Genius: How Teams Nurture Individual Brilliance

Week 2

 

Introduction

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Obama, July 13:

You didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.

 

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (Applause.)

 

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

 

The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.

 

So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country, you know what, there are some things we do better together. That’s how we funded the GI Bill. That’s how we created the middle class. That’s how we built the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam. That’s how we invented the Internet. That’s how we sent a man to the moon. We rise or fall together as one nation and as one people, and that’s the reason I’m running for President — because I still believe in that idea. You’re not on your own, we’re in this together.

- Barrack Obama

 

 

This speech certainly kicked up a firestorm. At a campaign speech on July 13, 2012, in Roanoke, Virginia, then Presidential candidate Barrack Obama, raised the idea of collaboration, cooperation, and standing on the shoulders of others.

 

It didn’t play too well with some of the political spectrum who hold the ideal of individualism as core and sacrosanct. But the truth is we all rely on others.

 

We rely on the previous, and the current learning, input, and support of others.

 

And whenever something new is developed, invented, or created it is almost always on the shoulders of others.

 

Others who may be collaborators who may help and nurture ideas and even others who may be competitors and push our thinking and doing to new heights.

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Week 3

 

PART 1 WORLD

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On the shoulders of others

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We have a preponderance, in the Western world especially, to raise the value of individual genius up and to diminish the role of the collective. We praise those individuals who have invented new ways of doing things without acknowledging the group or environment that allowed them to flourish. We raise the name of one as worthy of adulation but often remain ignorant of the help or accomplishments of others who created similar or identical findings. And in many cases, the ones whose name we know off by heart are only the ones we know because they arrived at the patent office first, and in the case of Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone only by a couple of hours ahead of Elisha Gray, a professor at Oberlin College. The patent surrounding the invention of the telephone is even more of a ‘group effort’ as both were reputably claiming the caveat patent of another inventor, Antonio Meucci, an Italian immigrant to the US, whose had invented the telephone but whose patent caveat had expired. All these inventors are worthy of the praise and adulation but they were often one of many on the same or similar path, and frequently on that same path together either as collaborators or competitors.

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Yet both, and others as well, were on the same path to inventiveness and the invention that the former is known for. In some cases, the latter or another made the discovery for the former to claim the patent. It is not to dimmish the inventiveness of the former but it is to recognize that we could just have easily been sitting in a stadium named Pac Meucci Park watching baseball rather than Pac Bell Park.

  

Steven Johnson, in his recent book, Where Good Ideas Come From, utilizes idea of the adjacent possible theory that biologist Stuart Kauffman raised, to explain the duplicate invention phenomenon. The adjacent possible theory says that biological systems have a potential to evolve to a higher order, but only in incremental steps. Improvements, in other words, will occur in steps or stages rather than any giant leap forward.

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Johnson goes on to theorize that ideas can be looked at in the same way. Each idea leads to another and builds on the previous one or ones. The iPhone can’t be invented before the telephone as a crude example, as the idea and the technology hasn’t yet developed to a stage where it is even remotely possible or imaginable. So, taking the adjacent possible to its logical next step (pun intended) any new ideas can only evolve in incremental steps from previous ones. And while each incremental idea may be small, several small ideas can add up to huge discoveries.

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Adjacent possible can work in a couple of ways. There is adjacent possible in terms of ideas and discoveries where each person reads, hears, and learns about the ideas of the others. And there is also adjacent possible where you learn from those physically near you and those who you collaborate with.

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These could be delineated as competitors – those physically or logistically further away whose ideas you hear about - or collaborators – those physically or logistically closer with whom you work together, but it’s not always that simple. Suffice to say, that both exist and both impact and benefit learning. Sometimes both exist together – think some of the great art movements or musical endeavors – where there is a typically healthy dose of both collaboration and competition.

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The fact is that there is collaboration or competition doesn’t diminish the new ideas or inventions, rather it helps us understand what is likely to help other new ideas and inventions to be created. It’s less likely to be the Eureka discovery of one person in a bathtub – and more on that later – and more so the environment in which ideas, and creativity flourish. Surely as societies where new discoveries are valued, we should be looking at how these new ideas germinate. In what environments? With what input? With how much collaboration and competition?

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Whose name is recognized and whose is unknown to us?

• Thomas Edison or Joseph Wilson Swan

• Isaac Newton or Robert Hooke

• Galileo or Johann George and Christoph Scheiner

• Charles Darwin or Alfred Wallace

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Edison or Swan?

While we all can recite the name Edison when talking about light and electricity the actual origins of the invention are a little murkier, as are almost all inventions and discoveries. It was less the flicking of switch and presto we have light and more so a combination of factors and some luck that raises Thomas Edison to the fore.

 

Thomas Alva Edison, did rightly obtain the earliest patents for incandescent light bulbs, in 1879 and 1880, but it was according to many historians the logical step in the journey that many were on. The British inventor Sir Joseph Wilson Swan, for example, who worked on the discovery at the same time and later partnered with Edison. Before that there was Italian inventor Alessandro Volta who pioneered concepts in controlling an electrical current. His "voltaic pile" effectively functioned as a battery and, yes you guessed it, his name became the electrical measurement of "volt" and therefore “voltage”.

 

Other including British chemist Humphry Davy designed his own battery and use it to power an arc lamp. The arc lamp was also very similar to the eventual light bulb that we are familiar with and it was some seventy years earlier than Edison.

 

This is not to discount Edison’s fame or value but rather to show – some might say shine a light onto – that discoveries and inventions, even those we take for granted, are frequently, more often than not, almost always, the culmination of a journey taken by many.

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