going nonhis mind him just fell the police were going -- weren't playing the game the way it supposed to be played. ... >> welcome, everyone. welcome, good evening. my name's meredith, stern school of business alum and a member of the alumni council. i received my mba in 2004. i'm thrilled to be here with you tonight for an incredibly exciting program. it's great to see so many alumni joining us for this talk, and i'd also like to thank those who

are watching our feed via youtube. it's my pleasure to introduce melissa schilling author of the recent book "quirky: the remarkable story of breakthrough innovators who changed the world." in conversation this evening with justin fox, columnist at bloomberg view. professor schilling joined stern in 2001 and is currently the herzog family professor of management. her primary areas of research include innovation, strategy in high technology industries such as smartphones, video games and renewable energies. she's particularly interested in platform dynamics and breakthrough innovation which you won't find surprising based on the title of her new book. our moderator is justin fox, columnist for bloomberg view writing about business. he started there in january of 2015 after serving as editorial director and executive editor of the harvard business review. thank you both for being here this evening. quirky was published by public affairs just last month and is already a favorite amongst

academics and industry experts alike. the book suggests intellect alone does not create an innovator. after the talk we hope that you will join us as we continue the conversation during a reception and book signing right here in this room. royalties from all books sold tonight will go to s.t.e.m. kids nyc, an education company that provides a year-round, intensive suite of s.t.e.m. education programs for k-12 scholars. and now please i allow me to hand the stage over to melissa and justin. thanks. >> thank you. [applause] >> so we're going to talk about what's inside in book in a minute, but i wanted to ask you, melissa, first of all, how it came to be. and i, to start that, i mean, we heard the description there, but what do you do for a living? what do you spend your time doing most of the time? >> so i'm mostly a researcher and a teacher.

>> and the research is about innovation, strategy -- >> yes. most of my research is large scale empirical research. that's kind of what i would say i'm more known for. so big patent data sets, alliance networks, but i've also done a fair amount on creativity and learning. >> and the way, sort of the path to this book from that, i mean, clearly innovation is an issue here. there's also a paper you did with william balmall and ed wolf a few years ago. what was the goal with that? >> yeah. when i was working -- by the way, famous, famous economist who was here at nyu until just a couple years ago. we wanted to study what made people either entrepreneurs or inventers, and he had a high pot cyst about education and childhood tragedy. and we had some disagreements over lunch frequently, so we decided to do a really large scale project looking at inventers and entrepreneurs.

we collected about 600 on a list -- >> this was historical or -- >> yeah, historical going back to i want to say maybe going back 200 years. and we hired a team of students to collect biographical data on these people. and the challenge is that when you collect data on 600 people, what you get is data that's relatively thin. you don't get a lot of details consistently across all those people. so when we came away from that project, we had some information about their work histories and about their education, but i felt really unsatisfied. i felt like we didn't really have a lot of deep insights into what had made these people entrepreneur or inventers. but then something -- >> well, before we go on, who was right, you or him? be how did it turn out? inventers and what their education -- >> i can't remember which side he took and i took at the time. >> oh, okay. >> but we did find that inventers on the whole had more

education an intrp neuros. -- entrepreneurs. >> that has been changing over time or -- >> we -- yeah. definitely the presence of higher education has just gotten bigger over time, but for everybody. not just for inventers. >> okay. sorry, back to -- >> no. i have to say what really triggered this book was in 2010 i was teaching innovation strategy which i teach a lot of courses in strategy and innovation strategy, and i do -- i have a textbook in innovation. so i'm always revising and reading and staying up on the literature and innovation. and in 2010 when steve jobs was looking very, very thin, students started asking me, what's going to happen? how much of that magic is in the man himself or how much of it is actually just a myth, and it's really at apple? is that innovation capacity embedded in the structure and the routines of apple, or was it really him? will we lose it? is there a successor, can it be handed down? is and fundamentally what people wanted to know is, can i do

that? how can i have that innovative capacity? and i went to the research thinking, well, surely has answered this question. i looked at all the research on creative genius and psychological, and it really had not been answered. there is really not that much research on this topic, and in part because it's a hard question to go after in a rigorous way. as i discovered, it's hard to put together a large sample of people and think you're going to get serial innovators in there. you also can't get them into the laboratory. steve jobs or elon musk are not going to come down the laboratory and let you study them. so the methods were with just not well suited to studying outliers, and they're rare in our history, right? and to study them is challenging. so i, i decided to just study steve jobs not because i thought i could publish it, but because i needed to know at this point. i got curious, and i wanted to

know something about him. i had already taught the apple case for years, so i knew plenty about apple, but this time i wanted to know about steve as a person. so i read everything i could find written on him, watched all the videos, realize every recorded transcript, just studied his childhood, his friends, quotes from his girlfriends, quotes from his family. and a really odd thing happened during that time, is that i started to notice that he had some very unusual commonalities with another innovator that i had studied before. i'd written a case about dean cayman a few years before that, and you know dean cayman for having invented the segway personal transporter, but it's actually not his most important innovation. >> it's sort of his biggest flop in a lot of -- >> and it really bothers him that it's the thing people know him for. his biggest innovation was the portable drug fluid pump and also the portable dialysis

