>> welcome everyone. welcome. good evening. my name is meredith 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 is great to see so many alumni here joining us for this talk and i like to think those who are watching via youtube. my pleasure to introduce melissa, author of the recent book quirky the remarkable story of the genius of breakthrough innovators who changed the world. they joined sterling and 2001 and is currently the professor of management. her primary areas of research include innovation strategy such as smart phones, video games and noble energy. she's particularly interested in platform dynamics, networks, creativity and break their innovation which you won't find surprising based on the title of her new book. our moderator this evening as justin fox. 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. the book suggests that it does not create a breakthrough innovator but it's one personal, social and emotional perkiness that enables true genius to break through not just one again and again. after the talk we hope you will join us as we continue the conversation during a reception and book signing here in this room. royalties from all books sold tonight will go to stem kids nyc, an education company that provides year-round intensive suite of stem programs for k-12 scholars. please allow me to hand stage to melissa and dustin. [applause] >> we will talk about what is

inside this book in a minute but i wanted to ask you first of all how it came to be. to start that and you read the description but what you do for a living? >> i'm mostly a researcher and teacher. >> and the research is about innovation strategy? >> most of it is empirical research that is what i would say i'm more known for so big patent data sets but also i've done on creativity and learning. >> and the past to this book from that and clearly innovation is an issue here but there's a paper you did with william and ed a few years ago that would describe it and what was the goal that? >> by the way, will's famous economist who was here at nyu until just a couple of years ago and we wanted to study what made people either entrepreneurial or inventors and had a hypothesis about education and childhood tragedy and we had disagreements

over lunch so we decided to do a large-scale project looking at inventors and we collected 600 -- >> and this was historical? >> yes, going back to 200 years and we hired a team of students to collect biographical data and the challenges that when you collect data after 600 people what you get is relatively thin with not a lot of details consistently so when we came away from the project we had information about work and education but i felt unsatisfied and i felt like we didn't have a lot of deep insights into the inventors but -- >> before we get on and you were right but what were the hypotheses -- what their education? >> i can't remember which side

he took and i took at the time. we did find inventors on the whole had more education than entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs do not have advanced degrees and inventors often did. not always but more often -- yeah, definitely the presence of higher education has gone bigger over time but for everybody, not just for inventors. >> sorry, back to -- >> i have to say that what triggered this book in 2010 i was teaching innovation strategies and i do a textbook and innovation so i'm always revising and saying up on the literature and in 2010 when steve jobs was looking very, very thin students started asking me will happen and how much of that magic is in the man himself and how much of it is a mess and is that innovation capacity embedded in the organization structure and routines of apple or is it him and will we lose it and is there

a successor and can be headed down? fundamentally what people wanted to know was how can i have that innovative capacity and i went to the research and thinking surely someone has answered this question and i looked at the research and i looked at the research on innovation and management and it really had not been answered and there's not much research on this topic and in part it's because of the hard question to go after in a rigorous way so as i discovered with well it's hard together put a large sample of bingo get breaker innovators. we also can't get them into the laboratory. he called steve jobs or elon office they won't come to the laboratory let you study them. the message we had been trained to study people were not suited to studying outliers and these people are fundamentally outliers. innovators are rare in our history and to study them is

challenging. i decided to study steve jobs not because i could publish it but because i needed to know at this point i got curious and wanted to know something about it. i had already talked the apple case for years so i knew plenty about apple but this time i wanted to know about steve as a person's i read everything that i could find written on him and watched the videos and read every recorded transcript and studied his childhood and his friends" from his girlfriends and family and nothing happened during that time is that i started to notice that he had very unusual commonalities with another innovator that i studied before and written case about dean kamen a few years before that time. dean, you know him from having invented the subway personal transporter but the segway is not his most important innovation. >> that was his biggest flop and it bothers him that it's a thing that people know him four. the biggest innovation was the portable drug infusion pump that

completely revolutionized care for diabetes and the portable dialysis machine and prosthetic arms and -- >> i didn't know that. my nephew has one of those. >> dean and steve jobs had strange commonalities that at first i couldn't understand how they could possibly be connected to innovation and it hit me that i'll do a multiple case study research project and study and set up a rigorous process of selecting them to keep them out of that process so it does not reach [inaudible] and i didn't even care to turn into something i could publish and i knew it was a high-risk projects and i knew i could find nothing useful or not publish it because the control group is the rest of us but i did it because it was. fun and it was so fun and so illuminating and in the and i

