate than we do now, but the lessons in innovation we learn from Bell Labs are still relevant.

What is innovation? The answer for Bell Labs was “better, cheaper or both.”

We shouldn’t underestimate the importance of Bell Labs as a lesson for innovation for companies in our current environment, despite the fact that the world has changed dramatically since Bell Labs’ heyday (1940s-70s). The engineers at Bell Labs invented the future in which we now live. Just about all of the tech world (the Apples, the Googles, the Microsofts) would not be possible without the work done at Bell Labs.

The Young Turks—the gifted group of innovators at Bell Labs—achieved this innovation by bridging a gap between the best science of the academy and the important applications that a modern society needed. In essence, this is what great tech companies do now.  

Bell Labs had a very simple formula based on 4 principles: 1) Technically competent management; 2) Researchers didn’t have to raise funds; 3) Research on one topic or system could be and was supported for years (e.g., cellular telephony and underseas cables); 4) Research could be terminated without damning the researchers. Unfortunately, companies nowadays don’t have the luxury to be as foresighted as Bell Labs and think in the long term. Current research, too often, is grounded in the short term, out of necessity and lack of prolonged funding.

The question then becomes: Where do you look for innovation?

Bell Labs operated under the premise that there are plenty of good ideas; what they were looking for was good problems.

The Bell Labs Campus

So, how do you tackle problems?

Very scientifically.

There are several laws that will help us in our quest for tackling problems through innovation:

Law 1- Put learning first and profits second. Learning isn’t just about reading and investigating happenstance. Learning has to be done through disciplined experimentation. Be scientific. Start by stating a hypothesis. Predict what will happen. Measure the results. Assess the lessons learned by comparing predictions to outcomes.

Law 2- Inside a big experiment, you will find many little ones. You have to gather evidence to validate each one.

Law 3- An innovation leader’s job is to execute a disciplined experiment.

To execute a disciplined experiment, an innovation leader’s plan should start by stating a clear hypothesis. Then, clearly identify the most critical unknowns (of which there should be many; if not, start over). Plan, analyze results, decipher lessons, and then tweak a bit. Measure as many results as possible. But then focus on one metric that becomes your obsession, the one that you think most closely relates to your bottom line or whatever it is you’re trying to achieve (there’s still the element of learning first, profits second). In 3 months or so, reevaluate. Is this metric still the one most closely associated with your objective?

Everybody must understand the assumptions, lest you want to feel the pangs of being thought of as the mad scientist pissing money down the drain. One of the biggest obstacles to innovation is what has become known as the Innovator’s dilemma: It’s easier to achieve incremental improvements and meet quarterly earnings goals, while it’s much more difficult to fund research on the more interesting ideas that may destroy your business if their product becomes obsolete.

The other problem we have in tackling problems with innovation is a terrible habit of shoving new ideas into old paradigms. Take, for example, Bell Labs’ failure with the picture phone in the 1960s. We can all recognize the picture phone today in our Skype or FaceTime, but what’s crazy is that the concept and the technology for a picture phone existed in the 70s. And what’s crazier is that the PicturePhone as a business failed!

The picture phone failed because of an inability to consider Metcalfe’s Law, which states: The larger the network, the higher the value it has for its users. Marketing studies told Bell Labs that the picture phone would be wildly successful. Could you imagine being a respondent to their survey? It’s like a telephone, but you can see your loved one at the other end of the line. Yes! Of course, I’m interested!

Here's the Picture Phone. Pretty cool, huh?

Marketing studies only tell you something about the demand for products that already exist. Later, Bell Labs measured a tremendous lack of enthusiasm for mobile telephony when it was being researched in the early 1970s. People couldn’t quite imagine what mobile telephony would look like. The difference between this lack of enthusiasm for mobile telephony and an outpouring of enthusiasm for picture phones prior to the launch of the PicturePhone has to do with people not knowing what Mobile telephony would look like. The difference also resides in how Bell Labs tried to fit their ideas into the paradigm in which they existed.

You have to create a new paradigm.

2 great obstacles that many organizations face in their quest for innovation, which is in essence their quest for existence, are: 1) the great divide between sales and engineering (and I’m lumping everybody who might fit into these two big departments, marketing for the former, for example, and project managers for the latter); and 2) meetings and decisions are reactive rather than focusing on what is important. In other words, meetings become a place where everybody shares what they are doing and where they are at rather than a space in which colleagues can gather and work together on a problem.