machine and prosthetic arms and ibot -- >> yo, i didn't -- my nephew has one of those. >> you'll have to write him a thank you note. dean cayman and steve jobs had some strange commonalities that at first i didn't understand how they could possibly be hit to innovation. then it hit me, i'm going to study eight serial breakthrough innovators, set up a rigorous process for selecting them so that there's no researcher bias. and i didn't even care if it turned into something i could publish. i knew it was a high risk project, i could find nothing useful or have it be all call tative and the control group is the rest of us. but i did it because it was pure fun. and it was so fun and so illuminating. and in the end, i learned so much. and it turns out not just about imagining innovators or selecting innovators and employees, but also about

parenting. you learn a lot about kids studying these people. >> so what you did then is sort of the same thing you did with jobs, but for all of these people. >> for all of them. >> you got every biography you could find -- >> yes. >> and, i mean, i guess there are not a lot of videos of marie curie -- >> no. >> how was it, the actual day-to-day, was it you'd sit and read and then keep it all on a spread sheet or -- >> yeah. all of those things. i was on sabbatical the first year, so i didn't even get out of my pajamas. i would read and read and realize. i had spread sheets, i had dry erase boards, i was drawing maps between people so i could do every comparison. you go through this process of identifying themes, and then one of the question things you have to do -- key things you have to do is try to find the exception to the rule to see if maybe it's just a spurious theme. the last thing you want to do is sucker yourself into believing something that's maybe just a coincidence. so in the book i really only

talk about themes, every theme that i talk about in the book is exhibited by at least seven out of the eight innovators. most of them are exhibited by all of the innovators. the exceptions, the two cases where it's seven not eight out of the innovators are actually really interesting of themselves, and maybe we'll end up talking about them. >> yeah. remembering the edison one but not the other one. >> yeah. >> so what you came up with is, basically, five kind of internal traits and then a couple of external factors. >> right. >> and what i was thinking was let's quickly go through, because that's sort of the meat of this book. >> okay. >> these traits. let's quickly go through the five and then go back to them. and so number one, a sense of separateness. >> yeah. >> what does that mean? >> i'm going to say one thing real quick too. as an academic, i'm careful about the word "traits," because psychologists have a pretty specific meaning. i tend to say characteristics, but it says traits right on the

cover -- [laughter] >> i can talk to that. >> a sense of separateness. all of the innovators except benjamin franklin exhibited this really strong sense of separateness where they felt socially disconnected, they felt detached from the world, they didn't feel like they belonged to it, and as a result, its rules didn't apply to them. >> we're going to come back to them, but we'll come back and spend more time. number two, extreme confidence. >> yeah. and actually, a specific form of confidence. so they weren't always sort of globally confident. i think if you met marie curie, you might not have concluded she was globally confident. but self-efficacy is task-related confidence where you have faith in your ability to overcome obstacles and achieve your goals. and a person with extreme self-efficacy will take on things that other people would think were impossible, which we see a lot over and over again in the innovators. >> number one, sense of separateness, number two, sense of extreme confidence, number three, the creative mind.

>> okay, it's an amalgamation of things in that chapter. this chapter i focus a lot on nicola tesla, really highlights the association between genius and madness. >> we'll get back to that and tesla. >> okay, fine. >> number four -- [laughter] well, i -- >> you're great at this, you're great. >> i have this crazy idea that it would be good to get them in everybody's head before we go back to them. >> yeah. >> number four, a higher purpose. idealism, i guess. >> yeah. seven out of the eight innovators were fiercely idealistic. they're pursuing a goal that they see is intrinsically noble and honorable, and it drives them. not money, not fame. a lot of them sacrificed their health, their reputation, their families, their leisure, everything in pursuit of this goal because it was an ideal. >> and the exception was? >> edison. >> number five, driven to work. not, like, in a car, but -- [laughter] although some might have been, i don't know.

>> yeah. they all loved to work. none more so maybe than edison. i often relate edison to a border collie, and if any of you know dogs -- i'm a dog person. bordering collies are known for being incredible work animals because they get such joy out of herding sheep. in fact, they'll herd anything. they'll herd cats and children and chickens. you don't have to train them, reward them. they do it because they love it. and a saying among dog people is if you don't give a border collie a job, it'll come up with its own, and you will not like it. but all of these people were like this. they were happiest when they were working hard. >> so a sense of separateness, extreme confidence, the creative mind, a higher purpose, driven to work. so let's go back to the separateness. especially because in innovation it seems like so much of the talk in recent years has been about group -- >> yeah. >> -- the power of groups, the power of collaboration. >> yeah. i have to say that this was a really surprising finding for me

in particular because a lot of the work i've done is on collaboration. i do work on networks, and everybody in networks believes that social networks are are hugely important not only for developing ideas, but for implementing ideas and getting them diffused. and so how could it possibly be that all of these serial breakthrough innovators didn't have strong social networks at all? they were actually very disconnected. it turns out it's actually -- the one i talked about the most is einstein. albert einstein could articulate it very clearly. first of all, he said he felt very detached from people, even his family. he loved humanity but not necessarily people individually, right? he loved humanity as like a global concept, but he felt separate from people. but he also felt it was very important to not become part of the herald and to think independently -- the herd and to think independently. and he believed his detachment and sense of separateness while on the one hand meant maybe he was a little less genial than

some people, and there was a tinge of melancholy in some of his words like that. it made him able to reject assumptions that held other people back, challenge received wisdom. and it's hugely responsible for his ability to cast off newtonian concepts that kept others from making the advances that he made. so being separate enabled these people to challenge rules, do things that other people thought were wrong sometimes or thought were impossible. they were often stuck with them even when other people argued against them. they were fundamentally unreasonable people. but as george bernard shaw points out, all progress comes from the unreasonable man. so we can see that very clearly in the unreasonableness, we can see it in elon musk today, steve jobs. >> well, but you think about tesla versus jobs and musk were actually able to get a bunch of other people to help them realize -- >> yeah. >> they were very separate and very different and hard to get along with in some ways, but they had this ability to make

things happen whereas tesla, and he struggled with that his whole life. >> nicola tesla, yeah, for sure. he worked mostly alone, mostly at night. >> and his greatest inventions ended up being taken off by other people. >> except that, yeah, we're still using a/c -- >> right. >> developed by tesla. this is him right up there. he not only invented a/c electrical systems, pretty much all of them, he also invented wireless communication which was for years attributed to marconi, and it finally came out in a big court case, and they finally realized he had ripped off tesla. he also invented lighting systems and the first remote-controlled robots. i actually think he, of everybody on here, was the smartest one. his mind was like a human computerated design system. he had this incredible photographic memory, so much so that he often thought he was having hallucinations because he would see things in front of him

because of his memory. and he could build a machine in his mind and turn it, run it, notice it was wobbling a little bit, adjust it, turn it, refine it, fix it, and when he was completely done, he would put it into physical form, and it would work perfectly. and while you're inclined to doubt that, many people witnessed him doing all kinds of advanced calculus and physics in realtime in his head. didn't have to write anything down. just a brilliant, brilliant man. >> did he have a lab like a block from here or a couple blocks from here? >> yes, the lab of his that burnt down was either on broadway or -- within a block of this building was tesla's lab. >> so bringing that back to, like, a company want want wantsw you put that together, this fact that very often the best ideas come individually with all this talk about collaboration and needing to work together. >> yeah. >> are there, like, simple methods you can do to -- >> absolutely.

i mean, one of the implications of, one of the things i talk a lot about in the book, and i can't take credit for this because psychologists have known this for years, and it's amazing it hasn't really gotten out into management. for instance, brainstorming groups don't work at all. and we've actually known this for a long time. but for some reason, it was so embedded in the norms of organizations ever since alex osborn wrote a book in 1956 and said that groups were better for creativity, we bought into that, and now it's almost heresy to argue they don't work. even when i presented it to my department group once, people looked at me horrified, because we like to do everything in teams, teams are very important. teams may be important for some things, they're not great for creativity. they're not great for number of ideas, quality of ideas, novelty of ideas. and the reason is that when you get together in a group, first of all, you might not want to put your craziest stuff out there, right? you might feel shy about sharing it. that one's pretty obvious.

the second one which is really fascinating is called production blocking, and it means that while i'm talking, first of all, you're not talking, but you're actually not even really thinking. i'm hijacking your thought process. i'm bringing you over to my ideas while i'm talking. which means that when people are working together, they're losing stuff. and then the third piece which the psychology field hasn't talked about much yet but you really understand it when you start to study musk and jobs, is that when people are in groups, a lot of people want to avoid conflict. a lot of people struggle with conflict so they make concessions. so they sort of sand off the sharp corners of an idea, and you end up with this compromise thing which isn't the beautiful, bold, unreasonable and unusual idea that you started with. so, first of all, that means let people work alone first. >> and then at some point -- >> at some point you can bring them together, but you've got to make sure they've developed

ideas, committed them out, they should be encouraged to be weird and unorthodox and to make bold hypotheses. you have to find a way to signal a very high tolerance for failure and a very high tolerance for unconventionality and weirdness. >> so the next characteristic, extreme confidence. i mean, that initially sounds like -- especially lately for some reason there's been a lot of talk about the dunning-krueger effect which is people who have very low abilities thinking they're brilliant. how do, how do you -- clearly, these people were very confident about themselves, and they were brilliant. >> yeah. >> how do you separate that? how do you figure out even internally -- >> yeah. so, you know, there's a strong selection bias on these people in that all the people i studied were geniuses. they were demonstrably geniuses. in fact, when i first went into this project, i actually didn't think steve jobs would turn out to be a genius, but he tested at

the tenth grade level when he was in fourth grade. his school recommended he be advanced two grades. his family said socially he wasn't ready for that, so they only advanced him one grade. so he was basically declared a genius by the age of fourth grade. but how do you tell if someone's just confident versus if someone's smart or -- >> yeah, i guess because, you're right, there are probably millions and millions of people who possess the extreme confidence that you describe here, it's just they aren't combined with all the other things. >> yeah. you need that -- you know, i have to, the confidence thing is interesting because efficacy, self-efficacy -- which is that task-related confidence -- it's not justifiable for innovation. it's valuable for a lot of things. it's valuable for productivity, for a sense-well-being. like, it's a trait that we should actively try to build in people because it's a powerful, empowering trait. and you can build it. you can build it in children, you can build it in employees, you can even build it in yourself. and the easiest way to, well,

the most effective way to build it is early wins. so when you experience this early win of doing something that you weren't sure you could do and maybe there's obstacles but you stick with it and you solve it, that ends up sending a very strong signal to your mind that you can overcome obstacles to achieve your goals. and in each of these innovators' lives, they have these early wins, and they talk about how important it was how at that moment they knew what they could do. they had this incredible confidence. steve jobs talks a lot about how building the blue boxes was a crucial moment. he said without that -- we discovered what we could do, and suddenly we knew we could do so much. >> these were the boxes that allow you to scam at&t -- >> yeah. to hack the phone system. they developed a system to hack the phone system. and he said if there had been no blue boxes, there would have been no apple. so that early win was really important. but it has implications for how you manage people and how you manage kids. like if someone is struggling

with something a little bit, sometimes our instinct is to jump in and help them, which is good for social bonding and for signaling a nurturing relationship, but it undermines self-efficacy. a lot of times you're better off saying i have faith in you, you got this, you can do it, stick with it. as long as you think it's something they have a chance at solving, you should probably let them work it through and solve it on their own because they'll build self-efficacy. and there's another way you can build self-efficacy that's even easier. do you want to know what that one is? >> sure. >> okay. so it's interesting, humans are an interdependent animal, and we're wired for social learning which means you don't have to actually go out and try berries to discover if they'll kill you. you learn from seeing if they killed anyone else, right? you learn about what you're likely to be able to jump over or what you can do by observing what other people can do. you're wired that way, that's your nature. so we can actually build self-efficacy through hero stories.

so when we have people like we do in school when we have kids, when we have them learn about someone they can identify with in some way -- not some superhero, but someone they can identify with -- struggling through some problem and then overcoming it and succeeding, they also learn something about themselves at that moment. you can build self-efficacy that way. >> so does "star wars" count, or is that too super hero-y? >> "star wars" probably counts. [laughter] yeah, yeah. >> the creative mind, i mean, it sounds kind of broad, but there's some specific things about how these people's brains work. >> yeah. i'd say the two biggest thing in that, that i found in that chapter that i talk about in that chapter, the first one is the relationship between intelligence and creativity. and we've always known that there was some relationship, but it's been unclear. because it's not the case that all geniuses will be creative, and it's also not the case that you have to be a genius to be creative or that all creative people are geniuses. and yet there's some relationship. and when you study it at a

neuroscience level, what you end up realizing is that, first of all, slight riel sated dopamine -- slightly elevated dopamine reduces your ability to screen out stimuli, it's called latent stimuli inhibition. so if you have modestly elevated dopamine, you feel more creative, you're likely to be more creative. it's actually the reason that parkinson's patients -- someone told me, a few years ago someone came to me and said did you hear that they've discovered that parkinson's people, people with parkinson's are actually much more creative? they suddenly discover all these artistic abilities, and they have all these talents that they never flew they had. and at the time i was studying nicola tesla, and i was thinking a lot about dopamine. and i said at that moment, it's not the parkinson's, it's the lev done pa they're treating them with because you treat people with synthetic dopamine. and sure enough about six months later, they figured out that's

what it was. so it makes you more create f, but it often enhances working memory and executive control. so people with modestly elevated dopamine are likely to not only attend to stimuli and be better at defocused attention, they can retain more of it in working memory. so it actually enhances things that look a lot like intelligence. >> how do we elevate our dopamine without getting parkinson's disease? >> yeah. well, elevating your done dopamine -- don't run out and take it, because if you stimulate those dopamine receptors which is exactly what's happening with cocaine or sex -- my kid's here, so i probably shouldn't have made that reference. but if your dopamine is too high, your brain -- which is this very smart animal of its own -- starts to turn them off. p which is exactly why a meth

addict can looks a lot like a parkinson's patient. they don't want to move, they don't want to talk, they don't experience pleasure from anything. so you don't want to elevate your dopamine that much. but if you just want to elevate it modestly like a good cup of coffee or a run or sex, those things all modestly elevate your dopamine. >> and so that was one -- >> that was one. >> that was one key. what's the other one? >> the other one turns out to be dopamine-related too. when you study nikola it is la, he has so many of these traits but turned up to a level so much higher than the other guys. my spinal tap reference is that he has these traits turned up to 11, and you notice things in him that you then start looking for in the other innovator, and then you find them, and they're things that nobody be's even talked about. when you study tesla, it's very, very clear that he had some form of dopamine disregulation. he's manic a lot of the time, he almost never sleeps. he sleeps two hours a night if

he sleeps at all. he has a lot of flowing, rushing thoughts. he's acutely sensitive to stimuli like the sound of a fly landing on a table hurts his ears. and lights hurt his eyes. so he tries to shut off all the lights. he's acutely sensitive. he also has signs of obsessive/compulsive disorder. anything spherical makes him feel a sense of abhorrence. if a woman wore pearls, he couldn't even be or near her. he had to calculate the cubic root of his food every night, and if it didn't divide exactly by three -- >> i have a big problem with that too. [laughter] >> yeah. so in him you see all these diagnostic criteria that he's got these imbalances, and one of them is this dopamine -- he had high, elevated dopamine, and he had mania. but then when you go back and you look at the other innovators, everybody but einstein slept significantly less than the average person. so marie curie and -- where are

they all here. so marie curie and thomas edison slept about four hours a night. benjamin franklin slept five hours a night. steve jobs was estimated to sleep between five and six hours, elon musk says he sleeps six and a half hours a night. the national average in the united states is eight and a half hours. the average globally for developed countries -- the one that's lowest is japan, and that's still seven and a half hours. so most of these guys slept significantly less than a regular person. >> because i always, like, that's the staple of ceo profiles and business magazines -- >> really that they don't sleep very much. >> and i always wonder if they're just idiots and they're going to kill themselves because they don't get enough sleep, or is there just this group of the population that just doesn't need it. >> i think it's very hard on your body to not get enough sleep, it can be very hard on your mind. but you also have to remember it's not that they slept less and became innovative. they slept less because their dopamine was elevated. when your dopamine is elevated