learned so much and not just about managing innovators but parenting. you learn a lot about kids studying these. >> we did then is what you did with jobs but for all of these people. yet every biography find and i guess there's not a lot of videos of marie curie. >> no. >> how did you the actual day today did you send read and then keep it all in the spreadsheet -- >> i was on sabbatical the first year so i didn't get out of my pajamas but i'd start reading and read and read and i had spreadsheets and dry erase boards and maps between people to have comparison and go through the process of identifying themes and the killing you to do is when you thank you have a theme you go through and try to disprove it and find exception to the rule to see if it's because last

thing you want to do is succor yourself into believing that it's a coincidence. in the book i only talk about everything i talk about in the book is exhibited by at least seven out of the eight innovators and most are exhibited by the innovators. the exceptions there are two cases where it's seven not eight out of the innovators are interesting and maybe we can talk about that. >> i remember the a similar but not the other one. what you came up with was basically five internal traits and a couple of external facto factors. what i was thinking was let's quickly go through because that's the meat of this book and the straits and let's quickly go through and go back to them. number one, a sense of separateness and i'll say one

quick thing. >> as an academic i'm careful about the words traits because they have a specific meaning of what you can call a trait so i tend to say characteristics but it says treat on the cover so. [laughter] all innovators exhibited this really strong sense of separateness where they felt socially disconnected and felt detached from the world and they felt they didn't belong to it and the rules didn't apply to them. >> we will come back to it but let's spend more time on each one so sense of separateness is one. number two, extreme confidence. >> yeah, a specific form of confidence. they were always globally competent. if you met marie curie might not have concluded that she was globally confident but self-efficacy is confidence where you have faith in your ability to overcome obstacles and achieve your goals and someone with extreme self-efficacy would take on things that other people would think were impossible. >> number one sense of

separateness, number two [inaudible], three the greater mine. it's an amalgamation of things in a chapter in this chapter which i focused on nikola tesla has highlighted the connections between intelligence and creativity and why there is disassociation between genius and madness. >> we will get back to that in tesla. number four -- [inaudible conversations] number four, a higher purpose. idealism. >> seven out of eight innovators were fiercely idealistic. they were pursuing a goal that they thought was intrinsically noble and honorable and it drives them. not money, not fame, a lot of them sacrifice their health and reputation and their families and their leisure and everything in pursuit of this goal because

it was an ideal. >> and the exception was? >> edison. >> number five, driven to work not in a car but like -- although some might have been. [laughter] >> they all love to work. none more so than edison. i often relate edison to a border collie and if anyone of you know dogs for collies are known for being incredibly hard workers because they get such joy out of hurting sheet. they will hurt cats and children and chickens and you don't have to train them or reward them they do it because they love it. a saying among thought people is if you don't give a border collie a dog it will come up with its own and he will not like it. all of the people were like this and they were happiest when they were working hard. >> sense of separateness, extreme confidence, creative mind, higher purpose, driven to work. let's go back to the separateness. especially because in innovation

how much of this talk in recent years has been about the power of groups and collaboration. >> i have to say that this is a surprising finding for me in particular because the work i've done is on collaboration. i do work on networks and everybody in networks believes that social networks are hugely important not only for developing ideas for importing ideas and getting them diffused so how could possibly be that these breakthrough innovators didn't have strong social networks at all. they were disconnected. it turns out -- the one who talked about it the most was albert einstein. he articulated very quickly. he pointed out that he felt very detached from people even from his family and that he loved humanity but not necessarily people individually. he loved humanity as a global concept but he felt separate from people. he also felt it was very important to not become part of

the herd and to think independently and he believes his detachment and sense of separateness on one hand meant that he was less genial than some people in there was a twinge of melancholy but it made him able to reject assumptions that held other people back. it made him challenge and it's usually responsible for his ability to cast off newtonian concepts. being separate enabled these people to challenge rules and do things that other people thought were wrong sometimes or thought were impossible and they were often stuck with them even when other people argued against them and they were fundamentally unreasonable people but as george bernard shaw point out all progress comes from the unreasonable man. you can see that clearly in the unreasonableness and élan must today and -- >> think about tesla versus jobs and mosque were able to get a bunch of other people to help

them realize that they were separate and different and hard to get along with in some ways but they had this ability to make things happen whereas tesla struggled with that his whole life. >> yeah, for sure. tesla worked mostly alone and mostly night. >> 's greatest inventions and not being taken off by other people. >> except that were still using electrical that were developed by tesla and some people don't know that much about him but i think he not only invented ac electrical assistance and payment all of them but he also invented wireless medication which was for years a committed to marconi and finally came out to the court case and he realized that he had basically ripped off tesla. he also invented lighting systems in the first remote-controlled robot and i actually think of everybody on

your was the smartest one. his mind was like a human computer and 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 could build something and the machine in his mind and turn it and run it and noticed it was wobbling and adjusted and turn it and refine it and fix it and when he was completely done he would in physical form and would work perfectly. while you're inclined to doubt that many people witnessed him doing all kinds of advanced calculus and physics in real time in said and didn't have to write anything down. brilliant. >> did didn't he have a lab a couple blocks from your question. >> guess, it was either right here on west broadway or within a block of this building was his lab. >> bring that back to a company that wants to -- how do you put

that together this fact that very often the best ideas come from individually with all this talk about collaboration and needing to work together? are there simple things you can do? >> absolutely. one of the implications and one of the things i talk about in this book is because psychologist have known this for years and it's amazing it hasn't gone out into management but brainstorming group don't work at all. we have known this for a long time but for some reason it was so embedded in the norms of organizations ever since [inaudible] wrote a book in 1936 of the groups were better for creativity we bought into that now is a most heresies argue that they don't work. even when i present to my department as they bring some groups don't work people looked at me horrified because we like to everything in teams and we believe that teams are important the problem is teams may be important for some things but

they're not great for creativity and not great for number of ideas or quality or novelty and the reason is when you get together in a group you might not want to put your crazy stuff out there. might feel shy about sharing it. that one is obvious but the second one which is fascinating is called production blocking and means that while i am talking you are not talking but you're not even really thinking. i'm hijacking your thought process and bringing you over to my ideas while i'm talking and it's hard for you to elaborate your ideas while i'm talking which means that people are working together they are losing stuff. the third piece which the psychologist field has not talked about much yet but you understand it when you study mosque and jobs his that when people are in groups a lot of people want to avoid conflict and people struggle with conflict so they make concessions so they stand off the sharp corners of their idea and you end up with this

compromise thing which isn't the beautiful, bold, unusual ideas that you started with. that means let people work alone first. >> at some point bring them together. >> at some point but you got to make sure they've committed to ideas and develop them out and feel no fear and 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 high tolerance for unconventionality and weirdness. >> the next characteristic extreme confidence and that initially sounds like lately for some reason there's been talk about the [inaudible] affect which is people with very low abilities thinking they are brilliant -- clearly, these people were very confident about themselves and were billions but how do you separate that and how do you figure out even internally? >> yeah, there's a strong

selection by these people and all the people i studied were geniuses. they were demonstrably geniuses. in fact, when i went into this project i didn't think steve jobs would turn out to be a genius but steve jobs tested at the tenth grade level when he was in fourth grade. the school recommended he be advanced to grades and his family said socially he was ready for that so the only advanced him one grade and he was basically declared a genius by the age of fourth grade how do you tell if someone is just confident versus someone smarts or -- >> you are right. there are probably millions of people who possess the extreme confidence that you describe here but they aren't combined with all the other things. >> the confidence thing is interesting because efficacy which is that path related confidence is not justifiable for innovation but for a lot of

things. it's valuable for productivity and for sense of well-being. it's a trait that we should actually try to build into people because it's a powerful empowering trait and you can build it in children and employees and build it in yourself. the easiest way and the most effective way to build it is early wins. when you experience this early when of doing something that you weren't sure you could do and maybe there's obstacles but you stick with it and solve it that and upsetting a strong signal to your mind that you can overcome obstacles to achieve your goals in each of these innovators life they have these early wins and they talk about how important it was and 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 because without that -- we discovered what we could do and we knew we could do so much. >> these were the boxes that allow you to hack the phone system.

