Copyright
Copyright © 2018 by Melissa A. Schilling
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First Edition: February 2018
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Names: Schilling, Melissa A., author.
Title: Quirky : the remarkable story of the traits, foibles, and genius of breakthrough innovators who changed the world / Melissa A. Schilling.
Description: First edition. | New York, NY : PublicAffairs, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017043370 (print) | LCCN 2017050137 (ebook) | ISBN 9781610397933 (ebook) | ISBN 9781610397926 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Inventors—Psychology. | Personality and creative ability. | Genius. | Inventions. | Technological innovations.
Classification: LCC T39 (ebook) | LCC T39 .S3185 2018 (print) | DDC 609.2/2—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017043370
ISBNs: 978-1-61039-792-6 (hardcover), 978-1-61039-793-3 (ebook), 978-1-5417-6239-8 (international)
E3-20171222-JV-NF
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Introduction
“Don’t tell me it’s impossible. Tell me you can’t do it.”
What Makes Some People Spectacularly Innovative?
1 “I gang my own gait.…”
A Sense of “Separateness”
2 “He’s like a walking moonshot.”
Extreme Confidence
3 “Ideas came in an uninterrupted stream.…”
The Creative Mind
4 “Once she had recognized a certain way as a right one, she pursued it without compromise.…”
A Higher Purpose
5 “Work made the Earth a paradise for me.”
Driven to Work
6 “The sixties produced an anarchic mind-set.…”
Opportunities and Challenges of an Era
7 “It’s not about the money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.…”
Access to Resources
8 “You get creative people, you bet big on them, you give them enormous leeway and support.…”
Nurturing the Potential That Lies Within
Photos
Acknowledgments
About the author
Praise for Quirky
Selected References
Notes
Index
Everyone who’s ever taken a shower has had an idea. It’s the person who gets out of the shower, dries off and does something about it who makes a difference.
—Nolan Bushnell
Introduction
“Don’t tell me it’s impossible. Tell me you can’t do it.”
What Makes Some People Spectacularly Innovative?
Why are some people so remarkably innovative? Not the one-hit wonders with a single great idea or the people who seize a unique opportunity offered by a moment in time, but the people who create one game-changing innovation after another: people who spend most of their lives generating and pursuing startling ideas, challenging assumptions, and accomplishing the seemingly impossible. Is there something special about them that makes them so willing and able to change the world? Consider, for example, Elon Musk.
Musk created and sold his first video game when he was twelve and became a millionaire by the time he turned twenty-eight. Over the next ten years he developed an electronic payment system that would be merged into a company we now know as PayPal; founded SpaceX, a company with no less of an objective than to colonize Mars; and helped to create Tesla Motors, the first new-car company to go public in the United States in more than fifty years. In 2010 SpaceX successfully launched a spacecraft into orbit and then brought it safely back to Earth, a remarkable achievement that hitherto had been accomplished only by the national governments of three countries: the United States, Russia, and China. Furthermore, he demonstrated the viability of reusable rockets, something the space industry had long said was impossible.
Musk did not come from a family with strong connections to any of these industries, nor did he come from exceptional wealth or political advantage. Musk did not grow up with any special access to computing, automotive, or space technology prior to founding these companies, nor did he spend years accumulating unusually deep experience in these fields prior to his innovations. Thus, he had no special experience or resources that enabled him to accomplish these feats—his successes seem to have been attained through sheer force of will. What made Musk both able to and driven to create such a remarkable series of profoundly important innovations?
Nikola Tesla (the man for whom Musk’s car company is named) was equally prolific, or perhaps even more so. During his lifetime he achieved more than two hundred stunningly advanced innovations, including the first long-distance wireless communication systems, alternating-current electrical systems, and remote-control robots. His fervor in pursuit of innovation was hard for most people to understand, especially given the skepticism and lack of financing he encountered throughout his life. Like Musk, Tesla had no family background or other advantage in the fields he would come to revolutionize. Although he studied physics in college, it is not clear that he ever completed a degree. Also like Musk, he left his home country as a young man and arrived in the United States nearly penniless. Tesla was an unusual man, to put it mildly. He was riddled with phobias and odd habits, and he lacked the kind of social intelligence and charisma that could have made it easier to get financial support for his projects. Yet also like Musk, he would accomplish a series of technological achievements that most observers had deemed impossible.
