Saul Alinsky once observed that that every revolution inspires a counterrevolution. “Once we accept and learn to anticipate the inevitable counter-revolution,” he wrote, “we may then alter the historical pattern of revolution and counter-revolution from the traditional slow advance of two steps forward and one step backward.”
President Bush’s conservative agenda ultimately led to Barack Obama’s sweeping victory and control of both houses of Congress. The changes Obama enacted, in turn, helped lead to Donald Trump’s improbable rise to power. Now, perhaps not surprisingly, the Democrats have retaken the House and many governorships, although lost seats in the Senate.
As I explain in my upcoming book, Cascades, the period after an initial victory is often the most difficult in any movement for change (an insight I got from my friend Srdja Popović). So the question today, after an election in which both parties can claim wins, is whether either side will be able to break the cycle and build a national consensus based on shared values.
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When you think of breakthrough innovation, someone like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk often comes to mind. Charismatic and often temperamental, people like these seem to have a knack for creating the next big thing and build great businesses on top of them. They change the world in ways that few can.
Yet what often goes unnoticed is that great entrepreneurs build their empires on the discoveries of others. Steve jobs didn’t invent the computer or the mobile phone any more than Jeff Bezos discovered e-commerce or Elon Musk dreamed up electric cars. Those things were created by scientists and engineers that came long before.
In researching my book, Mapping Innovation, I got to know many who truly helped create the future and I found them to be different than most people, but not in a way that you’d expect. While all were smart and hardworking, the most common trait among them was their quiet generosity and that can teach us a lot about how innovation really works.
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On December 31st, 1929, the Indian National Congress, the foremost nationalist group on the subcontinent, issued a Declaration of Purna Swaraj, or complete independence from British rule. It also announced a campaign of civil disobedience, but no one had any idea what form it should take. That task fell to Mohandas Gandhi.
The Mahatma returned to his ashram to contemplate next steps. After his efforts to organize against the Rowlatt Act a decade earlier ended in disaster, he struggled to find a way forward. As he told a friend at the time, “I am furiously thinking day and night and I do not see a way out of the darkness.”
Finally, he decided he would march for salt, which impressed almost no one. It seemed to be an incredibly inconsequential issue, especially considering what was at stake. Yet what few realized at the time was that he had identified a keystone change that would break the logjam and the British hold on power. Today the Salt March is known as Gandhi’s greatest triumph.
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The first thing we think about when we first hear the news about a major breakthrough is the great possibilities it unlocks. The space age spawned fantasies about living like the Jetsons and riding around in flying cars. That still hasn’t happened and possibly never will. Yet we’ve still benefited great from space technologies.
Satellites have truly changed the world. They have made it possible for us to communicate with each other easily, cheaply and seamlessly. News of events around the world gets beamed to us as if it happened next door. GPS satellites help us navigate unfamiliar places as if we lived there all our lives. It’s hard to imagine life without them.
In much the same way, many of today’s breakthroughs will not turn out how we think they will. The problem is that things that truly change the world always arrive out of context for the simple reason that the world hasn’t changed yet. They need to find an ecosystem that is crying out for a solution to a meaningful problem and that’s rarely the one they were built for.
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Every organization strives to innovate, but few succeed consistently over time. That’s why so many once dominant companies hit a peak and then decline. A recent study estimates that 50% of the current S&P 500 will be replaced over the next ten years. Success is supposed to breed success, but it often breeds failure.
Yet IBM, Google and Amazon have been able to buck this trend. While most companies are lucky to come up with one major innovation, these three continue to develop breakthroughs and don’t seem to be slowing down any time soon. In fact, they seem to be accelerating their ability to create impressive new products and services.
However, they are very different organizations, which vary widely in their cultures, products and approaches. Each has developed in its own way and found its own path, but managed to come up with a repeatable model that works. Despite these differences, however, looking at them together can help us uncover some common principles of innovation.
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An education is supposed to prepare you for the future. Traditionally, that meant learning certain facts and skills, like when Columbus discovered America or how to do long division. Today, curriculums have shifted to focus on a more global and digital world, like cultural history, basic computer skills and writing code.
Yet the challenges that our kids will face will be much different than we did growing up and many of the things a typical student learns in school today will no longer be relevant by the time he or she graduates college. In fact, a study at the University of Oxford found that 47% of today’s jobs will be eliminated over the next 20 years.
In 10 or 20 years, much of what we “know” about the world will no longer be true. The computers of the future will not be digital. Software code itself is disappearing, or at least becoming far less relevant. Many of what are considered good jobs today will be either automated or devalued. We need to rethink how we prepare our kids for the world to come.
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While history tends to single out individuals, the truth is that when you look behind the story of any heroic leader, what you find is a network of loyal supporters, active collaborators and outside facilitators that are behind any great achievement. Nobody accomplishes anything significant alone.
That’s probably why it’s become fashionable for pundits to encourage us to “find our tribe,” a network of like-minded people who share your ambitions. Don’t listen to them. The truth is that great things are achieved not by taking comfort from your tribe, but from going beyond it and reaching out to those who aren’t of like mind.
The problem with focusing too much on your tribe is that those people tend to think the same way you do. They frequent the same places, watch the same TED talks and read the same blogs. That may be great for giving you some comfort and confidence, but it also acts as an echo chamber that will reinforce flawed assumptions and lead you down a false path.
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Data, as many have noted, has become the new oil, meaning that we no longer regard the information we store as merely a cost of doing business, but a valuable asset and a potential source of competitive advantage. It has become the fuel that powers advanced technologies such as machine learning.
A problem that’s emerging, however, is that our ability to produce data is outstripping our ability to store it. In fact, an article in the journal Nature predicts that by 2040, data storage would consume 10–100 times the expected supply of microchip-grade silicon, using current technology. Clearly, we need a data storage breakthrough.
One potential solution is DNA, which is a million times more information dense than today’s flash drives. It also is more stable, more secure and uses minimal energy. The problem is that it is currently prohibitively expensive. However, a startup that has emerged out of MIT, called Catalog, may have found the breakthrough we’re looking for: low-cost DNA Storage.
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In 1999, the day before his eighth startup went public, Steve Blank decided to retire at the age of 45. With time to reflect, he sat in a ski lodge and began to write a memoir with a “lessons learned” section at the end of each chapter. “In hindsight, it was a catharsis of moving from one part of my life to another,” he told me.
“I was 80 pages in when I realized there was a pattern. When I sat inside the building things didn’t go very well, but when I got outside the building things turned around and got much better,” he remembers. It was that insight that would lead him to a second, even more storied career as a business guru.
Today, almost 20 years later, the Lean Startup has become a full-fledged movement, complete with an entire ecosystem of books, conferences and practitioner-consultants. It has also moved far beyond startups to encompass government labs, large bureaucracies and major enterprises. The biggest question today is not whether it is a better way to build companies, but where it’s going next.
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When Steve Jobs and Apple launched the Macintosh with great fanfare in 1984, it was to be only one step in a long journey that began with Douglas Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos and the development of the Alto at Xerox PARC more than a decade before. The Macintosh was, in many ways, the culmination of everything that came before.
Yet it was far from the end of the road. In fact, it wouldn’t be until the late 90s, after the rise of the Internet, that computers began to have a measurable effect on economic productivity. Until then, personal computers were mainly an expensive device to automate secretarial work and for kids to play video games.
The truth is that innovation is never a single event, but a process of discovery, engineering and transformation. Yet what few realize is that it is the last part, transformation, that is often the hardest and the longest. In fact, it usually takes about 30 years to go from an initial discovery to a major impact on the world. Here’s what you can do to move things along.
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