>> they developed a system to attack the phone system and he said that there had been no blue boxes there would've been no apple. it has indications for how you manage people and kids. if someone is struggling with something our instinct is to jump in and help them which is good for social bonding and for signaling and nurturing relationship but it undermines self-efficacy and a lot of times you're better off saying i have faith in you and you got this and you can do it and stick with it. if you think they have a chance of solving it let them forget through and solve it on their own because they will build self-efficacy. there is another way you can build self-efficacy that is even easier. it is interesting that humans are in interdependent animal that relies on wired for social learning which means that you don't have to go out and try berries to see if they killed you you see if they killed anyone else. you learned what you would likely jump over by observing

what other people could jump over and that's our nature and so we can build self-efficacy through hero stories. when we have people like we do this is what gets. 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 a problem and overcoming it and succeeding they learn something about themselves at that moment. build self-efficacy that way. >> that does "star wars" count? [laughter] >> "star wars" probably counts, yeah. >> from the creative mind. it sounds broad but there are specific things about how these people's brains work. >> yeah, i would say the two biggest things that i found in that chapter that i took part in the chapter and the first one is the relationship between intelligence and creativity. it was always known there was some relationship but it has been unclear. not all geniuses will be

creative and is not the case that you have to be a genius to be creative. if there is some relationship and when you study it at a neuroscience level what you end up realizing is that first of all, slightly elevated dopamine causes you to experience divergent thinking and enhances your attention and reduces your ability to screen out stimuli and called the stimuli and missions and so if you have elevated dopamine you feel more creative and likely to be more creative and is a reason that parkinson's patients someone told me years ago someone came to me and my colleagues that did you hear that they discovered that parkinson's people are actually much more creative and they suddenly discover all these artistic abilities and they have these powers they didn't know they had in at the time i was studying niclas tesla and i was thinking a lot about dopamine

and i said at that moment it's the level of dopamine that their training with them. you treat parkinson's with synthetic dopamine. sure enough, six month later they figured it out. this dopamine elevation makes you more creative but it also enhances working memory and executive control so people with moderately elevated dopamine are likely to not only attend to stimuli and be have better attention but retain more of it in working memory so it enhances things that look like intelligent. >> how do we do that without getting parkinson's? >> well, yeah, elevating your dopamine -- if you elevate your dopamine chronically you don't run out and take the medicine because if you do it or stimulated the receptors or cocaine or meth or even sex and i have kids your social made that reference but if your dopamine is too high too much your brain which is a very smart

animal of his own starts to down regulate your dopamine receptors and turns them off. it's exactly why a meth addict when they get off of mass looks a lot like a parkinson's patient. you want to move and they don't want to talk or experience pleasure from anything. you don't want to elevate your dopamine that much but if you just elevated modestly bigger good cup of coffee or run or sex those things all moderately elevate your dopamine. >> was the other key? >> the other is dopamine related to. when you study tesla he ends up -- you so many traits that turned up to a level so much higher than the other guys. my final references that he turned it to 11 and you notice things in him that you then start looking for and the other innovators and find them and they think no one has even talked about when you study tesla it's it clear that he had

some form of dopamine to circulation. he's manic a lot of the time and almost never sleeps and he sleeps two hours a night if he sleeps it all and has a lot of slowing thoughts and he's acutely sensitive to stimuli like the sound of a flight landing on a table hurts his ears and lights hurt his eyes and tries to shut off the lights. he's acutely sensitive and has signs of ocd so he is anythin anything -- if a woman or pearls could be near her. he had to character late the cubic root of his food every night and if it didn't divide exactly by three he couldn't eat it used of builds -- >> i still that -- >> use this criteria for his imbalances and he had high elevated dopamine and he had media. you go back and look at the other innovators everyone but einstein slept significantly less than the average person.

