in very general terms that is very dangerous because we can trust that president trump which we do something ridiculous but we don't trust him to negotiate with north korea we can trust harvey weinstein could make great movies but not his behavior around women so when people say they trust amazon they say they have confidence that when they make an order and it will show up but they don't necessarily trust them to pay taxes or treat employees well so this is the first thing that i would like you to think about when we talk about trust, keep in mind institutions and leaders and individuals that trust is contextual you can trust me to write an article but that

empowers me. . . . . it's great to see so many alumni and i would like to thank those that are watching on youtube. it's my pleasure to introduce melissa author of the recent book a remarkable story of the genius breakthrough innovators

who changed the world in conversations with justin fox, columnist for bloomberg. currently the family professor of management or primary areas of research include innovation strategy and high-technology industries such as smartphones, video games into renewable energy is she's interested in platform dynamics creativity and breakthrough innovation which you won't find surprising based on the title of the new book. the moderator is a columnist for bloomberg news writing about business started in january of 2015 after serving as the director of the business review. thank you both for being here this evening. published just last found a favorite among academics and industry experts alike the book suggests intellect doesn't create a breakthrough innovator and i that is more personal, social and emotional that enableenables this to breakthrot just once but again and again.

after the talk we hope you'll join us as we continue the conversation during the reception book signing in this room. royalties from all books will help and education company that provides a year-round intensive suite of education programs for k-12 scholars and now let me hand thingthehand things over td justin. [applause] >> we are going to talk about what is inside of the book and then how it came to be. to start that, you heard the description but what do you do for a living most of the time class >> the researchers large-scale empirical that's what i am more known for indie fare out on

creativity and learning and the way sort of the past from the book. a few years ago described this, what was the goal with that? he had a hypothesis about education and also about childhood tragedy. we have agreements over lunch frequently so we decided to give a large-scale project looking at investors and entrepreneurs. >> was this historical? >> going back maybe 200 years we hired a team to collect

biographical data and the challenge is when you collect what you get is relatively thin. you don't get a lot of details consistently so when we came up with that project we had some information about their work history and education but i felt unsatisfied like we didn't really have a lot of deep insight into what made these entrepreneurs. >> what was the hypothesis and how did it turn out? >> i can't remember which side he took. we did find they had more education and entrepreneurs didn't have advanced degrees as inventors often did. it's gotten bigger over time for

everybody, not just inventors. what triggered this book i was teaching innovation strategies and i have a textbook in innovation so i'm always revising and reading and staying up on the innovation and in 2010 when steve jobs was looking very thin, students started asking me what's going to happen. how much of that magic is in the man himself and is that innovation capacity in the structure and routine of apple or will we lose it and cannot be handecan it behanded down and fy people wanted to know how can i have that innovative capacity. i went through the research thinking surely somebody's answered this question. i looked at all of the innovation in management and it

hadn't been answered. they are not going to come down to the laboratory and let you study them. so the message that we had been trained to use wasn't well suited to stud study our playerd peoplout flyers andpeople are ft flyers, serial breakthrough innovators are rare in our history and to study them is challenging. if. i watch all the videos and

recorded transcripts, just studied the childhood and friends "-end-quotes from his girlfriend and family in a really odd thing happened during that time i started to notice that he had some very unusual commonalities. i di'd become a case about dean camkamen a few years before that time, and you know him for having invented the personal segway transporter that it's actually not his most important innovation. it really bothered him. the biggest innovation was the portable which completely revolutionized the care for diabetes and the portable dialysis machine and prosthetic arms. >> you have to write him a thank you note. so they have some really strange

commonalities that at first i couldn't understand how they could possibly be connected to innovation and then it hits me i'm going to do projects and study eight serial breakthrough innovators in and a process for selecting them to keep myself out of the process so that doesn't restructure the bias and i didn't care if it turned into something i could publish i knew that it was a high-risk project i could end up not being able to publish it because it is all qualitative and the control group is the rest of us. it was so fun and ill illuminating and i learned so much not just about managing indicators also about parenting like you learn a lot about kids. >> what yowhat cute it is the se thing you did with jobs but for all of these, every biography you could find is not in the

videos of marie. i was drawing maps with people so i could do comparisons. maybe it is just a coincidence come in the book i only talk about everything i talk about in the book is exhibited at least by seven out of the eight innovators. most art exhibited by all of the innovators.

the two cases where it seven ouf eight or interesting of themselves. what you came up with this basically five kind of internal traits and then a couple of external factors. let's quickly go through the meat of this book. let's go through the five and then go back to them. so, number one, a sense of separateness. what does that mean? >> i'm careful about the word trade so i intend to say characteristics. all of the innovators sent exhibits with a strong sense of separateness where they felt

socially disconnected and detached from the world, they didn't feel like they belonged to it and the rules didn't apply to them. >> number two, extreme confidence. >> they were not sort of always globally competent. you might not have concluded she was globally competent at the self-efficacy is past related where you have faith in your ability to overcome obstacles and your goals. it's an amalgamation into this chapter which i focus on a lot highlights the connections between intelligence and creativity and also why there is

a disassociation between genius and mad us. it was an ideal. the exception was? number five, driven to work not like in a car although some might have been a. they all love to work some more so than edison. i have to relate him to a border collie and if all of you know i

am a dog person. they are known for being incredible work animals because they get such joy from heard sheep. they do it because they love it. don't get a border collie a job it will not come up with its own and you won't like it. but they were happiest when they were working hard. >> so the sense of separateness, the creative min mind in a highr purpose driven to work. let's go back to the separateness especially because in the innovation so much of the talk in recent years has been about the power of groups and collaboration. a lot of the work i've done is on collaboration. i've done work on the network study leave social networks are hugely important not only for

developing ideas but implementing ideas and getting them diffuse so how could it be all of the breakthroughs didn't have the social networks at all they were actually disconnected and it turns out the one who talked about the most is einstein. he pointed out first ball he said he felt very detached even from his family he loved humanity does not necessarily people individually. it was like a global concept that he felt separate from people and also felt it was important to not become a part of the herd and to think independently and his detachment and separateness meant he was a little less genial than some people. it is hugely responsible for his

ability to cast off the concepts that kept them from. to challenge rules and do things other people thought were wrong or impossible even when other people argued against them they were fundamentally unreasonable people but as george bernard points out all progress comes from the unreasonable man. we can see that very clearly. >> they were hard to get along with in several ways but they have an ability to make things happen where he struggled with that his whole life. >> he worked mostly alone and at night. his creations ended up being

taken off by other people. he had not only all of the systems but also invented wireless communication which was attributed and finally came out in a court case. his mind was like a human computer aided design system with photographic memory so much so he thought he was having hallucinations. they turn it, refine it and fix it. he would put it into the

political for me and it would work perfectly. the lab that burnt down was either right here on west broadway but it was nicolas tesla's lab. how do you put that together with this fact that very often the best ideas come individually with all this talk about collaboration and needing to work together are there other simple methods you can do? >> one of the things i talk about in the book i can't take credit and they've known this for years but for instant

brainstorming groups don't work at all and we've known this for a long time it was so embedded in the organization ever since they wrote a book and 56 and said that they were better for creativity we bought into that and when i presented them to the department and people would look at me a little bit horrified because they like to do everything in teams and believe that they are important to. they are not great for creativity or a member of ideas and the reason is that when you get together in a group you might not want to put your craziest stuff out there. it was production blocking and why i'm talking you're not even really thinking. i am hijacking your thought

process and bringing you over to my ideas which means when people are working together the third piece is when the psychology field hasn't talked about much yet but you understand it when you start to study when people are in groups a lot of people want to avoid conflict and struggle with conflict so they make concessions. they sort of sand off the sharp corners of their idea and it isn't the beautiful bold unusual idea that you started with. what people work of the first. then at some point you can bring them together but they have to commit to ideas and develop them out and they should be encouraged to be weird and unorthodox and make bold hypotheses. you have to find a way to signal

a high tolerance for failure and unconventionality and weirdness. >> the next one, extreme confidence sounds like there's been a lot of talk about the effect of people who have a very low ability of thinking they are brilliant. clearly these people were confident. how do you separate back and figure out -- >> all th >> all the people i studied were geniuses. they were demonstrably genius and when i first went into this project i didn't think steve jobs would turn out to be a genius but when he was in fourth grade his school recommended he be advanced to grades and his family said he wasn't ready so they will be advanced in one grade said he was basically the

genius by the age of fourth grade. how do you tell if someone is dressed confident or smart? >> there are millions of millions that you described here combined in all of the other things. >> self-efficacy which is that confidence isn't just valuable for innovation but it's for a lot of things like productivity and sense of well-being that we should try to build a trade in people because it is empowering and you can build it in children and even endorse self. the easiest most effective way to build it is early so when you experience this doing something you were not sure you could do and maybe there's obstacles you stick with it and sold it.

it was a crucial moment and he discovered what we could do and we discovered we could do so much. so that early one was important. but the implications for how you manage people and how you manage kids like if someone is struggling with something a little bit sometimes their instinct is to jump in and help them which is good for social bonding and signaling and nurturing relationships but it undermines the self-efficacy.

if it's something they had a chance of solving you should let them work it through because they will build self-efficacy. humans are an interdependent animal that relies on interdependence and we are wired for social learning which means you don't have to go out and try to discover if they will tell you you learn about what you are likely to be able to jump over to. it's someone they can identify with struggling through some problesomecomplement and overcod

succeeding they think about themselves at that moment you can build self-efficacy. >> does star wars count? >> it probably counts, yes. we've always known that there was some relationship, but it's not the case all geniuses will be created and it's also not the case that you have to be a genius to be creative and yet there is some relationship when you study it at the neuroscience level what you end up realizing is that.

did you hear that they discovered parkinsons people are actually much more creative and they discove discovered all of e artistic abilities and have all of these talents they never knew they had into this time i was studying and thinking about dopamine. it's not the parkinsons because you treat people with parkinson's with synthetic dopamine and later they figured it out, but this makes you more creative and enhances working memory and executive control the people with moderately elevated

dopamine are likely to not only attend to stimuli but they can also retain more of it. >> elevating your dopamine. i probably shouldn't have made that reference but your brain which is a very smart animal starts to down regulate your receptors and turns them off. you don't want to elevate that much but if you want to elevate

it through a cup of coffee or run those things all elevate your dopamine. when you study nicolas tesla he has so many of these trades but it's so much high air you notice things in him that you then start looking for in the other innovators and no one even talks about so when you study nicolas tesla it is very clear he has some form of a dopamine dysregulation. he is manic a lot of the times and sleeps two hours a night if at all. it's like the sound of a fly landing on the table and the

light hurts his eyes. he have to calculate the cubic root of his food and then divide it by three or he couldn't eat. so with him you see all of these criteria and one of them he had high elevated dopamine but then when you go back and look at the other innovators they slept less than the average person, so benjamin franklin slept five hourhours a night and steve jobs estimated to sleep between five and six and he slept about five

to six hours a night. the national average in the united states is eight and a half hours. the average for the developed countries, the one that's lowest is japan and it's still seven and a half, so most of them slept significantly less. >> it's like that's a staple of cethe stableof ceo profiles in s magazines and i always wonder if they are idiots that are going to kill themselves without enough sleep. >> i think it is hard on your body cannot get enough sleep. they slept less because they're dopamine is elevated to a. a manic person doesn't sleep and doesn't feel tired at all and that is what a lot of them have

a little bit of media. >> one other thing in that chapter that i never thought about, when we are thinking about things if we follow the association path to the. >> by the time five minutes later they've already moved on beyond the basic things. it goes back to the working memory and executive control. he is going to see the

implications of something and what happens next and what happens next or what caused that. he's going to get a bigger picture quicker. >> the next characteristic is higher purpose of idealism. and elon musk is someone who had a lot of differing opinions about what is this guy doing is he just trying to do a big snow job on all of us his idea is what is his higher purpose. >> key is not about the money at all.

he ends up forming an internet company in college for many millions of dollars a. at that point he could have just bought an island and drink but she -- lotito. he hurt nasa wasn't going to take them to mars and he thought what do you mean they are not going to take us to mars?

he believes they are going to run out of energy and the reason he originally wrote the business plan for the city was the one that came up with the idea of a. they have a colony on mars and he wanted s wants it so badly ht take them public because the board of directors of force him to make some changes that would lessen the chance. >> he believes that he could invent a free energy system he could eliminate all human

physical work and therefore we could focus on more creative endeavors and he also believed his lifelong ambition was to develop a global wireless communication system. it's fewer than before. they developed the 13 bridges of life and have people follow his whole goal industriousness. he became so committed he ended up severing ties with his son.

marie kerry, dean kamen, this is a guy who didn't typically finish high school. he was a talented electronic person and then at some point he saw a person go in for kidney dialysis and thought you ha sawe connected to a large machine and you have to be there for hours and it's miserable. it disrupts your job and everything about your life.

