Soldiers & Artists
Tim Cook or Jony Ive?
Tim Cook (current Apple CEO but for many years was Steve Jobs’ right hand man for keeping everything at Apple working smoothly) described himself as the “Attila the Hun of inventory” ruthlessly searching for operation efficiencies, supply chain improvements and shredding cost out of Apple’s systems. Safi Bahcall (in his brilliant book “Loonshots”) would refer to Tim Cook as a soldier. Someone who wants efficiency, data, metrics and action to make what’s already working work better.
Jony Ive, on the other hand, the driving force behind innovation in the IPod, IPhone and IPad among others, is not a soldier in the Tim Cook sense but an artist. An unconstrained creative searching for the next exciting thing… and just like other creative agencies and their love of “no process” he needs to be free to fail, over and over again.
Soldiers need certainty. Artists need freedom.
How do you stay innovative?
Safi’s theory is that to have a successful ‘innovation factory’, an organisation that produces hit after hit after hit no matter what happens in the market, you need both artists to create and soldiers to operate, but they must be kept in balance with each other.
To keep people with such strongly opposing ways of working together for the same goal, they have to be separated with separate tools and management practises (loose vs tight reigns) to control them. Neither group can do both halves of the task and neither group works well under the other’s leadership.
You need to love them both equally… if a new idea was a baby, artists think every baby is beautiful, whilst soldiers think every baby is ugly. You have to be able to manage the careful transfer of ideas and feedback back and forth between the two.
Steve Jobs would later become a master of balancing both his soldiers and artists allowing one group to be free to experiment and fail while the other was ruthless and highly structured. So far it looks like Tim Cook has managed to shred his soldier background and become a careful leader, able to balance both sides of the organisation. But with Jony Ive leaving, and perhaps no strong character yet to emerge to replace him, we’ll have to wait and see if things continue to prosper or if have they tipped too far to one side?
Listen to Safi Bahcall talk about his ideas about innovation that I discuss here.
An environment for failures to try again.
As we’ve seen, the failure rate for new ideas is almost absolute. If every idea needs to fail a few times before it is a success, you need an environment that can support and nurture that.
Safi presents a fascinating theory (for history nerds like me) as to why scientific advancement at around the same time plateaued in China when it started to flourish in Western Europe. His theory is that the stable empire of China, despite its great advances till this point, followed the instructions of the one all powerful Emperor. When the Emperor was satisfied with something, there was no need to explore further, so research in that area stopped. If he didn’t like something it was actively subdued. Ideas and developers who were out of favour had no where else to go. China at the time had few neighbours it could mingle with.
The rulers of Europe were no less authoritarian and no less fickle. The difference being that in Western Europe at this time there was a large number of different competing rulers. If an idea was not wanted in one kingdom, another kingdom nearby might try it. The competitive nature of having many ‘organisations’ all trying to do the same thing, next to each other, stimulated enormous growth.
Whilst this is interesting from a historical point of view, similarities can be drawn to the modern world of technology and idea development. If a film script is killed by one of the big movie studios, it tends to stay dead. If a new drug is killed by one big pharma it stays dead. There is no where else for these ideas to go. The ‘emperor’, so to speak, has said no.
But if the idea for a film is rejected by a small independent studio, operating in a dynamic eco-system of rival independents, the idea will float around until one of the others decides to give it another try. Through this method exciting breakthroughs can be made.
The encouraging environment also attracts risk takers and bold thinkers, knowing that they are freer to also move around with their ideas if rejected.
When things are out of balance but innovation is still happening, beware of the two traps:
The “Moses Trap”
“When ideas advance only at the pleasure of a holy leader, who acts for love of [ideas] rather than strength of strategy”
What about all those great innovators who have led their companies to massive success seemingly through their own vision alone? I’m thinking of Dyson, Edwin Land (Polaroid), early Steve Jobs and many others… great creators who built great companies based on a strong conviction in their ideas and their vision. They were right then, so they’ll be right now.
Safi’s hypothesis is that without the effective transfer of ideas, knowledge and feedback throughout the organisation, great organisations like this fall into a trap he names after the bible character Moses.
If every new project is either approved or killed by only the great leader, speaking down to them from on high, then you are vulnerable to missing the next big thing or leading the whole organisation to disaster. If only the boss’ vision is what counts, how can they realistically keep in touch with a world that is changing all the time? This is what happened with Polaroid and Apple in the early days and then at NeXT, Steve Jobs’ second company before coming back to Apple and changing his management approach (after accidental huge success at Pixar, a computing animation startup he bought, taught him he’d been doing it wrong all this time).
It’s a very common leadership scenario where only the boss can steer the direction of the company’s new creative projects and this works well until it doesn’t.