marie curie and where are they all here -- marie curie and thomas edison stopped about four hours a night, dean slept four hours a night and benjamin franklin up to five hours night it steve jobs estimated that between five and six hours night and elon musk says he sleeps six and a half hours a night and the national average and united states is a half hours. the average globally for developed countries and the one that is lowest is japan and that is still seven and a half hours. most of these guys slept significantly less. >> that's the staple of ceo profiles and business magazines that they don't talk about it i always wonder if they're idiots and they'll kill themselves if they don't get enough sleep or are they a group of the population that doesn't need it. >> i think it is hard on your body to not get enough sleep.

it can be hard on your mind but you have to remember that 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 are manic were not tired. an insomniac doesn't sleep but they feel bad. they feel tired and they wish they were sleeping. automatic person doesn't sleep and doesn't feel tired at all. that is what these people they have the media. >> one other thing in the chapter that you describe that i had never thought about thinking that way and said we all think about things follow association pass where one of the things that is different about these people that were creative and good at it is not that they go down the same path but they got much faster. >> and further. >> so by the time five minutes later they are moved on beyond the basic and moved to the other

things so it's not this radically different way but they can make the connections faster. >> and echoes back to working memory and executive control. they say elon musk says that he's always thinking ten steps out. he does it automatically and that's how his mind works. and having that long association you will see the world the family than you do. he will see the impatience of something what happened next and what happens next or what caused that and what caused that and he will get the bigger picture quicker because he does ten steps out. >> elon is a good person to go to the next characteristic which is higher purpose idealism. elon musk is something that there's a lot of differing opinions is he this -- what is açai doing? is he trying to do a big snow job on all of us or is he a guy trying to save the world and -- what is his higher purpose?

>> he is so interesting. if you take the time to study elon musk there is no way you will come away from that thinking is about the money. he is not about the money at all. remember he sold his first videogame when he was 12. he taught himself to program attend and so the first videogame at 12. if a 12 -year-old went videogame to date your not that impressed but this was the early '80s when you are learning basic and the screens were in monochrome and it was textbased can even begin to imagine to teachers up to program in the early '80s at the age of 12. he forms a heat sold a compaq for millions of dollars and then start a financial payments company part of which ends up becoming paypal which he sold to ebay and by the time he sell that company he's got $180 million but he doesn't need money anymore. he's not that point he could've just bought an island in drink

but he does but he asked himself what they do that would 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 would he mean? so he rolls up his sleeves and says take us there ourselves. his whole purpose and the reason he got involved in tesla was he believes will run out of energy and he wants to get us onto a renewable energy alternative and the reason he originally wrote up the business plan for solar city and he was the one that came up the idea of solar city and then handed it off to's cousins to develop into a company which will create renewable energy in mars is a backup plan because he thanks that some cataclysmic event comes in our planet the only way we can preserve his fifth colony on mars so he really wants to get us to mars. once it so badly that he won't take spee6 public because he

knows if he takes it public a board of directors would probably force him to make changes that would lessen the chance of getting to mars. he's a feverishly idealistic person. >> what are some of the big ideals of these people at? neglect tesla believe that if he could invent a free energy system he could illuminate all human toil or physical work and therefore we could focus on creative and that endeavors. his lifelong ambition was to develop a global wireless education system because he believed that if we could talk to each other around the world it would obviate war and i think he was disappointed to find out that is turned out to not be true. >> when i read that i was thinking you, that's ridiculous but on the other hand i guess we have had fewer wars than we did before but i don't know. >> other things changed at the same time that enabled war. you want other ideas? >> yeah, sure. >> benjamin franklin developed a 13 virtues of life that he

published and had people follow in his whole goal was around industriousness and an eight gala terrien and free america and he became so committed to that idea that he severed ties with his son because his son was a british loyalist. he chose his ideal of a free america over his son. marie curie and obstructing for a minute because this is a guy he didn't technically finish high school but he didn't finish college but he was a tinkerer and when he was a high school kid he started tinkering and so effective at it to get the contract to light the major museums around new york and i think around the age of 20 get the contract to do the ball drop on new year's and is it talented electronic person totally

