Truly revolutionary people come sparingly, perhaps once or twice in a lifetime. Because of this we tend to look at them as almost larger than life; yet they exist, as do we, within an historical and social context with all the limitations that come with being human. But that’s partly what makes them so interesting. They possess the same raw materials and information as others, but for some secret reason they’re able to act on the information at their disposal and transcend their peers in a unique way. Let’s grant, for sake of argument, that they possess a certain genius; still, are there practical takeaways which could benefit the rest of us concerning how they successfully sold their ideas in a competitive marketplace?
We’ll compare two such idea revolutionaries to answer that question, but with one important criteria: namely, we’ll inquire whether similar characteristics can be gleaned from revolutionaries, not only from very different vocations, but also from completely different periods in history. Doing so opens the possibility that such traits transcend particular times and vocations, implying that there’s a uniformity of underlying factors in transformative innovation. We’ll find that there are indeed some shared characteristics that are both interesting and beneficial for anyone in the business world - particularly for executives responsible for setting strategic direction. Those underlying factors will prove significant because they relate to the way human beings in general best create ideas and, just as importantly, how they best support and successfully sell those ideas within a competitive field. Before proceeding though, I need to make a brief comment about my objective, namely, that our overview will be restricted to answering the question of why they were successful vis-a-vis their peers; and thus I won’t attempt to evaluate the legitimacy of their viewpoints. In other words, my interest is in what made them successful in the competitive marketplace of ideas, not in what the final judgement of history will be on their ideas.
With that caveat, our first revolutionary is the 19th century scientist Charles Darwin, who single-handedly changed the nature of science for generations to come with his theory of evolution. Second is Steve Jobs, who revolutionized how a great many of us interact with technology and whose influence will be felt for many years to come. The two could hardly be anymore removed from each other, not only historically, but vocationally. Yet we’ll discover that, despite their vastly different times and roles in life, they displayed some instructive commonalities that should prove helpful to anyone interested in successful innovation.
Charles Darwin
That historical, philosophical, and even scientific debates on evolution and its implications continue to exercise the minds of serious thinkers a century after Darwin’s death gives us continuing evidence of the extraordinary vitality of Darwin’s science and of the profundity of the Darwinian revolution.
I. Bernard Cohen
A great many elements converged to produce what’s been called the Darwinian scientific revolution. What interests us here is that Darwin was by no means the first thinker to propose the idea of evolution. I. Bernard Cohen points out that historians have shown there were many predecessors to Darwin on the subject. Yet before Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, none of these prior proposals about evolution altered the nature of science in any significant way. So the natural question is why? What was is it about Darwin’s particular presentation of the idea that was so different than his predecessors? The problems Darwin was trying to answer weren’t any secret to other scientists; and, in fact, others had even proposed elements that were very close to what Darwin would lay out in the Origin.
In fact, Cohen notes that Alfred Russell Wallace independently developed some of the same ideas as Darwin, which fortuitously ended up being published along with a short synopsis of Darwin’s in 1858 (a year before the Origin). However, there was muted reaction to their ideas, and they quickly learned that the mere publication of the idea of evolution was’t enough to launch the scientific revolution they sought. That had to wait for Darwin’s own publication of the Origin the following year. But this brings us to the question that concerns us here, namely, in what lies the difference between this first and second round of publications? Why did the first publication fall on deaf ears while the second, Darwin’s Origin, usher a fundamental shift in science felt to this day? There are actually several reasons, and ones that will be instructive for our purposes.
The first reason is Darwin’s presentation of the idea in the Origin. It was both readable and it showed by careful reasoning and observation evidence for the doctrine of evolution. He also brought together a wide swath of evidence from other, related fields of knowledge: for example, the vast experience of breeders who practiced a sort of artificial selection, as well as a great variety of evidence of the geographical distribution of plants and animals, from geographical history, and other related fields to natural history. Additionally, Darwin transformed the proposal of Charles Lyell (concerning the well-known problem of the sequence of different species found in the fossil records of successive geological eras) from the view of a contest among species into that of individuals. Noting the variations, in other words, within members of a species, Darwin proposed that the chances of an individual’s survival depend on particular variations the individual possesses (what he called “natural selection”). This transition from Lyell’s interpretation was one of the keys to a revolutionary way of thinking about the world of nature.
Darwin’s insight though was also precipitated by his reading from other, seemingly non-related fields. The work, for example, of Thomas Malthus - an English economist and moral philosopher - proved to be the catalyst that led Darwin (and Wallace, independently) to see the clue to the origin of species in natural selection through “a struggle for existence.” In other words, it enabled Darwin to apply what he knew about the struggle at the species level to the individual level. But there are also other factors that contributed to Darwin’s receptivity to Malthus in the first place, such as the principles of individualism and competition in Adam Smith’s economic thinking. To add to all this there even seemed to be in the air a feeling that a divinely ordained process was continually weeding out misfits in a similar manner to the concept of “selection.”
Along these lines, Howard Gruber adds that Darwin delighted in studying Paley’s Natural Theology and Euclid’s Elements. Ironically, it my have been Darwin’s immersion in the Cambridge combination of theology and natural history that deepened his awareness of the adaptive structures he was later to explain in natural terms. Even the poetic vein in his approach to nature was nourished throughout his education. “Poetry can be important,” Gruber notes, “in the development of a scientist: its content results from the poet’s efforts to search out hidden meanings in the world around him; its form demands a similar effort of those who would enjoy it...One does not have to look far in Darwin to find prose passages in which he is being more self-consciously poetic, striving to invoke in his readers something of his own feeling for nature.”
Another significant factor concerning the revolutionary nature of Darwin’s proposal manifested itself in the attacks on his model for doing science. His opponents charged that he’d departed from traditional norms of scientific thought, in that Darwinian evolution is nonpredictive (but nevertheless causal). That is, while Darwin proposed a cause to the process of evolution, he was unable to predict what the future course of evolution will be - a striking departure from the traditional view in which predictive power is a necessary criteria in theory assessment. He essentially showed that a science can give a satisfactory explanation of the past, even while prediction of the future is impossible. And regarding other detractors, as one would expect in the midst of an idea revolution, Darwin had his share. The reading of the Wallace-Darwin papers in 1858 mentioned above made George Bentham so “perturbed” that he withdrew his own paper that was scheduled to be read later that morning in which he was to present evidence of the fixity of species.
Finally we have the issue of timing. Darwin had worked out the consequences of his theory slowly, but by 1844 he privately wrote an essay which contained the essence of the thoughts presented in the Origin. We have evidence that he became an evolutionist in 1837 and conceived of the theory of natural selection the following year, yet didn’t publish his ideas in any form for some two decades. So interestingly, the intellectual revolution was actually achieved in 1836-37, with the second stage of commitment to the revolution, the private revolution, taking form in 1844. But the public stage of revolution on paper had to wait for another decade and a half until Darwin received Wallace’s paper - which was one of the primary causes for Darwin’s rapid completion of a readable version of the Origin - with its independent conception of natural selection, in 1858.
Implications
For our purposes, we can make some initial conclusions about Darwin’s revolution.
First, the problems Darwin was trying to solve were nothing new, and others were already coming to similar conclusions. What seems to have made his proposal stick was directly related to his effort in providing a readable account that systematically laid out the evidence. A simple reading of a paper the prior year wasn’t enough. Whatever might be said about nineteenth century scientists, they were very much human and a clear, readable, and elegant account of evolution was required to push Darwin’s theory through the clutter. Darwin essentially created an easy-to-understand account that was especially appropriate for consumption, something we might think in terms of a marketing effort of sorts. Yet theoretical simplicity and beauty isn’t a foreign element even in scientific progress.
Second, Darwin was a wide reader who had a firm grasp of not just the professional literature of his vocation, but just as importantly, of many other subject matters seemingly unconnected with his own field. Bringing in a swath of evidence from breeders, among others, was key to selling the theory. In addition, had he not read Malthus’ work, which was unconnected to his field, history’s judgement of Darwin might have been different. His reading of these many other sources sparked an important imaginative process in Darwin’s thinking that enabled him to see his own field in a new and creative light. In other words, his broad interests empowered a transformation in which he was able to take ideas already in the marketplace to the next logical step through a creative process that was fertilized by inter-disciplinary reading.
Third, although we might think it too obvious to mention, Darwin acted and took advantage of the time as he made the Origin available for public consumption (being motivated by competitive pressures). Here we highlight two important points: first, it shows that competitive pressures are everywhere, in every field, and that they should be viewed as a galvanizing force which can harness one’s energy toward a productive end; second is that Darwin decided to take the risk - which was substantial given the scientific and religious implications of his theory and the furor that was sure to follow - and make his ideas public. As Seth Godin might put it, he made the decision “to ship.” Fourth, and most importantly, it was the combination of all these factors that set the Origin apart from the work of his contemporaries. It seems evident that without these factors Darwin likely would not have brought the revolution to science that he did (meaning it would have been left to someone else).
Fifth, as a result Darwin was able to redefine the bounds of science itself, not the least of which by introducing a theory with explanatory power of the past, but minus the predictive power that was thought by traditional methods as a necessary feature of theories. As our beginning quote illustrates, Darwin’s revolution not only allowed innovation to flourish, but no matter what the final consensus of his revolution will be, his thought is sure to go down in the annals of history.
Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs thus became the greatest business executive of our era, the one most certain to be remembered a century from now. History will place him in the pantheon right next to Edison and Ford. More than anyone else of his time, he made products that were completely innovative, combining the power of poetry and processors.
Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs once remarked that, “Technology alone is not enough. It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.” These weren’t just words to Jobs. He embodied this ideal as Apple introduced a product line - the iPod - that would, quite literally, make our hearts sing. But as Walter Isaacson points out in his impressive biography of Jobs, the iPod was just a part of a new strategy that would transform the personal computer into a “digital hub” that coordinated a variety of devices. Jobs’ vision was that people would link and sync their pictures, video, text, and every aspect of what he called their “digital lifestyle.” Thus the Mac, far from being marginalized, would become the hub for new innovative devices which included the iPod, iPhone, and iPad.
A central part of the strategy involved what Jobs called “the digital music revolution,” which began in January of 2001 with Apple’s initial release of iTunes for the Mac. iTunes allowed an intuitive, completely self-contained, format where users could import an unlimited number of audio tracks and put them into an MP3 format, and download songs to MP3 players with plug-and-play simplicity. The advertising slogan would later simply put it, Rip. Mix. Burn.
The iPod was released soon after in October of the same year, just as the country was grappling with a terrorist attack which took the lives of thousands of Americans. It seemed to outsiders that Apple stood on a precipice in which their very future might be determined as Jobs made the memorable announcement. While it was Apple’s first attempt to enter the digital music market, the iPod was by no means the first digital listening device. Hard disk MP3 and flash-based players had been in the market for several years, and their market penetration was in full swing.
But Apple presented their new device as distinguishable in several ways. First, the iPod could compete with both devices in the fact that it used a 1.8-inch hard drive and could hold about a thousand songs - which made it smaller than most other hard disk MP3 players and small enough to give flash-based players a run for their money. From Apple’s perspective, the iPod was the perfect marriage of storage capacity and size. Second, it could play multiple audio file formats. Third, the other players were missing a sleek design, something which Apple was able to deliver in spades. Combining a simple interface with an equally simple hardware design, Apple was able to build an impressive device with both power and ease of use. Isaacson highlights debates in which Jobs had to convince team members to offload more complex procedures to iTunes where they could more appropriately be handled, which turned out to be one of Apple’s brilliant moves. And while the press thought Apple had priced the iPod too high at $399, it turned out that they had read the market perfectly and greatly exceeded anyone’s sales expectations.
Finally, special mention should be made of the literature he read throughout his life because, as mentioned above, he explicitly and on many occasions remarked about its impact on his work. “I like living at the intersection of the humanities and technology,” he said on one occasion. On another he remarked: “Edwin Land of Polaroid talked about the intersection of the humanities and science. I like that intersection. There’s something magical about that place. There are a lot of people innovating, and that’s not the main distinction of my career. The reason Apple resonates with people is that there’s a deep current of humanity in our innovation...In fact some of the best people working on the original Mac were poets and musicians on the side...Great artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were also great at science. Michelangelo knew a lot about how to quarry stone, not just how to be a sculpture.” Thus along these lines, Isaacson notes that Jobs wasn’t only interested in reading on technology, but also read widely within the liberal arts, including Plato, Melville, and Shakespeare; “I loved King Lear,” Jobs once said. This was all on top of his reading of spiritual literature. In fact, Bianca Bosker of the Huffington Post points points out that less than a handful of the books mentioned in Isaacson’s biography concern technology. So here again we see broad, inter-disciplinary reading that fed the vision of a man who Isaacson calls “the ultimate icon of inventiveness, imagination, and sustained innovation.”
Implications
We can conclude briefly with the following. First, the problem Jobs was seeking to address was nothing new, with competitors having already developed solutions that were readily available. In fact, as Isaacson notes, at one point Jobs was frustrated with himself for missing it and hoped he wasn’t too late. But here again, competitive pressures impelled Jobs into action and he was able to capitalize on the market’s failure to present an elegant solution. With a deep understanding of the market, Jobs was able to address the problems head-on, but in a way that encompassed much more than the obvious with his keen ability to “sniff the winds, and sense what lay ahead.”
Second, Jobs succeeded in transforming people’s digital lifestyles by looking at what was currently in the market and taking it to the next logical step, through an imaginative process which enabled him to gauge cultural and technological trends. Thus he thought in much broader terms than competitors by developing a strategy of the digital hub, followed by a fully integrated solution (iTunes) that allowed complete management of a person’s entire music library. Instead of merely focusing on the personal computer which which was showing signs of decline, Jobs simultaneously breathed new life into the Mac and captured our imaginations by creating an intersection between the things we love in life, the things we live for, and technology. Uniquely, technology came to the service of our passions, intelligence, and art - virtually all aspects of our humanity. His thinking and broad vision proved so compelling that Apple would rise to be the world’s most valuable company in August of 2011.
Third, Jobs presented an extremely compelling solution by making complex things easy, inspiring elegance in both hardware and software. Ease of use and aesthetics were his mantra, enabling the iPod (as well as the iPhone and iPad) to captivate users all over the world. Todd Zenger notes that Jobs “believed that consumers would appreciate aesthetics and aspired to create a device with the elegance of a Porsche....His insight was that the internal capability most critical to value creation in this competitive terrain was design.” But, and I believe this is worth repeating, as Jobs tried to make abundantly clear on many occasions, the influence of the liberal arts was key to his quest and success. He once said that “Microsoft never had the humanities and liberal arts in its DNA. Even when they saw the Mac, they couldn’t copy it well. They totally didn’t get it.” His interest and reading in non-business related material provided the soil in which technological innovation would flourish.
Fourth, and again it might seem strange to point out, he acted and took advantage of the time. But as any entrepreneur knows, acting on beliefs isn’t easy; in fact, more than not, it’s that last part of a person’s plan that never comes to pass. Risk can be frightening, but unfortunately it’s an integral component of action. And Jobs’ grand strategy was most definitely a risk, as failure would probably have meant Apple’s irrelevancy. Fifth, it was the combination of all these factors that was the impetus of Apple’s phenomenal success. As a result, Jobs was able to literally redefine not just personal computing, but also important aspects of the music industry and how our lives interact with technology. Evidence of this is everywhere, from people sitting in coffee houses with earbuds, all the way to the other spectrum of manufacturing plants where production managers can be seen with iPads in hand containing the company’s real-time key performance indicators. Revolutionary indeed.
