Hello, Pittsburgh! In October 2016, Barack Obama and thirty other speakers arrived in a city famous for its postindustrial rebirth, ready to talk about the future of innovation. The event: the White House Frontiers Conference, held on the campuses of Pittsburgh’s best-known universities, Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh. The agenda: to stretch people’s minds about what the country’s future could hold. The majority of the speakers: single-subject experts such as NASA’s chief scientist, a robotics inventor with a thousand patents, a top neuroscientist, and half a dozen of America’s brightest software experts. The brainpower in the room: immense.
To make everything fit together at this conference, White House organizers needed one more type of expert: a speaker with the courage to step back and share simple truths. Someone had to peer at artificial intelligence with the eyes of a sociologist, an ethicist, or a poet. Just as welcome, someone who could balance today’s excitement over Google Maps and drone-delivered medicine with stories of how early humans harnessed fire or the way household electricity had gone from rare to commonplace in the 1930s. To create a deeper dialogue between speakers and audiences, someone ought to share a historian’s insights about the ways society resists, modifies, and then accepts technological progress. The more conversational the tone of that speaker, the better.
What the Frontiers Conference needed was Tim O’Reilly.
Look up O’Reilly on Google, and it’s easy to jump to the (mistaken) conclusion that this grinning, energetic man is a lifelong technologist. It’s not just the fact that O’Reilly relies on static electricity to send his thinning gray hair streaming in every direction. He owns a technical publishing company whose top-selling titles include Node.js for Embedded Systems and Programming iOS 10. He runs conferences on topics such as open-source software, big data, and artificial intelligence. He serves on the board of Code for America and Maker Media, which promotes digital-age craftsmanship in schools and other settings. With a background like that, he must have been a computer science major or something similar, no?
Actually, O’Reilly’s beginnings are a well-hidden surprise. As a Harvard student in the 1970s, he opted for a bachelor’s in classics—and never earned any other degrees. His senior thesis was on Plato and mysticism; his favorite class focused on the writings of Samuel Johnson. Deep down, O’Reilly still thinks like a humanist. In his Pittsburgh talk, he repeatedly invoked social forces that most pure technologists didn’t even see. He talked about how life improves when citizens are “willing to spend money to educate other people’s children.” He picked over the ways that Victorian England built social structures that reined in the nastiest effects of disruptive technology so that early apprehensions of job loss abated and living standards improved. He invited people in the room to focus on social problems that human minds can’t crack but that might succumb to carefully administered doses of artificial intelligence.
When O’Reilly finished college, his finances were so pinched that he needed to borrow a suit from an older associate in order to make his first business presentation. Today, O’Reilly favors rumpled chinos and fraying print shirts, but he dresses humbly by choice. As head of a media company that employs more than five hundred people, he has netted many millions of dollars over the years by spinning off various commercial ventures. Much of that has been plowed back into his business; even so, estimates of his net worth range as high as $100 million or more. We could linger on how O’Reilly made his money, but that would be missing the point.* The reason Tim O’Reilly opens this chapter is his ability to step into the world of technology as a humanist and see things the pure technologists never notice.
In a 2005 Wired magazine profile, journalist Steven Levy chronicled O’Reilly’s talent for picking up trends before anyone else. As Levy saw it, O’Reilly’s penchant for reading incessantly, talking to everyone, and listening carefully “helped him understand the significance of the World Wide Web before there were browsers to suit it. And it led him to identify and proselytize technologies like peer-to-peer, syndication and Wi-Fi before most people had even heard of them.”
Fortunately, the career quadrant that has paid off so well for O’Reilly can be your jackpot too. The next few sections will focus on the second and third elements of critical thinking that were highlighted in chapter 2: your analytical methods and your problem-solving skills. Your liberal arts education has taught you to move forward as a researcher in the face of ambiguity. You know how to make solid inferences in the face of thin or contradictory information. You know how to extract every last morsel of meaning from a difficult text. You can adapt to a changing environment; you can work effectively with minimal oversight.
Just as important, you know how to inch toward a solution that can’t be reached all at once. You’ve written rough drafts that may be only 50 percent of the way toward success, and you haven’t flinched at the struggle for improvement that lies ahead. When necessary, you have overhauled your early efforts multiple times until you came up with a winning final version. You aren’t frightened of the hard issues. You know how to come at a problem from three or four different directions if no single approach is sufficient.
Step into any fast-changing field, and those critical-thinking skills will be invaluable. New technologies are transforming industries ranging from digital advertising to 3-D printing, genetic counseling, publishing, and education. Self-driving cars, military drones, hobbyists’ drones, “smart” houses—the examples keep piling up. In all these arenas, it’s not enough to perceive what great engineering can build. Success or failure depends on seeing the bigger picture. Huge questions remain regarding how these technologies should be applied, how the market will react, and what the risks and limits of each breakthrough might be. The hunt for answers requires people like you.
In the late 1950s, the British scientist C. P. Snow wrote a landmark essay entitled “The Two Cultures” in which he argued that intellectual leadership in Western society was being split into two camps that couldn’t make sense of each other: physical scientists and literary intellectuals. Each group had a curious, distorted image of the other based on dangerous misinterpretations. People who understood the second law of thermodynamics had no idea what Shakespeare had to offer, and vice versa. “The degree of incomprehension on both sides is the kind of joke which has gone sour,” Snow declared. “If the scientists have the future in their bones, then the traditional culture responds by wishing the future did not exist.”
One of the saving graces of the American educational system is that it keeps trying to bridge this gap. As a nation, we ask students to spend four years getting their undergraduate degrees (Britain does it in three) because we want everyone to try classes outside their specialties. We want engineers to read a few novels; we want poets to appreciate the natural beauty of numbers and equations too. If you are a science or engineering major with a fondness for liberal arts electives, you’ve prepared yourself well for this bridge-building role. If you’re a history or English major who doesn’t panic at the sight of a few numbers or formulas, you’re on track too. The growing popularity of interdisciplinary majors such as cognitive studies speaks to increased awareness on the parts of employers, students, and university faculty that graduates with multiple perspectives bring something extra to the job market. Count me in as a champion of almost any approach that helps span the two cultures.
Right now, the job market lacks universal, easy-to-understand language that captures these multidimensional skills. As a result, the best opportunities for liberal arts graduates are likely to reside in jobs with awkward, long, and opaque titles. You might be trying to get hired as a partner advocate, a business-development manager, a relationship manager, or a customer-success specialist. Each organization has its own vocabulary. Linguistic reform is needed.
For now, let’s refer to these as bridge-building jobs. This term is simple, easy to remember, and flexible enough to cover a wide range of industries and corporate structures. It’s hard to say how many of these jobs exist or how rapidly they are coming into being, but one useful starting point is the Burning Glass estimate of hybrid job openings in the U.S. economy. These positions blend some tech expertise with a considerable amount of nontechnical insight. At least 240,000 openings arise each year, according to Burning Glass’s tally.
Ask individual companies how they staff these chasm-spanning jobs, and everything becomes clearer. “We’d much rather hire a passionate candidate with potential than an uninspired candidate with a sparkling résumé,” says Alan Knitowski, the CEO of Phunware, an Austin, Texas, company that builds smartphone apps. His customers range from big banks and hospitals to celebrity astrologers. There’s no telling what aspects of mobile technology will fascinate each potential client, or what anxieties might arise. As a result, “We hire candidates who aren’t afraid of learning on the job,” Knitowski adds. “They possess the initiative to find a hole and fill it.”
Consider what happened when Skycatch, a California drone-software company, wanted to enter Japan a few years ago. Someone needed to go to Tokyo to lead negotiations with a promising potential partner. Skycatch’s choice: Mimi Connery, a 2008 graduate of Williams College with a degree in political science. Her edge: she was a seasoned negotiator, with experience ranging from venture capital to managing the band Third Eye Blind. She had well-honed instincts about how deals should come together and what to do when obstacles arose. Other people at Skycatch knew the technology better and could advise her as needed. The Japanese alliance depended most keenly on how well everyone could align needs and capabilities. That played to Connery’s strengths. As she points out: “Williams taught me how to interact with people, and that’s valuable in any industry.” Connery now is launching XX Incorporated, a maker of women’s products.
Again and again, it’s the core liberal arts strengths that employers prize. “You’re really differentiated if you understand humanities,” says Bracken Darrell, chief executive of Logitech. His company started out making keyboards and computer mice; now it’s trying to come up with more advanced gadgets that make virtual reality as enticing as possible. That’s more than an engineering challenge; success depends on gaining a deep understanding of what satisfies people at work and play.
Connecting Different Worlds
What do we mean by blockchain?
I’m on the phone with Oliver Meeker, a 2009 graduate of Hobart College, a small liberal arts institution in upstate New York. He’s working for IBM in New York City in a fascinating job that requires him to think about technology and the ways future business networks might operate. He’s a sociology major who has come into this specialty by a roundabout path. I’m eager to find out what he does. If he wants to open our conversation with this simple, enigmatic question, that’s fine with me.
While I’m puzzling over the answer, Meeker takes me on an intriguing journey. Imagine how an ancient village traded, he begins. Long ago, you knew which neighbors grew your grain and where that grain came from. Trust was inherent; you didn’t worry about adulterated crops. If you traded your pig for some grain, your neighbor was equally confident in the quality of your pork. If disputes arose, they could be easily resolved, since the nature of the transaction and the responsible parties were obvious. As economies grew, such small-village trust became impossible. Far-flung markets took hold, with intermediaries trying to keep everything orderly. Production efficiencies increased, but so did uncertainties about goods’ origins and buyers’ recourses if things went wrong. You no longer knew your ultimate trading partner.
I sense where Meeker is heading, and there’s no reason to interrupt. I’m enjoying this lively, genial introduction to a new world. The next thing I know, Meeker is telling me about blockchain, the digital era’s latest transformational technology. I’m wary at first, because when I hear blockchain, I think Bitcoin, and that conjures up renegade actors in the underground economy carrying out drug deals. But Meeker wants me to appreciate an entirely different context. For him (and IBM), blockchain is fundamentally about building trust that can be applied prudently in areas ranging from trade settlements for capital markets to the validation of federal quality certificates from food suppliers. As Meeker explains, “It is all about trust.”
Most business-minded discussions of blockchain are highly abstract, with hard-to-grasp allusions to greater transparency and security. Meeker keeps it real. “Let’s say you want to know with one hundred percent confidence that the salmon you are eating is actually organic,” he says. With blockchain, uncertainties vanish. The various people and businesses along your salmon-supply chain—the fishermen, shipping company, warehouse, and retailer—have a single view of where the fish has been on its way from the ocean to your plate.
IBM and a host of other companies are working on ways to use blockchain technology in mainstream sectors such as health care and supply chains, he adds. Digital technology already has created trillions of dollars of value that can’t be touched or seen. Think of credit cards, debit cards, and wire transfers. Then think of PayPal, Apple Pay, and GooglePay. The connection between abstract electronic systems and U.S. paper currency gets thinner all the time. At some point, blockchain could turn out to be the best way of exchanging goods and services, Meeker contends, thanks to the key traits he alluded to a few moments ago: immutability, security, decentralization, and transparency.
I’m fascinated but not surprised to find that IBM’s blockchain team includes a sociology major with more than four years of experience in Vietnam, along with the necessary dozens of computer science majors, finance specialists, and the like. The cultural and business implications of transformational technology are huge. Somebody needs to make sure society gets it right. Meeker is one of the bridge builders that such ambitious projects require. He is a Phi Beta Kappa intellect with a disarming laugh and an upbeat personality. You wouldn’t necessarily expect to find him at IBM, but there he is. When asked to introduce a start-up at billionaire Richard Branson’s island resort, Meeker dressed the part, showing up in an open-necked pink oxford shirt with his sunglasses perched atop his head. Thanks to his overseas stint, Meeker recognizes the importance of always being sensitive to local contexts. There’s never just one way to solve a problem, he explains, and “you always—always—need to understand your audience.”