self-taught and he saw% going for kidney dialysis and his brother was a doctor and he saw that you have to be connected to a large machine have to be there for hours and it's miserable and it disrupts your job and disrupts everything about your life and he thought it disrupted your dignity and i couldn't solve that problem. invented the world first portable dialysis machine and then the first portable drug infusion pump and then he saw someone in a wheelchair one day struggling to get up a curb and he felt so bad for that person so he developed the mobility wheelchair which can climb stairs and stand up on two wheels and balance so that you can be i to iv as he thought that was an important part of restoring someone's dignity was to enable them to stand up and let people i die. balancing something on two wheels is complicated and some people told him it was

impossible but the wheel had to adjust and spend that quickly but it's that technology that led to the segway. his idea was to reduce human suffering. >> the non- idealist and it looked and i can find any? >> i thought surely i would find there is you follow a little in with what you study intensely but i had a conflicted relationship with that is. it sounds like we had -- he electrocuted a lot of docs which bothered and also a cow and horse and not the elephant. don't believe he electrocuted in elephant but he did electrocute over two dozen dogs. he would give boys that if they came in with the dog up the street he would give them an orange to prove that ac electricity was too powerful to be safe which was tesla's electrical current so the people

would adopt his electrical current i had a conflicted relationship with edison by thought i find the idealism and he had something close to it autobiography written and 1819 and it's a big tumor work so if you ever want to know him it's hard work reading on. i found a quote in a magazine or newspaper published in the early 1900s that really relieved any search relieved me for my search. he basically wrote i don't like to think about the highfalutin things and i'm not interested in those big ideals and i stay close to the ground and a practical man. that thinking his brother people. he's telling you in his own words is not an idealist but he left work. he said work made the earth a paradise for me and i never intend to retire. some people assume that edison was a materialistic man because he liked to win and like to get

patents but one thing that is worth knowing about him because he did throw over tesla at one point and he also got screwed over by j.p. morgan and the other financiers of the time because he helped find it and found the company that became general electric and they maneuvered him right out of that and took his name off the monitor and he subsequently basically lost all the money from that company and at one point was probably rams is often said to him well, do you realize that --

>> what you have to understand is that they were always working and was on something that really mattered. in fact, this goes back to the very first things about steve and dean and they both for the exact same clothes every sunday. marie curie also wore the same clothes every sunday and albert einstein was prone to watch thee

the same clothes every day. thomas edison were the same basic suit all the time but steve and teens time it's hard to understand why they would wear the same close everyday but then you have to remember they didn't care what other people thought of them because they were separate. they were socially separates the rules that they were applying to you don't apply to them. that need addressing close goes away at the same time there focused on something more important. someone asked dean what he were the same close and looked down at his close and he always wore a blue worksheet and jeans and boots and said well, i wear were close when i'm working and if i'm awake, i'm working. [laughter] >> there's also been this discussion that so many people so the example of jobs that you remove one decision in the morning like every decision takes a little bit out of you

and that is believing that and like obama when he was president had this rack of identical suits. and then jack at twitter does -- >> and elizabeth holmes. >> but it made her get to work quicker so we will go to questions in a little bit. the microphone they are back there so when we talk but start thinking about things you might want to ask. those were the five individual characteristics and i will just do it again but a sense of separateness, extreme confidence,. [inaudible conversations] >> then they might not buy the book. >> higher purpose and different work. the other two chapters about these people were the external factors, timing and resources basically. one of the things it's a bunch

of white guys except for recovery and the fact that she was able to do this interesting set -- she is from poland. >> yes, she grew up in the area that was occupied by russia and at a time when the russians start was trying to eliminate the polish heritage and you couldn't learn polish literature or use the polish language in school they were trying to rush a fight that entire area and she came from a family of intellectuals. both her father and her mother were teachers and they believed firmly in education but one of the things that made a difference in her life is that this movement came about called polish positivism so poland had tried to fight against russia initially with military means and they got trounced. they lost really badly and off the lights were lost. then they realized we can't

fight russia that way and they were too big and strong and will never defeat them so they decided we will save poland by preserving polish heritage through science. will make sure that poles are smart and educated and contribute to silence and i remember that way. they had this moment where they said every poll must be educated and this was at a time when most of europe didn't allow women to go into higher education and didn't get educated beyond the age of 14 and most universities in europe to allow women in. but they said women like all polls had to be educated and marie curie was committed to this cause. 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 bathroom of your house and it would secretly educate women so she was running