and you're manic, you're not tired. an insomniac doesn't sleep, but they feel bad, right? they wish they were sleeping. a manic person doesn't sleep and doesn't feel tired at all, and that's what, you know, these people i think a lot of them have a little bit of mania. >> there was one other thing in that chapter that you described that just i'd never thought about thinking that way. it's that we all, when we're thinking about things, follow association pasts where we're thinking about, oh, and that reminds us of that, and that reminds us of that. and one of the things that's different about these people who are very creative and good at it, it's not -- they go down the same paths, they just go much faster than normal people. >> yeah. faster and further. >> well, yeah. by the time five minutes later they're already moved on beyond the basic things and starting to move into the other things. it's not this radically different way of thinking, it's just they can make the connections faster. >> yeah. and that goes back to working memory and executive control. you know, they say elon musk always is thinking ten steps

out. like, he just does it automatically, that's how his mind works. and having that sort of long path of association means he's going to see the world differently than you do. he's going to see the implications of something, you know, what happens next, what happens next, what happens next, what happens next. or what caused that, what caused that, what caused that, what caused that. he's going to get the bigger picture quicker because he does ten steps out. >> well, elon's a good person to go into the next characteristic, higher purpose, idealism. and elon musk is somebody who i think there's just a lot of differing opinions about is he this -- what is this guy doing. is he just trying to do a big snow job on all of us, or is he this guy trying to save the world. >> yeah. >> what is -- he's idealist. what is his higher purpose? >> he's so interesting, right? anyone, if you actually take the time to study elon musk, there is no way you will come away from that thinking that he's

about the money. he is not about the money at all. he, you know, remember, he sold his first video game when he was 12. he taught himself to program at 10 and sold his first video game at 12. and today if a 12-year-old writes a video game, maybe you're not that impressed. but this was the early '80s when you were happy to learn basic, right? when the screens were in monochrome and it was all text-based. can you even begin to imagine teaching yourself to program at the age of 12 back in the early '80s? he ends up forming an internet company in college that he ends up selling to compact for millions of dollars. then he starts a financial payments company, part of which ends up becoming paypal which he sold to ebay, and by the time he sells that company, he's got $180 million. he doesn't need money anymore. he's not about -- you know, at that point he could have just bought an island and drank mow here toes. but he asked himself what can i do that will really make a meaningful difference in the world.

and he looked around and heard that nasa was not going to take us to mars, and he thought, what? what do you mean nasa's not going to take us to mars? so he rolls up his sleeves and is like, okay, well, i'll just have to take us there myself. his whole purpose -- the reason he got involved in tesla was because he ability withs to get us on to a renewable energy alternative. he originally wrote the business plan for solar city. some people don't realize that. p and then he handed it off to his cousins to develop into a company to create renewable energy. and then mars is the backup plan. because he thinks if some cataclysmic event comes and our planet is ruined, the only way the species will be preserved is if we have a colony on mars. so he really wants to get us to marsing. and he wants -- mars. and he wants it sod badly that he won't take spacex public because a board of directors would probably force him to make changes that would lessen the chance of getting to mars. so like a feverishly idealistic

person. >> what were some of the other big ideals that these people had? >> so nikola tesla believed if he could invent a free energy system, he could eliminate all human toil, human physical work and that, therefore, we could focus on more creative endeavors. he also really believed, this was -- his lifelong ambition was to develop a global wireless communication system because he believed that if we could talk to each other around the world, it would obviate war. and i think he'd be a lissing disappointed -- little disappointed to find out that would not be true. >> when i read that i was thinking, yeah, that's ridiculous. on the other hand, i guess we have had fewer wars than -- >> the problem is other things changed at the same time that enabled war. >> yep. >> you want some other ideals? >> yeah, yeah, sure. >> okay. so benjamin franklin, keenly idealistic person, developed a 13 virtues of life that he published and had people follow. his whole goal was around

industriousness and in a eking galtarian and free america. he became so committed to that ideal that he ended up severing ties with his son because his son was a british loyalist. ing he chose his ideal of a free america over his son. marie curie -- let's talk about dean cayman for a minute. dean cayman be, this is a guy -- it's said that he didn't technically finish high school. he definitely didn't finish college, but he was a tinkerer. and when he was a high school kid, he started tinkering, and he was so effective at it that he got the contract to light some of the major museums around new york. he also, i think by maybe around the age of 20, got the contract to do the ball drop on new year's. and so he was a tinkerer. he was a talent ld, talented electronics person, totally self-taught. and then at some point he saw a person having to go in for kidney dialysis. his brother was a doctor, and he saw you have to be connected to

a large machine, and you have to be there for hours, and it's miserable, right? and it disrupts your job, it disrupts everything about your life. he thought it disrupts your dignity. and he thoughting i can solve that problem. and so he invented the world's first portable dialysis machine, then the world's first portable drug infusion pump. then he saw someone in a wheelchair one day struggling to get up a curb, and he just felt so bad for that person. so he started developing the ibot mobility wheelchair which can climb stairs, and it can also stand up on two wheels and balance so that you can be eye to eye, because he felt like that was a very important part of restoring someone's dignity, was to enable them to stand up and look people eye to eye. and it was -- it turns out that balancing something on two wheels is really complicated, and a lot of people told him it wasn't possible. the wheels have to adjust and spin back and forth very quickly. but it's that technology that led to segway. so his idea was to reduce human