Albert Einstein achieved equally remarkable accomplishments in physics: during a four-month period, when he was all of twenty-six years old, he wrote four papers that completely altered the scientific world’s understanding of space, time, mass, and energy. Each was a significant breakthrough, including work on particle physics that would set the stage for quantum mechanics to overthrow classical physics. What is all the more remarkable is that he accomplished these feats while working as a patent examiner because every physics department he applied to turned him down for an academic post. His disrespect for authority had earned him the ire of his college professors, and they refused to support him in his quest for a university position. Even after writing his four remarkable papers, he faced considerable resistance: having the impudence to challenge well-established theories and being Jewish in a time of rampant anti-Semitism combined to make him the subject of frequent attacks. These attacks made his life harder, but they did not induc
e him to show more reverence for the work of his peers. For Einstein, bowing to authority—including the authority of social norms—was a corruption of the human spirit. He had no intention of marching to anyone else’s drum. This stance would make it harder for him to gain support and legitimacy for his ideas, yet it also freed him to think beyond the existing theories of his time. He would go on to win the Nobel Prize and become, arguably, the most famous scientist of all time.
What is it, then, that makes these people so spectacularly innovative? Is it genetics, parenting, education, or luck? Although innovation has long been a popular research topic in both psychology and business, we don’t have good answers to the question. In part this is because serial breakthrough innovators—people who are extreme outliers of innovative productivity—don’t make great research subjects. Because they are rare, it’s next to impossible to gather data on a large sample of them and run statistical analyses. And because they are busy, you would have an equally hard time getting them into a laboratory to run experiments. Thus, in business schools we tend to focus our research on problems such as how to organize innovation teams, how to choose alliance partners, and how to structure ideation exercises. Those are, after all, things we can measure and manage. The innovation research has not told us where serial breakthrough innovators come from, nor has it told us how we can foster breakthrough innovation in ourselves, in people with whom we work, or in our children.
The research in psychology on individual creativity gets us a bit closer, but most of that research has focused on the general process of creativity—how ordinary people use creativity to solve problems, for example—rather than telling us why some people become outliers. The smattering of research on creative geniuses is sparse, disconnected, and short on conclusions and implications. For example, it has suggested that there may be a genetic component of genius, which is true, though not particularly helpful if you are seeking to increase your innovativeness. Other writers have argued that true genius requires a very large number of hours of practice or very large numbers of chunks of information—a claim that is diminished by a vast number of highly visible exceptions. As noted, Elon Musk did not revolutionize space travel because he had extensive information and experience in that field—quite the opposite. When both US and Russian rocket manufacturers told Musk that his idea for economical reusable rockets was simply not feasible, he started teaching himself by studying rocket science textbooks on his own, and within months he created a spreadsheet that detailed the costs, materials, and performance specifications of the rocket he intended to build. Musk is an outsider who has done the impossible, in part because he didn’t know (or believe) that it was impossible.
Musk crosses boundaries because some of the quirks of his personality are that he enjoys tackling new, difficult problems and he doesn’t care very much about whether you think he has the ability or right to do that. This is an extremely important point—most research shows that we tend to penalize people for crossing boundaries. We discount generalists and are suspicious of people who engage in activities that seem inconsistent with their identity. However, outsiders such as Musk bring an advantage that insiders and industry veterans often lack. Outsiders aren’t trapped by the paradigms and assumptions that become calcified in industry veterans, nor do they have the existing investments in tools, expertise, or supplier and customer relationships that make change difficult and unappealing. For example, Gavriel Iddan, a guided-missile designer for the Israeli military, invented a revolutionary way to allow doctors to see inside a patient’s gastrointestinal system. The traditional approach for obtaining images inside the gut is a camera on the end of a long flexible rod. This method is quite uncomfortable, and it cannot reach large portions of the small intestine, but it was the industry standard for many decades. Most gastroenterologists have invested in significant training to use endoscopic tools, and many have also purchased endoscopic equipment for their clinics. Not surprisingly, most innovation in this domain has focused on incremental improvements in the rod, the camera, and the imaging software. However, Iddan approached the problem of viewing the inside of the gut like a guided-missile designer, not like a gastroenterologist. He did not have the same assumptions about the need either to control the camera with a rod or to transmit images with a wire. Instead, he invented a capsule (called the PillCam) with a power source, a light source, and two tiny cameras that the patient can swallow. The patient then goes about her day while the camera pill broadcasts images to a video pack worn by the patient. Roughly eight hours later, the patient returns to the doctor’s office to have the images read by a software algorithm that can identify any locations of bleeding (the camera pill exits naturally). The PillCam has proven to be safer and less expensive than traditional endoscopy (the PillCam costs less than $500), and it is dramatically more comfortable. For patients, the camera pill was a no-brainer; getting doctors to adopt it has been slower because of their existing investment and familiarity with endoscopy. The PillCam is currently sold in more than sixty countries, and several companies now offer competing products. The camera pill is a remarkable solution to a difficult problem, and it is easy to see why it came from an outsider rather than from an endoscope producer.