with a group of the smartest and fiercest women of her time helping educate other women and she was a brilliant person to learn to read ahead of all of her siblings were older and she was studying math and science but again she was not allowed to go to university in warsaw she worked as a governess and scraped up a little money to travel to france alone. her sister had gotten there a few years ahead of her enrolled in the sorbonne scraped by a meager existence got her phd at the sorbonne and overcoming remarkable odds. once you hear that story you realize why there aren't more women because what she had to do to become a woman of science was intense. i also studied [inaudible] was later in time and she didn't meet the criteria for serial breakthrough innovator but another important innovator invented computer programming language and she taught a lot

about the fact that women were not welcome in business and science during the time and this is like world war ii in that e era. even during the time women weren't welcome in business and in science. when war broke out and she joined the navy and she became unable at role in invented computer programming in the navy and because she was an admiral hp and ibm both companies would talk to her because her uniform and military particle essentially neuter her. it made her gender go away. both of these cases illustrate that women were at a severe disadvantage to get into education and to get the education you need to get into science. as for long. were jews and people of color. a lot of hurdles and you see a sample of people who made it on the innovator list and looking at a long time window where only

the very end of that time window women would've had any possibility. marie curie was an outlier in that respect. >> anyone have a question? >> thank you. how did you come up with the a people that you did and most of them are americans and do not look at your opinions as much? >> they are not mostly american. elon is south african, marie is polish, tesla is from croatia but he serbian dissent, jobs is american, einstein denounced his german citizenship. benjamin franklin was american and thomas edison was basically american although his family spent part of her life in canada.

this goes back to as an empirical researcher i wanted to get myself out of the process as much as possible as i thought i could inadvertently introduce bias if i was lucky people. people said usually look it william [inaudible] and he was a weird guy is that i couldn't because you just told me he's a weird guy. you can't select on those variables so what i did was have these criteria where everyone had to be on multiple towards the top like within the first 20 on the top of multiple most famous inventor or innovator list and they let the world identify the people they see is most important and had to be serial breakthrough innovators which means they had have really big innovations and more than one in a lifetime and preferably many across their lifetime because if someone only has one big innovation it's hard to separate person from context. ), right place can give you one invention. it doesn't give you a lifetime of invention. they had to be serial innovators

and people about whom there were multiple identities and first-person accounts. i wanted to hear their voice and their words with video transcripts and letters and marie curie had not only several biographies but one written by her daughter which is a very poignant biography. you didn't want to undue influence by one biographer and in the end i found there was a lot of dissension about innovators in fields like art or music because that hot tonic case element meant that people had heterogeneous taste and then batlike once you're famous you stay famous so and up deciding to use only science and technology cousin felt like it was easier to objectively ascertain there was a breakthrough innovation and that the criteria were more objective

and there is much work consensus that if you look at the list of technology innovators you get the same people over and over again. then when i finally had a set and it was brinkley all white men and marie curie that i picked people from different time periods and industry sectors so that you just didn't want to take everyone who came out during the it bloom or everyone from the electrification era although you could have and there were a lot of people during that time. you want to people from different time periods in order to separate person from context. >> hello. i recently was listening to a series of a podcast on [inaudible] one of the episodes covered different research studies have been done trying to find commonalities between ceos. they didn't they had a hard time finding commonalities and there were diverse characteristics.

what do you think makes being a good leader which i'm putting in the ceo category different from being an innovator -- why was it a little easier to find the commonalities they are all that sound like your research is not easy by any means but why does that provide a unique a set the way that good old-fashioned leadership is more variable? >> some of these guys were ceos but not necessarily ceos that we admired from their ceo. if you turn that into a verb. to be a good leader he have to have good people skills and good people skills are something that are very valuable in a huge range of applications and now it becomes harder to separate ceos from people who are successful in the non- ceo role and it is probably also a lot of ceos with a lot of variance and the trip would be identifying the people that you think you would have to

be people that everybody agreed for the best ceos of all times and could we identify the eight ceos of all times and did an in-depth study were we developed a biography in comparison and studied it vigorously we would find commonalities and you would find efficacy in the best ceos and that's a trait you would find in people who are driven like whenever you see someone who is driven and does things that other people would find it too hard or too scary there is probably a self-efficacy part of that story but that hasn't been looked at that closely. i don't know how they structure their study. >> they probably had lots more people. another question?

