Failure Is an Option

Wouldn't you say that human beings are most innovative when their backs are up against the wall?
This is a matter of opinion, but I think when people's backs are to the wall, that's not when great ideas come up. That's when great ideas get funded. Right now there's a lot of stock thinking about alternative energy, because we feel that our backs are coming up to the wall. That's not the best way to fund innovation, but it shows you that creating the incentive or capital will get more people to develop the ideas. I happen to think that when you find a great inventor, they invent all the time. You can't stop them, in fact. At one of our first invention sessions, the icemaker in the refrigerator broke. Inventors, among other things, seem to need caffeinated beverages, and immediately you had three or four top-notch inventors inventing new icemakers.

On the spot?
On the spot. They said, "The icemaker broke. Oh, hey, why do icemakers work this way? Well, here's a better way to make an icemaker. No, here's another way." And instantly, we had several new icemaker inventions. Now, we can create lots of new inventions and ultimately we can't pursue them all. So we have a process we call triage, and those didn't make it in triage because icemakers weren't as interesting as some of the other problems we were solving. But it goes to show that inventors will invent, if given the opportunity. You don't have to wait until your back is up against the wall.

What kind of education makes the most innovative people?
That's a hard one to answer. It's not the educational background as much as it's the personality that develops and much of that comes from the context in which they were raised and obviously some is genetics. It is interesting that we're operating globally now and you tend to see more flexible inventors—big idea inventors—coming out of the U.S. instead of a lot of other countries.

Why is that?
Among the countries we operate in, by many metrics the U.S. actually has the worst education system. Why is it that we kind of have the worst education system but the best innovation track record? It's because, I believe, culturally we have a lot of people who have no fear of failure. The beauty, not of our education system, but of our culture, is that we will rebound from failure. Once I talked to a huge multinational company in Asia. When the CEO walks down the hall, everyone stands up and bows. I gave a talk about how many failures I had in starting new groups at Microsoft. At the end, I put a timeline down of my failures and I turned to the chairman of the company and all of his CEOs and said, "If I was at your company, when would you have fired me?" He pointed at the timeline and said, "Frankly, probably in your first year." I told him that if that were the case, I probably wouldn't have lasted long enough to create things of real value that I did at Microsoft, then, would I? Ultimately, most common among the great inventors we work with is that they have no fear of failure, no respect for the boundaries of their education, yet they are self-aware enough to take input from others.

Is technological innovation different from innovations in politics? Or can Karl Marx and John Adams readily be compared to Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison?
I have a different way of categorizing political and technical ideas. I actually think those guys came up with what we would call today great business-model ideas. They're not necessarily all about capital, but they have to do with how to organize people or processes to accomplish a goal. So I don't differentiate political ideas from others. I do however divide ideas into ones that are potentially win-win versus those that are more zero-sum. In general, because technology fuels economic growth, there are a higher proportion of technology ideas that are win-win than political ideas. To the extent that you end up with a political idea like capitalism that creates a lot of growth, maybe there is a win-win there, though a lot of people argue that there are a lot of losers in capitalism. Look at the pandemic example I gave earlier. There is a huge social component there. It's not just technology.

© 2008