The “PARC Trap”
Another trap that innovative companies can fall into, and shares some aspects of the Moses Trap is named after Xerox PARC. A fantastically creative research body within the Xerox corporation (famous for its photocopiers, and not much else).
The PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) outside San Francisco pioneered and invented much of the technology that is considered ubiquitous to modern computing…
The graphical user interface featuring windows and icons
The computer mouse (to navigate the new user interface)
Laser printers
Bitmap graphics
WYSIWYG text editors
The Ethernet as a local-area computer network
But Xerox failed to commercialise any of it, instead constantly shedding their top engineers (and with them their cutting edge research) to new companies like Apple and Microsoft.
Xerox had successfully separated its soldiers from its artists, moving the artists to the PARC where they had free reign to be creative. But unlike the Moses trap where all decisions had to go via the one glorious leader which stifled communication between the two groups. Xerox effectively had no leadership at all. No one on the soldier side seemed to care what the artists were doing and as a result no ideas every made it to the other side for implementation and or feedback.
As a result the artists felt demoralised and sought people who would actually try to do something with their hard work and technological breakthroughs.
Seeking Balance
Being a physicist by training, Safi’s insight is summarised by a simple 2x2 matrix which uses the physical properties of water turning into ice as it’s inspiration.
Along the bottom is this separation of the two groups, artists or soldiers (water or ice). If the separation is weak, then no one can get anything done, because the two groups are incompatible. Keeping them apart (strong) means they can both be effective, but you risk either falling into the Moses or PARC traps.
On the vertical axis we have dynamic equilibrium, is there a continuous flow and exchange of ideas between the two groups? If both axis are weak then we have a stagnant situation where no one can do anything, but also no one tries. If the phase separation is weak, so the two groups are mixed, but there is a very healthy exchange of ideas, the two conflicting management practices needed for both to flourish conflict and you end up with chaos.
Safi believes you need both to be strong in order for successful innovation to continuously flourish.
I love this idea and the many historical examples in his book give it much strength. But I also see the logic neatly matching onto my own thinking of Innovative Balance between Why vs How. The Why being the artistic problem finders and the How being the organised problem solving soldiers.
Preservation vs Discovery
My way of thinking about Soldiers & Artists
I agree with everything I’ve read in Safi Bahcall’s book, it shares a lot of overlap with my own thoughts on the subject. Whilst he seems to class people as being inherently more soldier or more artist, the Tim Cook or Jony Ive example, I like to think of there being two modes in which people can operate for two different goals:
Preservation
Moving carefully to make what you have better but without jeopardising it.
Discovery
Moving quickly, breaking the status quo to find something new.
If you’re in a situation where you are trying something for the first time, the goal is discovery, to learn as much as possible. My advice would be to do things much quicker than you would normally. Much quicker than perhaps common sense tells you too. Move very quickly and seek constant validation every step of the way.
Prioritise speed... what does this mean in reality? For me, my natural tendency is to spend lots of time (perhaps months) thinking about which component is the right one for a particular project? Which bit should I use, or wondering about how something could work? I'm paralysed until I've done enough research that my choice is the correct one.
But more often than not, the moment the new purchase arrives, or the prototype has been made, I know instantly that it was wrong or could have been done in a better way.
Wouldn't it have been better to know that sooner? Think how much time I just wasted on a single decision.
If I had bought the item straight away, if I had made the prototype without worrying about what might go wrong until after I have the thing in my hands, over the course of the project I would save a huge amount of time and money and in the same time-frame make far more progress. This seems counter-intuitive and will go against much school training of avoiding mistakes and solving the problem in your head before you start.
Lots of quick, easily reversible decisions that build upon each other, "Iterating to Great"
This is not like jumping in (or being thrown in!) the deep-end of the swimming pool (as the expression goes), this is like running in from the beach and swimming out to the ocean!
For a piece of coursework... don't spend all week on an idea, spend an hour on one, ask someone for their thoughts, spend another hour trying to make it better, ask another person and so on! Build up from little steps rather than spending all your time on a single creative jump to a finished polished answer.
When should you move carefully?
If something is established and already working, the cost of failure may far exceeds the benefit of learning something new then you need to move exceedingly cautiously. Boeing experimenting with a new anti-stall flight computer software clearly was not done carefully enough for example. The risks just aren't worth the change. Think of an old antique piece of furniture that has a small mark, you wouldn't experiment with a new untested varnish on it?
If big companies with lots to risk want to be an innovative pioneer, follow Safi’s advice and separate it from the rest of the organisation.
Careful people struggle to move quickly (and visa-versa).
As companies / ideas / teams become more established, more known and older, they naturally attract more careful people. Making them more risk adverse, harder to question and more set in their ways.