suffering. >> now the non-idealist of the bunch is edison. >> yeah. >> you looked and looked, and you just couldn't find any? >> i looked and i looked. i really thought surely us wing go to find -- surely i was going to find an idealistic edison somewhere. you fall a little in love with anybody you study intensely, but i had a very conflicted relationship weedson. it sounds like we -- with edison. he electrocuted a lot of dogs which really bothered -- and also a cow and a horse. not the elephant, that's a hoax. don't believe he electrocuted the elephant, but he did electrocute over two dozen dogs. if boys came in with a dog off the street, he'd give them an orange. he did it so that people would adopt dc leklying call current, which was his. i thought surely i was going to find the idealism in him somewhere, and he actually has something close to an

autobiography that was written in 1919 -- most people don't realize that -- and it's a big tome of work. it's hard work, reading that one. but i found a quote in, like, a magazine or a newspaper published in the early 1900s that just really relieved any search, any -- just relieved me from my search. he basically wrote i don't like to think about the highfalutin things. i'm not interested in those big ideals. i stay pretty close to the ground. i'm a practicalling man. that thinking is for other people. so he's telling you in his own words he's not an idealist, but he loved to work. he said work made the earth a paradise for me, and i never intend to retire. and some people assume that edison was like a very materialistic man because he liked to win, and he liked to get patents. but one thing that's worth knowing about him -- because he did screw over tesla at one

point, and a lot of people begrudge him that, as they should. he helped found the company known as general electric, and it was general electric edison, and they maneuvered him out of that, and he subsequently basically lost all the money from that company. and at one point i think it was francis upton or charles batchelor who sate to him, well, do you realize that you've lost the four million you made from all of your electrical enterprise. and he thought about it for a minute, and then he. shrugged and he said, yeah, but we had a good time doing it, didn't we? [laughter] >> early on his goal was to get independent enough to be able to work on whatever he wanted to work on. >> he did not like to have a boss. >> that's what he ended up getting to do. >> he had a fierce need for autonomy that a lot of these guys have, that need for autonomy. >> the hard work part, i mean, on the one hand, yeah, of course they've got to work hard, on the other hand, again, there's lots of talk lately about, hey, if

you don't work so many hours, you can be more productive. >> yeah. >> these people basically worked all the time. >> yeah. it's funny because a friend of mine, morton hanson, just published great at work, and a big theme is that you shouldn't work so hard. but what morton's theme is we create a lot of busy work for ourselves, and we work on things that don't matter very much. i hope i get this right, because if i don't, i'm going to pay for it. he thinks you should work on things that really matter, focus on those things and not all the other stuff. what you have to understand about these people was that they were always working, and it was on something that really, really mattered. in fact, this goes back to the very first thing i noticed about steve jobs and dean cayman, strange little quirk that they both have in common. they both wore the exact same clothes every single day. and marie curie also wore the same clothes, and albert einstein was known to wear the same clothes every single day. and in einstein and curie's time, people didn't have as many

clothes. but in steve jobs' time and dean cayman's time, it's hard to understand why they would wear the same clothes every day. but then you have to remember they didn't care what other people thought of them because the -- they were separate, right? they were socially separate. so the rules that are applying to all of you don't apply to them. so that need to dress in different clothes goes away. and at the same time, they're focused on something else more important. and somebody asked dean cayman why do you wear the same clothes every day, and he looked down at his clothes -- he always wore a blue work short, jeans and boots -- and he said, well, i wear work clothes when i'm working, and if i'm awake, i'm working. [laughter] >> there's also been this discussion i think partly because so many people saw the example of steve jobs of just you remove one decision -- >> right. >> -- in the morning. like every decision takes a little bit out of you, and thus removing that, i mean, i think like obama when he was president had this rack of identical suits, and he just put them on.

>> yeah. >> and jack dorsey at twitter, total jobs imitator, does the same thing. >> and elizabeth holmes. >> but it made her get to work quicker, so in that sense it worked. so we're going to go to questions in a little bit. one thing -- so where are the microphones? how does that work? they're back there, okay. we can talk a little bit, but start thinking about things you might want to ask. so those were the five individual characteristics, and i'm just going to do it again, a sense of separateness, extreme confidence -- >> they're not going to have to buy the book if you tell all of this over and over. >> i don't know. >> just kidding. >> a higher purpose, driven to work. and then the other two sort of chapters about these people were kind of about the external factors. >> yeah. >> timing and resources, basically. >> yeah. >> and, i mean, one of the things you look up here, and it's a bunch of white guys except marie curie. >> yeah. >> and actually the fact that

she was able to do this -- >> remarkable. >> -- this interesting set of -- so she's from poland, right? >> right. although -- so she grew up in the area that was occupied by russia and at a time when the russian czar was trying to eliminate all polish heritage. you couldn't learn polish literature or history in school. they were trying to russify that entire area. and, you know, she came from a family of intellectuals, her father and her mother were teachers. her father was a professor. and they believed very firmly in education. but one of the things that really made a difference in marie curie's life is that this movement came about called polish positive i'll. so -- positivism. they got trounced, they lost really badly, and lots of lives were lost. and then they realized we can't fight russia that way, they're too big and strong. we'll never be able to defeat

