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.

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.