>> i-pronoui-pronou n have a question about the connection between their success in education and some of these people often pointed to as you don't need higher education to be successful in the field and they might have the opposite effect of education and might suppress the creativity portion of the process so i'm wondering among these people what percentage were highly educated formally which what percentage were not and whether any connection between their success and innovation? >> that's a great question which is a big take away from the book. a professor you expect to hear that education mattered a lot because if that is a matter than my role is in doubt but all of these people started with no money at all and there are famous stories like benjamin franklin arrived with enough

money to buy two rows of bread and tesla arrived in new york that he got everything stolen on the vote so he arrived with 4 cents and a poem in his pocket. elon musk came over from canada at the age of 17 against his parents wishes and worked on farms to put himself through school. most of them this is an interesting thing that they had far less formal education that you would expect given the field and even the ones ahead education a lot of them had a conflicted relationship with education. we start at the top elon musk had two undergraduate degrees but says he never went to class but he showed up to take the exam and he was only interested in a glass if he felt it was relevant to his purpose. he didn't think he should have to go to the other classes of those annoying him. marie curie i will leave her out because she was an exceptional student the whole way and that she is the exception here but tesla was a brilliant student but became addicted to gaveling and up from school. steve dropped out of school but

said it was the best thing that ever happened because he stayed on campus and started taking the classes he wanted to take. albert einstein had this really difficult relationship with his professor and got a phd but was at the bottom of his class we graduated and conflicted and talked through how school can destroy the creativity and in some ways he resented the educational process but he was self-taught and i'll come back to that. give me one minute. benjamin rachlin had almost no schooling. really very little schooling because his parents can afford it and they would indenture him to be a printer with his brother. thomas edison was born with this abnormally large head and so doctors thought he was fragile and there was something wrong with him so they initially told his parents don't send them to school and then it will points when he was about seven or eight they enrolled him in school but

he was distractible and hyperactive and he overheard one of the teachers calling him adult and told his mother that he was called adult which was scatterbrained and can't concentrate his mother got so mad that she marched down to the school and said this boy has more brains then you yourself so she took them home and homeschool him. the latter is a hoax but he did have almost no schooling. totally self-taught but by the time he was 12 he read the great civics test and a great philosophy text and library between him and his mother they sat and read all these incredibly sophisticated looks ending was not a good student but you are tempted to think education does not matter and education hurts and that is not

the case. what happened was these people consumed that amount of education and they were ravenous for books and always teaching themselves but they needed to consume education at their own pace. in their own direction and format. the structure of a standard curriculum change them it was like having their wings held in by a cage. they needed to slide down paths of their own choosing and they all did. elon musk he was an intense reader and read every book in the public library in his town and started in on the inside computer and committed large parts of it to memory and said in a rolling stone interview recently i was raised by books. books and then my parents. education matters but it is not standardized. standardized education did not sue them. they needed personalized software and education. >> at the same time they were looking for what are the most important text to read and they weren't going on some loopy

whatever but they were thinking this is what i have to read to learn to shoot iraq it off back to earth. >> right. exactly. [inaudible conversations] >> not to say -- i've been a professor for 24 years and students are heterogeneous. don't think they are but one answer their evaluation forms they act as if they think the entire class is just like them but they're wrong because they're all taking wiley different stances on what worked in the classroom for them and some people are more visual learners and other auditory and some people like structure some people like a freewheeling conversation and some to better environment with ambient noise and some need silence in someone's work in long stretches and others need to work in short shifts and bursts so i've been writing about this lately that i think the challenge with standardized education is that kids aren't standardized.

>> we are done but we will be around so you can ask questions. [applause] >> thank you for a terrific and thought-provoking conversation. we have gifts that i will hand to you in just a second as a token of our appreciation. join us for the reception. you can purchase books over there at the table and melissa will be signing books in the back. don't forget their royalties from the books sold tonight will go to stem kids nyc. thank you very much for coming. [applause] [inaudible conversations]

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