Summary Findings
Darwin and Jobs, despite their very different vocations and aims, had some important commonalities. First, in an important sense neither one was first to market with a solution to their respective problem. Second, they both had an expertise in the market of ideas that were current and available, meaning they understood the problems each of their constituencies faced and why those problems hadn’t been solved. Third, both were able to recast complex problems into a relatively simple, even elegant, solution. Fourth, they were able to see through the data and extend those available ideas in a direction that was truly revolutionary. In other words, they successfully cast a slightly different light on problems that may have seemed to many as worked-over and solved to some extent, setting the scene for a new paradigm through which we see the world. Fifth, and closely related to the fourth, they were both well read and knowledgeable about ideas outside of their professional domains that proved critical in their idea formation. As a result, they were able to see interrelationships among disparate fields of knowledge that others had failed to see - which provided a key to their ability of seeing through the data.
This aspect is worth stressing particularly in our culture as education becomes more and more specialized. In his bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom laments that education in the U. S. has become specialized to the point that the humanities and liberal education are in complete decay. While more people now have college degrees, the impression that our general populace is better educated depends on what one means by the word education - or rather a blurring of the distinction between liberal and technical education.
A highly trained computer specialist need not have had any more learning about morals, politics or religion than the most ignorant of persons. All to the contrary, his narrow education, with the prejudices and pride accompanying it, and its literature which comes to be and passes away in a day and uncritically accepts the premises of current wisdom, can cut him off from the liberal learning that simpler folk used to absorb from a variety of traditional sources. It is not evident to me that someone whose regular reading consists of Time, Playboy, and Scientific American has any profounder wisdom about the world than the rural schoolboy of yore with his McGuffey’s reader.
G. K. Chesterton once remarked that the great myths of the liberal arts are works of imagination which teach poetical truths that there’s something there; something behind the clouds or within the trees, and that the pursuit of beauty is the way to find it; that the imagination, in other words, is a sort of incantation that can call it up. Gruber correctly comments that the balance that’s best for clinching an argument is not the same as that for opening a mind. Broad reading opens the mind, which combined with knowledge and proficient use of the brutal facts, sells the idea.
As evidence of the decline in our creative abilities, Richard Barrett cites a now well-known study that compared the creativity of children to adults. It showed that the vast majority of children are creative geniuses by giving a group of 1,600 children a test of creative thinking over a period of 15 years. From ages three to five, an astounding 98 percent of the children scored in the genius category. But here’s the interesting part. Already by ages eight to ten, only 32 percent scored in that category, and by 13 to 15 years of age, it was down to a paltry 10 percent. Moreover, two hundred thousand adults over the age of 25 have taken the same tests, and only 2 percent scored in the genius category. “What happened to their natural creativity? The answer is that it was socialized out of them. Our proficiency in expressing our creativity falls off as we accept other’s opinions and evaluations of what is good and bad, right and wrong. Our education systems have much to answer in this arena” [Richard Barrett, Liberating the Corporate Soul].
Many have argued that the decline of the humanities and liberal arts in our educational institutions has been a significant factor in the decline in imagination and creativity. Isaacson says that Steve Jobs was able to take imaginative leaps that were instinctive and even magical at times, and that his insights came out of the blue and required intuition more than sheer mental processing power. Darwin was also able to make such leaps; but in both cases, their interests in other fields - the humanities, economics, poetry, and even music - provided the fertile soil in which revolutionary ideas could be born and grow to maturity.
Finally, using competitive pressures as a motivator, they acted, and in the face of considerable risk to their futures. In this sense they were (Darwin included) both entrepreneurial and courageous. And courage shouldn’t be trivialized in either case, as cowardice becomes the much easier road to take when so much is on the line. Both reaped their fair share of detractors and enemies as a result. Yet for the reasons above, both were successful in revolutionizing how we think about the world and its many-sidedness.
