likely settle in as the primary arbiter of economic life in most of the world.”
Those who hate today’s modern monopolies can find a crumb of comfort in the fact that all this exponential change will not necessarily save even the biggest mega platform businesses from destruction. Consider that 88 percent of Fortune 500 companies from the 1950s are not just missing from today’s list, they are gone, bankrupt, or out of business. In the 1970s, IBM defined the business marketplace and was unstoppable. In the 1990s, Microsoft could do no wrong inside the electronics industry. And, in the 2000s, Enron looked to be the best or even only company ready to successfully ride the e-commerce wave of the future. Each of these companies either failed, went backward, or went bankrupt.
Today, the great majority of companies will fail to innovate and break through or they will move across a life cycle that takes them into thinking more like a status quo incumbent than a forward-looking insurgent.
And, in the meantime, outside, along some marketplace periphery, a wild-card company will be imagining a fresh-eyed innovation breakthrough that will someday turn the business world upside down. This is what the transistor did to the world of 1947, the integrated circuit to the world of 1958, the personal computer to the world of the 1990s, and the smartphone to the world of the 2000s. Perhaps here, out along this marketplace periphery, at a Starbucks table or garage or dorm room, will begin the gestation of the world’s next trillion-dollar company.
How Do I Cash In?
Creating or reinventing the next breakthrough mega-company almost certainly means putting to work some form of the insurgent innovation framework.
Driving innovation breakthrough means continually asking a version of the five fundamental questions that, in 1997, the newly appointed Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, asked his top executives when he began a well-nigh Shakespearian return to the company he himself created, the same company that, in 1985, had fired him. These questions formed the nucleus of the greatest corporate turnaround in the history of business:
1. What do you (really) do?
2. Why did you begin doing this originally—and now?
3. Who are you—and who do you need to be to win?
4. Where are you? (and where are your chokeholds?)
5. What’s next? (What keeps you up at night?)
Fundamental to answering these five strategically loaded questions is a commitment to thinking and acting anew. This entails not a single magical moment or dramatic epiphany, but rather a step-by-step journey. And it means taking a first step and walking toward a commitment—a decision—to begin the battle to innovate. This is our next subject.
CHAPTER TWO
Subdivide Light
And yet it moves.
—Attributed to Galileo Galilei
Over the course of some four centuries, the telescope, in its various technological iterations, has transformed the way we see both the universe and ourselves. The transformation became most dramatic since 1990 when the Hubble Space Telescope was launched and has since probed the very frontier of the universe, showing us reality as it existed some 13.82 billion years ago. This transformation has only multiplied as NASA launched its other “Great Observatories”—the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory in 1991, the Chandra X-ray Observatory in 1999, and the Spitzer Space Telescope in 2003.
Before these events, the most powerful perceptual and intellectual transformation wrought by the telescope came at the very beginning of its first years of use. In 1608, Galileo Galilei heard news of a Dutch spectacle-maker, Hans Lippershey, and the patent he filed for a device that could see beyond the sky. Within a day, Galileo got busy making his own version of this new, magical instrument. As with many inventions, the inventor and the innovator are not necessarily one and the same person. Lippershey deserves credit for inventing the telescope, but it was Galileo who made it an instrument of profound innovation.
Through this transformational lens—which in its first year allowed humankind to understand more of the universe than had been known over the preceding two thousand years—Galileo could see the mountains and craters of the moon and the daylit side of Venus. This revealed to him two earth-shaking facts. First, our universe was far bigger—and our place in it therefore far smaller—than previously understood. Second, those jagged mountains and pock-like craters were hardly evidence of the “perfect” and “eternal” work of a perfect and eternal God.
This convinced Galileo that the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus had been correct some hundred years earlier, when he said the sun and not the earth was the center of what came to be called the solar system.
The shift to the view of the sun as the center of the solar system took many years and, as innovation so often does, questioned, eroded, and even destroyed old beliefs. Chipping away at cherished faiths requires fresh faith in the new belief. And there is often a price to pay. In 1633, many refused to believe they on earth were not the center of everything. They took steps to suppress the heretical idea that it was not the sun moving, but rather the earth itself. Galileo was summoned to the Inquisition and ultimately compelled to retract his Copernican view. In a formal allocution, he was forced to say aloud that, in God’s creation, the earth was stationary.
Aging and ill, Galileo did as he was told, denying that the earth orbited the sun. But legend has it that, after pronouncing the required allocution, he whispered more to himself than to those present, “E pur si muove”—“And yet it moves.”
If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.
—Thomas Edison
The Copernican Revolution, validated by Galileo’s “E pur si muove,” is a central example of what the controversial philosopher of science Thomas S. Kuhn calls a “paradigm shift” in his 1962 classic, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Here he details the history and process of innovation, challenging conventional thinking about the progress of what he calls “normal science,” arguing that scientific progress is more episodic than accumulative, with breakthroughs occurring during periods of “revolutionary science.” Kuhn holds that, in revolutionary times, anomalies lead to new “paradigms,” which make it possible to ask new questions of old data, thereby superseding the mere “puzzle-solving” of earlier paradigms.
Each new paradigm changes the rules. The paradigm shift is therefore the product less of linear thinking than an exponential or revolutionary displacement in thinking. When he proved Copernicus correct, Galileo set into motion revolutionary thinking that transformed the prevailing Ptolemaic paradigm—the geocentric universe. Viewed in retrospect, we may conclude that Copernicus led to Galileo, who led to Kepler’s cosmology, and then ushered in Newtonian physics—progress begetting progress in serial fashion. Kuhn, however, argues that this linear interpretation is an ex post facto fiction. He sees this process of change as the product of revolutionary or breakthrough thinking. For purposes of analysis, he divides the process into phases:
• Phase 1 is the “pre-paradigm phase,” wherein no consensus exists on any particular theory.
• Phase 2 begins the operation of “normal science,” which puzzle-solves within the context of the dominant paradigm.
• Phase 3 witnesses the erosion of the dominant paradigm, which is shown to be increasingly unable to account for mounting anomalies. At this phase, the scientific community enters a crisis period.
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