In The Innovators (2014), Walter Isaacson focuses on high-impact innovation since 1843 — during a period that extends back to Ada, Countess of Lovelace and her association with Charles Babbage — until 2011 when an IBM’s computer (“Watson”) won a special two-game, three-day Jeopardy! exhibition match in 2011 against all-time champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.
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“Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats.” Howard Aiken
These are among the lessons to be learned from the story of innovations that created the digital age:
o First and foremost is that creativity is a collaborative process. Members of a team know and can do far more — and do more and do it btter — than any one of them can…and ever will.
o That said, the digital age may seem revolutionary, but it was based on expanding the ideas handed down from previous generations. The collaboration was not merely among contemporaries, but also between and among generations.
o The most productive teams have been those that brought together people with a wide array of specialties.
o Throughout history, the best leadership has come from teams that combined people with diverse but complementary styles.
o Another key to fielding a great team is pairing visionaries, who can generate ideas, with operating managers, who can execute them. [channeling Thomas Edison] “Visions without execution are hallucinations.”
o “The best way to create the future is to invent it.” Alan Kay, Xerox PARC
o The future will not be controlled by machines. Rather, by those who achieve high-impact results working in partnership with machines.
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Walter Isaacson (1952- ) is an American journalist who has written biographies of Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Jennifer Doudna, and Elon Musk. As of 2024, Isaacson is a professor at Tulane University and, since 2018, an interviewer for the PBS and CNN news show Amanpour & Company.
He has been the president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan policy studies organization based in Washington, D.C., the chair and CEO of CNN, and the editor of Time.
The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution was published by Simon & Schuster (2014).