Applying What We’ve Learned
Our examination has revealed some significant things about how successful revolutions are brought about; namely, that certain traits seem to transcend particular times and vocations, pointing to an instructive uniformity (at least in some cases) of underlying factors in transformative innovation. We can point specifically to the following: First, it’s not always necessary to be the first to market (there can even be certain perils to being first). Competition is a simple fact of life, but there often remain unaddressed problems that can be solved in innovative ways, and commonly even more proficiently within an existing competitive field which can serve as fodder. In fact Darwin and Jobs were both jolted into action by competition, implying that competitive forces served as a catalyst of fruitful work. Look carefully to see where the gaps are and address those head-on. But even more, think broadly about the underlying problem, how it can be creatively addressed, and who your constituencies really are - or could be.
Second, make simplicity a priority, as it’s a form of elegance in itself. While this may seem desirable in the business world, it doesn’t seem so for science, but philosophers of science are quick to point out that even here one of the criteria for evaluating competing hypotheses is theoretical simplicity. Presentation, even in a discipline like science, matters. Why? The reasons are many, but one has to do with how humans best process and connect with new information and ideas. Clarity, simplicity, and elegance are especially suited to meet an audience - and they’re powerful because they do so at an emotional level, not just intellectual. Importantly, studies are showing that people’s emotions are closely tied to their reasoning processes. In fact, Gerald Zaltman argues that our emotions typically exert first choice on our thinking and behavior.
Third, read, and read widely. Make yourself familiar with the literature in your industry, but importantly, do so in areas like poetry, philosophy, and even music. Discipline yourself to devote thirty minutes a day just reading with no other distractions. Absorbing a wide-array of literature has the effect of opening the mind to creative thinking in a way nothing else can. Try something along the lines of Shakespeare's Henry V or Plato’s Republic. One may be an expert in a specific field because all time and attention has been focused there, but he pays a high price of living in a very small space. Reading a broad range of literature, listening to Mozart and Bach, has the effect of enlarging that space to encompass more of the world’s wonders. And its effect will be more clarity of thought and a greater appreciation for innovation.
Fourth, have the courage to take a risk and act on your ideas, taking advantage of the time. Follow through with your ideas to the end, and as Seth Godin says, set a date, and when that date comes, ship - no excuses. Of all the characteristics presented here, this one may be the toughest. But it’s obviously one of the most crucial aspects to developing and marketing innovative ideas. At the heart of this is developing self-discipline (something both Darwin and Jobs had). Studies have shown that people high in discipline outperform even those with higher IQs. In fact, self-discipline out-predicts IQ for academic success by a factor of about two. And unlike IQ (which many argue to be unchangeable), self-discipline can be learned as it simply involves deliberate practice. Mortimer J. Adler once said that true freedom isn’t possible without a mind made free by discipline, and he was right.
Finally, Gruber makes a point worth mentioning. Each of us, he says, makes a different set of decisions about how we make use of our personal resources, thereby setting the scene for the fortunate thoughts that occur and choosing among them as they do. Thus, Darwin could notice behavioral variations in pigeons and use them in a theory of the evolution of mind “because he was at once the pigeon fancier, the evolutionist, and the materialist.” We can similarly add that Jobs could notice behavioral patterns and unexpressed wishes of consumers and use them in a grand strategy that would change the way we interact with technology because he was at once a humanist, technologist, and music lover. Gruber’s point would be simply that the fact they were all these things at once meant that a unique intersection of many things could occur in their minds. And that, the existence of such an ensemble shouldn’t be regarded as an accident, but rather the deliberately cultivated fruit of each’s effort. They both organized their lives in order to construct a new point of view. “In his explorations of the world, the individual finds out what needs doing. In his attempts to do some of it, he finds out what he can do and what he cannot. He also comes to see what he need not do. From the intersection of these possibilities there emerges a new imperative, his sense of what he must do.”