them. so they decided we will save poland by preserving heritage through science. we will make sure poles are smart and educated and contribute to science and are remembered that way. and they had this movement where they said every pole must be educated, even the women. and this is at a time when most of europe didn't allow women to go into higher education, women didn't tend to get educated beyond the age of 14, and most universities in europe didn't allow women in. but polish positivism said women, like all poles, had to be educated. and marie curie was very committed. her name wasn't marie curie back then. she became involved in this thing called the flying university which was a secret, covert school program that would be held in basements and in churches or in your back room of your house that would secretly educate women. women educating other women. so she was running with a group of these smartest and fiercest women of her time, helping

educate other women. and then when she -- she was a brillen i can't, brilliant person. she learned to read well ahead of all her siblings who were older, and she was studying math and science. but again, she wasn't allowed to go to university in warsaw. so she worked as a governess and graped up money and -- scraped up money and traveled to france alone and enrolled in the sorbonne and skypeed by a mighter -- scrapes by a meager existence and got her ph.d. overcoming remarkable odds. once you hear all that story, you suddenly realize, well, i see why there aren't more women. because what she had to do to become a woman of science was intense, right? i also studied grace hopper who was a little bit later in time. grace hopper didn't meet the criteria of serial breakthrough innovator, but another important innovator. she invented computer programming language, and she talks a lot about the fact that women were not welcome in business and science during her

time. and this is like world war ii, that era. even during her time women weren't welcome in business and in science. so, but war broke out, and she joined the navy, and she became a naval admiral, and she invented computer programs in the navy. and because she was an admiral, hp and ibm and deck, those companies would talk to her because her uniform and military protocol essentially neutered her, right? it made her gender go away, right? so, you know, both of these cases really illustrate that women were at a severe disadvantage to get into education, to get the kind of education you need and to get into science as were people of color, as for a long period were jews also. so a lot of hurdles. and when you're looking at a sample of people who make it on to most famous innovator lists, you're looking at a long time window when the very end of that time window women would have had

any possibility. so marie curie was really the, an outlier in that respect. >> right. anyone have a question? we have a mic here -- yeah. here's somebody. >> thank you. how did you come up with the eight people that you did? be you know, most of them are americans. did you not look at europeans as much? >> yeah, i -- most of them are -- they're not mostly american, actually. elon is south african, marie curie was polish, tesla was -- he's from croatia, but he's serbian descent. albert einstein was, he denounced his german citizenship. benjamin franklin was american and thomas edison was basically american, although his family spent part of their life in canada, and dean cayman is american. but this goes back to as an empirical researcher i wanted to get myself out of the process as

much as possible because i thought i could inadvertently introduce bias. people say you should look at william shockley, he was a weird guy. i was like, now i can't look at william shockley because you just told me he was a weird delay guy. [laughter] you can't select on those variables. everybody had to be multiple -- towards the top, within the first 20 of most famous inventor or innovator list. you're letting the world identify the people they see as most important. they had to have really big innovations, more than one in their lifetime, preferably many across their lifetime. because if somebody only has one big innovation, it's very hard to separate person from context, right? right time, right place can give you one invention. it doesn't tend to give you a lifetime of invention. so they had to be serial breakthrough innovators. there had to be people about whom there were multiple

biographies and first-person accounts. i wanted to hear their own voice in their own words. i realize the letters x there were video transcripts from a lot of them. mariemarie curie has not only sl biographies of her, but one's written by her daughter which is very poignant. you're not unduly influenced by one biographer. and then in the end, also i found that there was a lot of discensus about innovators in fields like art or music because that he donic taste element met that people felt like fads, once you're famous, you might stay famous. so i ended up deciding to use only people from science and technology because i felt like it was easier to ascertain that there was a breakthrough innovation. not purely objective, but more objective. and there was definitely much more consensus. if you look at the lists of technology innovators, you get the same people over and over

again. there's lots of consensus about it. and when i finally had a set and it was, frankly, all white men and marie curie, then i picked people from different time periods and different industry sectors so you didn't want to just take everybody who came out during the i.t. boom, right? and you can't want to take everybody just from the electrification era, although you could have. you want people from different time periods in order to, again, separate person from context. >> hi. so i recently was listening to a series that "freakonomics" podcasted on ceos, and one of episodes covered different research studies that have been done trying to find commonalities between ceos. they didn't really have a -- they had a hard time finding commonalities, and there were actually a lot of diverse characteristics. what do you think makes being a good leader -- which i'm sort of put anything the ceo category -- >> different from being an

innovator? why was it easier to find the commonalities? although it sounds like your research was not easy, by any means. but why does that sort of provide a unique set? >> yeah. so, you know, some of these guys were ceos but not necessarily ceos that we admired for their ceo-ing, if we can turn that into a verb. ceos, to be a good leader, you have to have good people skills. good people skills are something that are very valuable in a huge range of applications in your life. so it now becomes harder to separate ceos from people who are successful in just a non-ceo role, right? it's probably also, there's probably also a lot of ceos with a lot of variance, and the trick would be identifying the people that you think -- like to do this kind of study you'd have to pick people that everybody agreed were the best ceos of all time, right?

