Personal essays
In search of innovation
On the road
Of the past thirteen issues of this newsletter, twelve of them were written on the road. One in the past three months and that was two weeks ago.
I’m home now until the end of the year but I’ve spent most of the past three months traveling.
I left August 24 for the Netherlands and visited Leiden and the island of Texel. I took the train to London and then to Wales. I came home for four days in September before leaving for Spain, London (again), and Edinburgh. I came home at the beginning of October.
So, I was home for four days in September. Mostly, I was elsewhere.
My time at home coincided with a visit from my brother so the family got together at my mom’s house and then I was back on the road for a private course in California, home to wash my clothes and mow the lawn, then off to a combination vacation, cooking class, and conference in Italy.
I was home for seven days in October.
As for November, I was home the week of election day. That newsletter was the first I’d written from home since the middle of August. It was a warning of what’s to come and so far appears to be accurate - but that’s not the topic for this week’s newsletter.
I had one more quick trip to Amsterdam for a conference and Berlin for a private class and now I’m home and catching my breath and considering what I should do next.
I’m taking much of my inspiration from elsewhere.
Slogans
Years ago I was working on a project with Sun Microsystems as they were moving towards open sourcing a lot of their portfolio and brought in a bunch of people to help them navigate the process.
Don’t worry - this isn’t an essay about technology either.
I wasn’t militant about Open Source and it was really interesting to witness the discussions.
Someone proposed that Sun embrace the slogan, “Innovation happens elsewhere.”
They freaked out.
They told us that they had some of the best engineers in the world.
We said, “we know.”
We’re not saying innovation doesn’t happen here - we’re saying you need to recognize the innovation that happens elsewhere.
They were puzzled.
We backed up and tried again.
We said, yes, you have great people working for you - but don’t you think there are great people working for other companies that also have great ideas?
They shrugged. They guessed so.
“But,” they said, “you’re forgetting about the excellent people we have here.”
We went around and a around on this.
We couldn’t convince them that they already knew they had great people working for them - we were just trying to get them to notice that there were great people outside of their company.
Finally, they compromised. They agreed to the phrase, “Innovation happens everywhere.”
This was more than twenty years ago but we’ve seen it since.
All lives
The push back against the “Black lives matter” slogan was that “All lives matter”.
I don’t know that that was ever a question.
We can all agree that all lives matter - although… no, let’s just agree with that.
The narrative to the discussion was that those who opposed the phrase “Black lives matter” had misheard it as “Only black lives matter” and were offended.
I don’t know.
I think they heard it correctly.
They heard that lives mattered elsewhere and somehow felt excluded.
But any group takes it for granted that their lives matter. The slogan was intended to get them to accept that lives outside their group matter too.
Their solution - all lives matter - was a way of saying that lives matter everywhere.
But then, it turns out, we only have the energy and attention span to pay attention to the lives here. We forget about the elsewhere.
Average
On average, given the right circumstances and access to opportunity, I would expect the same percentage of any given population to be capable of driving innovation.
I worry when we assume that all of the innovation will come from whatever group we’re in.
I think of the many ways that America has benefited from immigrants.
Both good and bad.
We benefit from the great ideas and entrepreneurship of immigrants.
We also benefit, while trying not to think about it, from the low wage contributions to our economy.
So many of us don’t think about either of these groups.
These people think they live in Keillor’s Lake Wobegon.
We live in a country where we think all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.
I’ve been traveling for three months. Every time I get the opportunity, I go.
I go partly because I worry that the new administration is going to restrict travel.
Why would you need to go elsewhere? Everything you need is here.
I worry that anyone with a passport will be suspect.
The women are going to have to be strong.
The men are too good looking to pick fruit and do the jobs that need to be done.
And the children? That’s just not how averages work.
Take any group that you think you want to exclude. The same portion of their children are above average as ours. Start excluding people from our country and those that remain will suffer.
I watched a judge try to genuinely connect with someone born in China by telling her about his visit to the China pavilion at Epcot.
Why would you need to go elsewhere. We have elsewhere right here.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 243. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe