Malcolm Glawell: Creation Myth— Xerox PARC, Apple, and the truth about innovation

..the evolution of a concept (Did Steve Jobs steal the idea of the personal computer from Xerox, or did he just revolutionize the idea?)

The difference between direct and indirect manipulation is not trivial. It is the difference between something intended for experts, which is what Xerox PARC had in mind, and something that is appropriate for a mass audience, which is what Apple had in mind. PARC was building a personal computer. Apple wanted to build a popular computer.

The ways armies have transformed themselves with the tools of the digital age— the Soviet Union, the United States, and Israel:
— The Soviets had a strong, centralized military bureaucracy, with a long tradition of theoretical analysis. It made sense that they were the first to understand the military implications of new information systems. But they didn't do anything with it. they didn't connect word with deed.
— The United States, by contrast, has a decentralized, bottom-up entrepreneurial culture, which has historically had a strong orientation toward technological solutions.
— As for the Israelis, their military culture grew out of a background of resource constraint and constant threat.
No one stole the revolution. Each party viewed the problem from a different perspective, and carved off a different piece of the puzzle.

...visionaries can be limited by their visions.

...heaven is not a good place to commercialize a product.

For an actual product, you need threat and constraint— and the improvisation and creativity necessary to turn a gold-plated three-hundred dollar mouse into something that works on Formica and costs fifteen dollars. Apple was Israel.

"You can be one of the most successful makers of enterprise technology products the world has ever known, but that doesn't mean your instincts will carry over to the consumer market...They're really different and few companies have ever been successful in both."

Gary Starkweather:

...the imaginative poverty of Xerox management.

...creativity wasn't on a metric.

...Often difficulties are just opportunities in disguise.

The truth is that Starkweather was a difficult employee. It went hand in hand with what made him such an extraordinary innovator.

He was disruptive and stubborn and independent-minded— and he had a thousand ideas, and sorting out the good ideas from the bad wasn't always easy.

Starkweather and his compatriots at Xerox PARC weren't the source of disciplined startegic insights. They were wild geysers of creative energy.

...this fecundity is often at the heart of what distinguishes the truly gifted.

A genius is a genius because he can put together such a staggering number of insights, ideas, theories, random observations, and unexpected connections that he almost inevitably ends up with something great. Quality is a probabilistic function of quantity.

...there is nothing neat and efficient about creativity. The more successes there are, the more failures there are as well— meaning that the person who has far more ideas than the rest of us will have far more bad ideas than the rest of us, too. This is why managing the creative process is so difficult.

Somone was always trying to turn off Starkweather's tap off. But someone had to turn the tap off: the interests of the innovator aren't perfectly aligned with the interests of the corporation. Starkweather saw ideas on their merits. Xerox was a multi-national corporation and it needed to consider every new idea within the context of what it already had.

Without the big idea, Xerox would never have seen the value of the small idea. If you consider innovation to be efficient and ideas precious, that is a tragedy: in the real messy world of creativity, giving away the thing you don't really understand for the thing that you do is an inevitable tradeoff.

Innovation is an unruly thing. There will be some ideas that don't get caught in your cup. But that's not what the game is about. The game is what you catch, not what you spill.

It was ever thus. The innovator says go. The company says stop— and maybe the only lesson of the legend of Xerox PARC is that what happened there happens, in one way or another, everywhere.