so he invented the dialysis machine then he saw somebody in a wheelchair struggling to get up a curb and he felt so bad for thathe person said he started developing the mobility wheelchair that could climb stairs and also stand up on two wheels so that you can be eye to eye. it turns out the balancing something on two wheels is complicated and a lot of people told them it wasn't possible, they have to be able to back up very quickly that it's that technology that lends the segway so his idea was to reduce human suffering. >> i looked and i looked and i thought i would find one

somewhere. you fall a little in love with anybody of you study and tensely but i had a very complicated relationship and it sounds he electrocuted a lot of dogs in a cow and a horse and not the elephant, that is a hoax, but he did it electrocute over two dozen dogs. he did it just to prove the electricity was too powerful to be safe which was the tesla electrical currents of people with about his dislike of the conflicted relationship with him but i thought i would find the idealism and he has something close to an autobiography written that most people don't realize that it's hard work of readinreading that one. i found a quote in a magazine or

newspaper published in the early 19 hundreds that relieved me from my search he basically wrote i don't like to think about these things. i'm not interested in those big ideas. event is for other people so he's telling you in his own words he's not an idealist that he wants to work he says it was a paradise for me and i never intend on retiring and some people assume he was much realistic but one thing worth noting, he also got screwed over by j.p. morgan because he helped found the company that became general electric.

at one point it was probably charles batchelor said to him you realize you've lost the 4 million that you got from the enterprise and then he thought about it and said that we had a good time doing it. early on the goal was to be independent enough to work on whatever he wanted to work on. >> he had the need for autonomy. >> on the one hand they have to work harder but on the other hand maybe if you don't work so many hours you can be more productive dot they basically were told the time. >> a friend of mine published the big scene in the book that

you shouldn't work so hard that we work on things that don't matter very much. he thinks he shoulshe thinks shn things that matter. what you have to understand about these people is they were always working and it was on something that really mattered. this goes back to the first thing i noticed they were the same clothes every single day and albert einstein was known to wear the same clothes. thomas edison wore the same basic suit all the time and in steve jobs time it's hard to understand why they would wear the same clothes every day that you have to remember they didn't care what other people thought about them because they were

separate, so the rules that are playing to all of you don't apply to all of them so they need to address them goes away and at the same time they are focused on something else more important and when somebody asks why do you wear the same clothes every day he wears a blue work shirt and jeans and shoes and satisfy where work clothing when i'm working and if i'm awake i am working. so there's also been this discussion because people saw the examples so you remove one decision and it takes a little bit out of you. >> it made her get to work

quicker. we are going to go to questions in a little bit. start thinking about things you might want to ask. those were the five individual characteristics with a sense of separateness, extreme confidence. they were about the external factors defining and resources. you look out and it's a bunch of white guys and the fact that she was able to do this was an interesting set of so they grow up in the area occupied by russia at the time they were

trying to eliminate the polish heritage you couldn't learn polish literature in school or use the polish language they were trying to rectify that entire area and she came from a family of intellectuals with her father and her mother were teachers her father was a professor and they believe very firmly in education but one of the things that made a difference is the movement came about called polish positivism with the military means they don't trounced they lost. badly and realized we cannot fight that way. we will never be able to defeat them so they decided we will save poland by preserving the heritage of student science we will make sure they are smart and educated and contribute and

they have this movemen had thise they said each must be educated even though women and this is at a time most didn't allow them to go into how your education and most universities didn't allow them in but they said that when men like all head to the educated and marie curie was very in the cause and became involved in this thing called fy15 university would be held in basements or churches or your house that would secretly educate women so she was running with a group of the smartest and fiercest of time and then she learned to read well ahead of her siblings and she was

studying math and science but she wasn't allowed to go to the university so she worked with the government and scraped up a little money and enrolled in the bond and scraped by and got her phd overcoming remarkable odds. another important innovator invented computer programming language and women were not welcome in business and science during her time this was like world war ii.

she became a naval admiral and because she was an admiral, they would talk to her because the uniform of the particle made her gender or go away. both of the cases illustrate they were at a familiar disadvantage as were people of color so when you look at a sample of people you are looking at a long time window they wouldn't have had any possibility, so she was the outlier in that respect. anyone have a question lacks the

>> how did you come up with the people that you did? did you not look at europeans as much? >> nicolas tesla was from serbian descent and i would count him as americans and albert einstein denounced the german citizenship and benjamin franklin was american and thomas edison was basically american and defend dean kamen is american, so this goes back to as an empirical researcher i wanted to give myself out of the process as much as possible to introduce the bias. people come to me and say you should looshould look at wesleys a bearde -- by towards the top n

the first 20 on the top multiple statements let the world identify the people they see as being most important they had to be see real breakthrough innovators which means they had to have big innovations more than one in their lifetime preferably across their lifetime because if somebody only had one it's very hard to separate the person from context. it doesn't tend to get a lifetime invention. they had to be people about whom there were multiple biographies and first-person accounts i wanted to hear their own voice and words it's not like literally hearing that there were video transcripts and marie

curie has several biographers one is written by her daughter which is a very poignant biography so they had to have multiple biographies so that you are not influenced by just one. at the end i also found that there was a lot of consensus about innovators in the field like art and music because that taste element meant once you are famous you might stay famous so i decided to chase people away from science and technology because it was easier to objectively ascertained that there was a breakthrough innovation and the criteria is more objective and it was definitely more consensus if you look at the list of technology innovators you get the same people over and over and then when it was all white men and marie kerry we picked people from different industries so you didn't want to just take everyone who came out during the

bloom and everybody just from the electrification area. you want people from different time periods to separate from different contexts. >> i was listening to a series that was broadcasted and 100 different studies to find commonality between the ceos. they had a hard time finding commonalities. what do you think makes being a good leader which i'm putting in the category different from being an innovator although that sounds like the research is not easy why does that provide a unique set the way that it is

more variable? >> you have to have good people skills that are very valuable in a huge range of applications becomes harder to separate from people that are successful at. you would have to take people everybody agreed were the best of all times.

it is a trait that you are going to find in a lot of people that are driven when you see someone that is driven or does things with other people that they would find it too hard or too scary there's probably going to be a self-efficacy part of the story that this hasn't been looked at closely. i don't know how they structured their study. >> you end up with this layer that is in common. >> i have it home question about the success in education. some of these people are roast n pointed to as not needing education to be successful and quite the opposite effect of education and might suppress the

creativity portion of the process. it's not whether there was any connection between it and their success and innovation. >> that is one of the takeaways in the book. as a business school professor you expect to hear access to capital matters in education matters because if they don't matter and the role is a little bit in doubt. all these people started with no money at all with some famous stories with enough money for two rolls of bread and nicolas tesla got everything stolen on the boat so he arrived with a poem in his pocket and came over at the age of 17 against his parents wishes to put himself through school and none of them had a lot of money and most of

them this is an interesting thing they have far less education than you would expect. a lot of them had a conflicted relationship with education. so as we start to talk, he had two other graduate degrees. he was a brilliant student of the candidate to gambling and dropped out of school. he said it was the best thing that ever happened to him. he started taking the classes he wanted to take. albert einstein had a difficult relationship with his professors that i think when he graduated it was very conflicted and he

talked a lot about how the school could destroy the creativity and independence of a person and someone who presented the educational process but he was self-taught and i will come back to that so give me a minute. as you know he had very little schooling because his parents couldn't afford it. thomas edison was born with an abnormally large head so doctors thought he was fragile and there was something wrong with him so they said you better not send that kid to school and then when he was about seven or eight day iand rolled him in school but he was distractible and hyperactive and overheard one of the teachers so he went home to tell his parents that they called him scatterbrained and he couldn't concentrate and his mother got so mad she marched down to the

school and told the teacher this boy has more brains than you youyouyourself have taken your self you took them out and homeschooled him so he only had a couple of months of schooling. he did have almost no schooling but when he was 12 he read all of the great physics tests in the library between his mother and him they sat and read all of these incredibly sophisticated the independent has mentioned it's also not a good student but you're tempted to think education doesn't matter. maybe it hurts. that's not the case. what happened is they consumed a vast amount of vegetation. they were always teaching themselves but they needed to consumer education at their own pace and direction and format. the structure of the center of curriculum was like having their

wings held in by a cage they needed to fly down their own choosing and they all did. he was an intense reader he read everything and then he started in on the encyclopedia and he said in a rolling stone interview i was raised by books. so education mattered, but it wasn't standardized on a standardizestandardizededucatio. they needed personalized. >> they were looking for the most important. they were mostly good at picking this is what i have to read. >> with respect to expertise just not for the way the classes

work. >> i've been a professor now for 24 years. they don't think they are heterogeneous when they enter the forms for the acts like the class is just like them but they are taking different stances on what worked for them. some people are more visual and some are more auditory and like more structure in the conversation. some people do better in an environment with some delays and some people need silence. some people need to work in short bursts. i've been writing about this lately. the challenge of the standardized education is that they are not standardized. >> okay, we are done but we will be around so people can ask questions. [applause]

thank you for the thought provoking conversation. we have some gifts i will give you as a token of our appreciation. join us now for the reception. you can purchase books over there at the table and then melissa will be signing books in the back. don't forget that the royalties from books sold tonight will go to stem kids. thank you so much for coming. [applause]

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