One of my takeaways from reading about Bell Labs was the tremendous importance of serendipitous encounters with people outside a researcher’s area of expertise. The Bell Labs campus was designed for these serendipitous encounters to take place. People were forced to get out of their silos and exchange ideas, even ideas totally unrelated to the actual “business;” these non-germane ideas were many times the ideas that started off great world-changing projects. Having people totally unrelated to your Department observe your Department’s processes then becomes profoundly enlightening because these people observe the company’s interactions with customers and the company’s products in different ways. Their insights can be crucial, which explains the success behind Kaizen workshops at organizations like Toyota and cross-functional “brown bag” lunches in which employees can learn about another aspect of the company and what other people are working on.      

The other element of Bell Labs, which was without a doubt the most important element for sparking innovation, was people. Starting with Mervin Kelly, president during the glory years, Bell Labs had the ultimate “manager.” Kelly’s sense of mission and his ability to institutionalize the process of innovation so effectively define the processes of innovation at Bell Labs. Kelly believed that an “institute of creative technology” needed a critical mass of talented scientists — whom he housed in a single building, once again emphasizing the importance of serendipitous encounters for ideas— and he gave his researchers the time to pursue their own investigations “sometimes without concrete goals, for years on end.”

Then we have Claude Shannon, who is the visionary. In many ways, Shannon’s visions were more important and have greater effect on our lives than those of Steve Jobs, the visionary we most celebrate nowadays. Shannon was the informationist, the theorist behind binary code, and the one to envision an information network that would wrap the world like “the biological systems of a man’s brain and nervous system.” He was also behind the digital computer and digital circuit design. Clearly, there would be no Google without Shannon.

Somewhere between Shannon (the genius) and Kelly (the manager) we have John R. Pierce, the Instigator, whose job was to wrest excellence out of places where it might fall short. He identified promising lines of research by making connections between staff members. Having a Pierce, an Instigator, is precisely what can help solve the 2 obstacles to organizations trying to achieve innovation that I identified above. A Pierce can break down silos, though breaking down institutions is difficult for a single person, and a Pierce can make meetings meaningful by knowing how to make combinations of people to make great projects.

Bell Labs Corridor

An innovative company like W.L. Gore, makers of Gore-Tex and probably the most famously “flat” organization, exemplifies taking an Instigator’s role even further by creating a lattice with self-managed teams. Bill Gore conceived of the company as a lattice connecting every individual in the organization to each other, an informal network of relationships that sparks cross-functional collaboration and allows information to flow freely. Because not only do we need to have serendipitous encounters to spark creativity, information should flow freely. Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From, notes just how important coffee houses, where ideas are exchanged, are to innovation in this video. And in his description, we learn that an idea isn’t just a single Eureka moment but a network, once again emphasizing that an idea doesn’t stand alone, but only becomes meaningful when it solves a problem and is inserted into a new paradigm in which it fits.

When a company decides to be innovative, it typically assigns one division under one leader to just make innovation “happen,” which is a course for disaster. It’s important that a dedicated team work on activities that are outside the specialized capabilities of the current organization and that this team is built up as if it were an entirely different company and measured by different standards. The leader of this team—because he or she is leading an experiment that is bound to create conflicts with the existing organization—should be measured not necessarily on profits (because learning should be more important with this innovative new team) but on how well he or she executes a disciplined experiment.

At the end of the day, innovation is like a box of Legos. Lego means something like “play well” in Danish, while in Latin it means “I study” or “I put together.” Serendipitous encounters, instigators, free-flowing information, and scientific and disciplined experimentation are what it takes to innovate. In essence, playing well and putting together. Innovation is about making things cheaper and better. It also requires creativity. When I was a kid, I used to think that creatives are the types that when they speak rainbows and unicorns came out of their mouths. Creativity is really about asking the tiny little questions that can change a process just enough to make it better or cheaper. Sometimes with big results. Creativity also requires structure to which everybody can relate. A story structure is one of the most universal concepts that exists. A good marketer is a good storyteller. And a good storyteller works using a structure.With a good structure, a story line develops. When a story line develops, people can see themselves in it. Great companies make a story in which we can see ourselves and want to participate.

Management Lessons from Abraham Lincoln: A Review of Team of Rivals

General Grant, upon receiving the telegram announcing Lincoln’s assassination and deciding on how to break the news to his wife, said, “First prepare yourself for the most painful and startling news that could be received.” And I cannot think of worse news for America in its history. Lincoln’s assassination was a pivotal moment, and 150 years later we still deeply feel the scars from his loss, which paved the way for a less than ideal reconciliation between North and South after our most trying time as a nation. It’s difficult to speculate just how much smoother Reconstruction would have gone with Lincoln but undeniable that Lincoln was the person best equipped to lead the country through the Reconstruction process, because of his extraordinary empathy which gave him his ability to understand how people think. And empathy is the first quality that we learn in management lessons from Abraham Lincoln in Doris Goodwin Kearn’s Team of Rivals.

Lincoln’s ability to assuage differences between his rivals with his empathy would have made the herculean task of Reconstruction that much more possible. 3 years later, during his VP Andrew Johnson’s impeachment trial, we get a sense of just how fractured the country was and how difficult Lincoln’s task was during the Civil War. But those closest to him, like Grant, instantly recognized that Lincoln’s death was “an irreparable loss to the South, which [needed] so much both his tenderness and magnanimity.” Elizabeth Blair, southerner with family in the Cabinet, remarked, “Those of southern sympathies know now they have lost a friend willing—& more powerful to protect & serve them than they can now ever hope to find again.” When we think of leaders, we commonly do not think of words like tenderness, friend, empathy or clemency. But those characteristics are what made Lincoln more than a common leader. 

At 7:22 AM on April 15^th, 1865, time of death for Lincoln, Secretary of War Stanton gave the most concise and perfect tribute to Lincoln: “Now he belongs to the ages.” His cabinet members, who Lincoln carefully picked to have views different from his own, were, like Grant, the first to realize just how damaging the loss was, because they knew how he brought together their differing views, representing the different opinions of the country, to form his own views and carefully craft his decisions, which were famous for their timing, because no man had a better barometer of what was going on in his country than Lincoln. When most “great leaders” are known for their ability to speak, Lincoln’s empathy and ability to listen made him superhuman. 

In all organizations there are warring factions—sales versus engineers at a tech company, administration versus faculty at a university. What a great leader can do is tap into all of the points of view to form a more whole view of a situation and tap into strengths and dampen weaknesses to make the whole much better than the sum of parts.

Team of Rivals carefully crafts the story of the 4 Republican candidates for president in the 1860 election—Seward, Bates, Chase and Lincoln—and how the little known rail-splitting lawyer from Sangamon County, whose most famous act was losing a Senate race, not only beat out the 3 other much better known candidates but then brought them together in his Cabinet, almost undeniably the most qualified Cabinet in our country’s history. Indeed, Lincoln's strategy of being everybody's second choice worked out, as he never disparaged the other candidates, but worked with them. 

The contentiousness of his Cabinet members (Chase coveted the presidency in the 1864 election so badly that he campaigned against Lincoln in his re-election efforts, even while Lincoln wouldn’t let him leave the Cabinet, knowing that Chase was the most qualified Treasury Secretary, because he funded the war and filled the nation’s coffers at a time when it should have gone bankrupt). One of Lincoln’s great coups takes place when he refuses to accept the resignations of his two most brilliant Cabinet members, Chase and Seward. In the “public interest,” he required both men to remain in office, despite their mutual despise of each other. By retaining them, Lincoln was able to maintain a balance in the Cabinet. Mary Lincoln believed that all of the Cabinet members were stabbing Lincoln in the back, but Lincoln understood just how important it was to keep a broad view of what was happening in the country. By balancing his team of rivals, he had consolidated his leadership. “If I had yielded to that storm & dismissed Seward the thing would have all have slumped over one way & we should have been left with a scanty handful of supporters. When Chase gave in his resignation I saw that the game was in my own hands & I put it through.” Lincoln’s careful chess moves are brilliant, though nobody suspected him of using his Cabinet members in such ways. 

Lincoln uses what I call the “Colombo Method,” named after the hard-boiled detective of 1970s TV fame. Colombo (Peter Falk in his most iconic role) was so good at “playing dumb” when speaking with his murder suspects that he let the criminals put themselves in jail. Colombo made the suspects think he was a bumbling idiot, so they start talking. Just as he would walk away, Colombo would say something like, “There’s just one more thing...” This is where Colombo would nail the murderers. 

In many ways, being an unknown rail-splitter from Illinois helped Lincoln, because people assumed he didn’t know what he was talking about. Early on in Lincoln’s presidency, just about all of the nation assumed that it was Seward who was running the show, though Seward was the first to understand Lincoln’s genius and to later realize just how much Lincoln was in charge in his quieter, more unassuming way. Seward himself thought he was calling the shots with Fort Sumter, the first debacle of Lincoln’s presidency and the beginning of the Civil War. While Seward wanted Lincoln to surrender Sumter, under the guise that southerners would be appeased by its abandonment, Lincoln knew better. Looking back, this theory looks more like Seward’s folly than the purchase of Alaska, but Lincoln had already taken Seward’s good advice of holding, occupying and possessing property belonging to the government; Lincoln just wasn’t going to cede Sumter per Seward’s prescription. 