Similarly, it is easy to see why Uber, Lyft, Didi Chuxing, and Grab are disrupting the taxi business and why Airbnb, Homestay, and Couchsurfing are disrupting the hotel business. Although taxi companies and hotel chains undoubtedly have knowledge and assets that would be useful in these new business models, they also have assets and strategic commitments that are tied to (or designed for) their original way of doing business and making money. Change would be painful, and it is not obvious that they could outcompete the newcomers in the new business models even if they tried. These are the reasons that disruptive innovation often comes from new entrants rather than industry stalwarts, despite the fact that existing businesses with decades of experience in an industry would seem to have some advantages in resources such as cash, equipment, and clout.
However, most outsiders do not become serial breakthrough innovators. Neither do most extremely experienced people. An individual’s degree of experience may play a role in her emergence as a breakthrough innovator, but it is not clear that it is particularly important or reliable. What, then, is important or reliable? Is there some combination of traits or resources that increases the likelihood of an individual becoming a serial breakthrough innovator? Can we help people tap their own potential to be a breakthrough innovator (and would we want to)?
I first tried to address this question through standard research methods: conducting large-sample studies on innovators and gathering as much data as I could about hundreds of innovators identified by aggregating lists made by others.1 Invariably these studies proved unsatisfying. Most inventors and entrepreneurs are one-hit wonders, leaving us with doubt about how much they could teach us about being innovative. Furthermore, when you try to study a large sample of innovators, you typically find that there is very little information available about their lives, leaving you to draw only a few conclusions about their education or work experience. These studies do not give us the kind of insight into breakthrough innovation that we really want. It is easy to conclude that this is a problem that cannot really be studied or that no insights can be gleaned from trying. Perhaps the problem is too complex, or innovators are too idiosyncratic, for us to learn much of use from studying them.
The question really started coming to a head in early 2011 as people saw the visible deterioration of Steve Jobs’s health. Many, including students in my course on innovation strategy, began asking me about the fate of Apple if it lost its famous leader. I wondered too. Did Apple’s innovativeness arise from something in the organization’s DNA, or was it specific to Steve Jobs? Could his “magic” be handed down to a successor? Was it embedded in the routines at Apple? Or was it in the man himself? It was a question so intriguing that it was worth pursuing even if it didn’t lead to anything useful. I thus began to stu
dy Steve Jobs, comparing every detail I could find on him with the existing research on innovation and creativity. I had already been following Apple for years in the course of my research and teaching, but now I began to study Jobs as a person. I read biographies, watched recorded interviews, and scavenged his statements from wherever I could find them. I wanted to understand what he was really like: his talents, his weaknesses, his beliefs and biases. I wanted to understand what drove him and enabled him. I was lucky that a great deal had been written about Steve Jobs and that he had done numerous recorded interviews: it was possible to get a rich, multifaceted perspective on him.
I soon noticed some striking commonalities between Jobs and other breakthrough innovators. For example, I had written a teaching case on Dean Kamen (inventor of the Segway, the first portable kidney dialysis machine, the first wearable drug infusion pump, and much more), and the similarities between Jobs and Kamen were strange and intriguing. Both men had dropped out of college and started companies in their early twenties, and neither had extensive training in the fields to which they would contribute. Both were quirky, with eccentric traits such as wearing the same clothes every day. Jobs didn’t put a license plate on his car and routinely parked in the spots reserved for people with disabilities—those rules just didn’t apply to him. Kamen bought an island (North Dumpling), built his own power grid, and declared his intention to secede from the United States so that its rules would not apply to him. Both men also had unusual homes. Jobs didn’t put furniture in his house—nothing quite fit his stark aesthetic tastes. Kamen’s home was a four-story hexagon with at least one secret passage. Its hallways were designed to look like mine shafts, and a huge cast-iron steam engine that had once belonged to Henry Ford was built into the house’s four-story central atrium. More importantly, both men had such great faith in their own capacity for reasoning and insight that they disregarded the “rules” that constrained the problem-solving efforts of others. For example, when people told Kamen that his idea for a wheelchair that would balance on two feet was impossible, he retorted, “Don’t tell me it’s impossible. Tell me you can’t do it,” and pointed out that many of the scientific principles we take as given are just “man’s laws” that we don’t know to be actually true.2 Steve Jobs said something remarkably similar in a video-recorded interview: “Life gets a lot broader once you realize one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you, and you can change it.”3 Both men were also driven much more by idealistic goals than materialistic gain: Jobs saw the computer as a means to revolutionize human cognition the way that bicycles had revolutionized human mobility; Kamen wanted to liberate people from the constraints of disease or injury.
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