could we identify the eight best ceos of all time, and if we did an in-depth study of those people can where we had case comparisons of every one and studied them rigorously, we would probably find commonalities. i bet you'll find high self-efficacy, for instance. it's a trait you're going to in a lot of people who are really driven. whenever you see somebody who's really driven and does things that other people would find too hard or too scary, there's probably going to be a self-efficacy part of that story. but it just hasn't been looked at that closely. i don't know how they structured that study. >> there's probably lots more people -- >> so you end up with this thin layer, again, of what's in common. thank you. >> other questions. yes. blue coat. oh, up here. yep. >> hi. i have a question about the connection between their success and education. >> yeah. >> so some of these people are

often pointed to as you don't need higher education to be extremely successful in your field. in fact, it might have the opposite effect, and education actually might suppress the creativity portion of the process. so i'm wondering among these people what percentage were, you know, highly educated -- >> yeah. >> -- formally, which percentage were not and whether there was any connection between it and their success and their innovation. >> i'm really glad you asked that question, because it's one of the big takeaways from the book. i have to say as a business school professor you expect to hear that education and access to capital mattered a lot. if they don't matter, then my role's a little bit in doubt. all of these people started with no money at all. in fact, some famous stories that are just, like benjamin franklin arrived in new york with enough money for exactly two rolls of bread. nikola tesla got everything

stolen on the boat, he arrived with four cents in his pocket. elon musk came from canada at the age of 17 and worked on farms and in a boiler room to put himself through school. and most of them -- this is an interesting thing, a lot of them had far less formal education than you would expect given their fields, and even the ones that had education, a lot of them had a conflicted relationship with education. so if we start at the top, elon musk, he had -- has two undergraduate degrees, but he says he never went to class, he just showed up to take the exams. he was only interested in classes he thought were relevant to his purpose. he didn't think he should have to take the other classes, so those annoyed him. marie curie, i'm going to leave her out. she's the exception here. but nikola tesla was actually a brilliant student but became addicted to gambling and dropped out of school. steve jobs, you know, dropped out of school but said it was the best thing that ever happened to him because he stayed on campus and started

taking the classes he wanted to take. albert einstein had this really difficult relationship with his professors. got a ph.d., but i think he was at the bottom of his class when he graduated and very conflicted, talked a lot through his life about how school can destroy the creativity and independence of a person and really in some ways he resented the educational process. but he was self-taught. and i'm going to come back to that, so give me a minute. benjamin franklin had almost no schooling, as you know. really very, very little schooling because his parents couldn't afford it, and they apprenticed him to be a printer -- indentured him to be a printer with his brother. thomas edison was born with this abnormally large head, so doctors thought he was fragile, that there was actually something wrong with him. they initially told his parents you better not send that kid to school. and then at one point when he was about 7 or 8, he -- they enrolled him in school, but he was distract bl and hyperactive, and he overheard one of the

teachers calling him addled, and he went hope to tell his mother which means scatterbrained and can't concentrate, and his mother got so mad that she marched down to the school and told the teacher this boy has more brains than you yourself and took him out of school and home schooled him from that point on. so he had just a couple of months of schooling. some of you have read a story about a letter -- that's actually a hoax, the letter -- but by the time he was 12 he had read all the great physics texts, philosophy texts in the library. between his mother and him, they just sat and read all these incredibly sophisticated books. and then dean cayman, as i mentioned, also not a good student. but, so you're tempted to think education doesn't matter. maybe education hurts. that's not the case. what happened was that these people consumed vast amounts of education. they were ravenous for books. they were always teaching themselves.

but they needed toen consume education -- to consume education at their own pace n their own direction, in their own format, right? the structure of a standard curriculum just chafed them. it was like having their wings held in by a cage. they needed to fly down pasts of their own choosing, and they all did, right? so elon musk, he was an intense reader. he read every book in the public library in his town, and then he started in on the encyclopedia and committed large parts of it to memory. and he said in a rolling stone interview recently i was raised by books, books and then my parents. so education mattered. but it, it was not standardizedded -- standardized education didn't suit them. they needed personalized, self-driven education. >> but at the same time, they were all looking for what are the most important texts to read. i mean -- >> yeah. >> -- they weren't, like, going off on some whatever. they were mostly actually really good at picking, okay, this is what i have to read to learn how

to shoot a rocket off and bring it back to earth, whatever else. >> right, exactly. >> this respect for expertise, just not for the way classes work. >> yeah, yeah. i have to say i've been a professor now for 24 years, and students are heterogeneous. they don't think they are. when they answer their evaluation form, they act as if they think the entire class is just like them, but they're wrong. they're all taking wildly different stances on what worked in the class for them. some people are more visual learners, and some people are more outside story. some people like structure. some people, frankly, would do better in an environment with ambient noise, some people need silence, right? some people want to work in long stretches, some people like to work in short fits and bursts. so, you know, i've been writing about this lately that i think the challenging with standardized education is that kids aren't standardized. >> do we have -- okay.

we are done, but we will be around so people can ask questions. this has been really fun, thanks. [applause] >> thank you both for a really terrific and thought-provoking conversation. we have some gifts that i'm going to hand to you in just a second as a token of our appreciation. so 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. and don't forget that the royalties from the books sold tonight will go to s.t.e.m. kids nyc, so thank you very much for coming. [applause] [inaudible conversations] ..

and today, we continue to bring you unfiltered coverage of congress, the white house, the supreme court and public policy events in washington d.c. and around the country. c-span is brought to you by your cable or satellite provider. provider. >> and we're pleased to be joined now by author melissa del bosque, here is the book called "bloodlines". the true story about the fbi, and a dynasty. there's a lot packed into the title. i want to start something different, melissa del bosque. this is a quote by fbi agent or you're speaking in the words of fbi agent scott lawson. >> uh-huh. >> host: cute, nuevo