Following Seward’s harsh criticism that Lincoln didn’t cede Sumter, Lincoln wrote a memo that he never sent. Here is another pointed lesson that good leaders follow: writing emails that they never send. Lincoln realized that, though he was the most gifted of our presidential writers, it was best to approach Seward in person and quietly defuse the situation, rather than write a memo he would later regret. 

Perhaps Lincoln’s first great feat was branding the war as an effort to keep the Union together rather than a war to free the slaves, much to the chagrin of radical Republicans and abolitionists who, had they gotten their way, would have imperiled the cause by losing important border states like Kentucky. While radical Republicans wished that he had issued the Emancipation Proclamation earlier, Lincoln wisely understood that the north would not fight to end slavery but to preserve the Union.  

But it was more complicated than that. Once Seward realized that it was Lincoln who was in charge, he also became an ally to the President in balancing the warring factions. Radicals thought Seward a conservative influence on the president, but both he and the president were engaged in the same task of finding a middle ground between the two extremes of radical Republicans and conservative Democrats. 

Where Lincoln shines above most leaders is his ability to recognize his errors. Fred Seward wrote, “Presidents and Kings are not apt to see flaws in their own arguments, but fortunately for the Union, it had a President, at this critical juncture who combined a logical intellect with an unselfish heart.” And errors Lincoln did commit, making him more human and credible and therefore more beloved by his countrymen. 

Though Lincoln was not experienced in war nor did he like it at all—his opposition to the 1848 war with Mexico probably lost him previous political positions—he was, in his own way, a fantastic war strategist. His perfectly timed visits to troops—he was totally unafraid of being on the front in dangerous situations—rallied them. He was also wise to understand his popularity with the troops, going to great lengths to give them time off to vote (they favored Lincoln in extraordinary numbers in his re-election campaign over the braggadocio General McClellan). One soldier wrote that he had to lower his cap “to cover a smile that had overmastered him” at the “ludicrous sight” of Lincoln riding along on the front, with his lanky, tall frame, almost bigger than the horse. But, the soldier wrote, the troops loved Lincoln. “His benignant smile as he passed on was a real reflection of his honest, kindly heart; but deeper, under the surface of that marked and not all uncomely face, were the unmistakable signs of care and anxiety...In fact his popularity in the army is and has been universal.” 

Goodwin Kearns notes the most surprising contemporaneous evaluation of Lincoln’s leadership, which appeared in the extreme secessionist paper, the Charleston Mercury. “He has called around him in counsel, the Mercury marveled, “the ablest and most earnest men of his country. Where he has lacked in individual ability, learning, experience or statesmanship, he has sought it, and found it... Force, energy, brains, earnestness, he has collected around him in every department."

Leaders set direction and achieve outcomes not only because they are able to get

other people to do things but because they themselves make a powerful message when

they do things. Leaders have a magnetic quality; people gravitate towards leaders and

espouse their ideas. Leaders communicate effectively, though not necessarily in a verbal sense. Through their actions and their body language, people inherently know who a leader is. The first person I think of when I think of a leader is Abraham Lincoln, who gave his “last full measure of devotion” to this country in its most difficult time. Acting as both a rudder and a motor through a massive sea change that would divide this country, even while he attempted to hold it together, Abraham Lincoln is the epitome of transformational leadership.

But the most concise definition of a leader comes in General Sherman’s evaluation of Lincoln: “greatness, combined with goodness.”

I found this Escuela Abraham Lincoln in Havana, Cuba, where there are many memorials to Lincoln because Castro, despite his dislike of most things American, could appreciate the magnanimity of Lincoln. The popularity and recognition of Lincoln’s unparalleled leadership qualities are nearly universal, even in places not know for appreciation of the United States. Tolstoy commented that "Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country—bigger than all the Presidents together. We are still too near to his greatness, but after a few centuries more our posterity will find him considerably bigger than we do. His genius is still too strong and too powerful for the common understanding, just as the sun is too hot when its light beams directly on us.” It is Lincoln’s character that makes him powerful: “He really was not a great general like Napoleon or Washington; he was not such a skillful statesman as Gladstone or Frederick the Great; but his supremacy expresses itself altogether in his peculiar moral power and in the greatness of his character.”