As Meeker sees it, his path to IBM makes more sense than most people realize. “Going to Hobart really pushed me to grow,” he recalls. “You were pushed to argue and to think about problems from multiple perspectives.” In his sophomore year, at the suggestion of one of his sociology professors, he spent a semester in Vietnam and found it life changing. Jettisoning his earlier plans to become a corporate lawyer, Meeker broke away from the American expatriate community and made dozens of Vietnamese friends. His favorite moments involved sitting on tiny plastic stools on the uneven sidewalks of Hanoi observing a fascinating ancient society deal with modernity.
At the end of his semester abroad, Meeker produced a treatise comparing the leadership styles of political revolutionaries Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap with that of American auto executive Lee Iacocca. After graduation, he earned a Fulbright scholarship that let him return to Vietnam to carry out research on the country’s rising entrepreneurial class. Fluent in Vietnamese and eager to see more, Meeker stayed on as an analyst for a premier private equity fund, Vietnam Investments Group. Among his projects: negotiating a franchise deal that brought Dairy Queen to Vietnam.
When Meeker returned to the United States in 2013, he flirted with a job in finance but refocused his hunt when a friend said, “You’ve got to talk to IBM about Watson.” The big computer-services company was investing heavily in Watson, its artificial intelligence initiative. Now IBM needed eclectic minds to help Watson strike up business alliances. Meeker’s ability to build a career in Vietnam impressed his hiring managers. They brought him into the Watson project for two years and then encouraged him to try his luck as a business-development specialist with IBM’s next big idea: blockchain.
Now Meeker works with various organizations that might harness blockchain technology with IBM’s help. Being effective means mastering an unfamiliar and highly technical area, but that hasn’t fazed him. “I read everything I can on blockchain,” Meeker says. “It’s hard work. I learned about PBFT, which is Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance. I learned how to talk about validator nodes, e-certs, t-certs, and the list goes on. I also have to envision industry transformation, new business models, and create new business cases.” Was it like learning Vietnamese? “Absolutely!”
His boss, Brigid McDermott, tells me she wants to build a solutions ecosystem that combines software engineering and sophisticated new business models and a critical mass of participants. That calls for knitting together teams of IBM specialists, with each person playing a different role. Meeker doesn’t need to be the classic high-energy salesperson, she observes. He is most valuable as a team builder. In such settings, a well-traveled sociology major can be surprisingly useful.
Taking Data to Good Places
Of all the technical fields that turn out to have a big nontechnical component, statistics is in a class by itself. Working with data has stopped being a fierce test of an individual’s math skills, just as modern forestry no longer depends on finding strong people to swing axes. Automation has radically redefined the human role. With the rise of software tools such as SPSS Statistics, SAS, and Microsoft Excel, technology now puts numbers at our fingertips. What becomes crucial is human guidance in terms of asking the right questions—and finding the best ways of sharing data insights with society at large. “Statistics is not math,” Cornell University statistics instructor William Briggs provocatively wrote a few years ago. As Briggs observed, we’ve transitioned to a new era in which “statistics rightly belongs to epistemology, the philosophy of how we know what we know.”
For an opportunity to see what Briggs is talking about, let’s take a close look at OpenTable, which has been blending dining and data since its founding in 1999. Spend time in New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta, or any other big city, and you are likely to use OpenTable to book a restaurant reservation online. It’s quick and always available, day or night. While munching breakfast, you can reserve dinner for four, even if the staff at your favorite restaurant is hours from starting the workday. If your ideal time slot isn’t available, OpenTable shows you a full run of alternatives. To date, more than one billion restaurant reservations have been made this way.
Unless you have a relative in the restaurant business, it’s unlikely you’ve encountered the other half of OpenTable’s business. Those billion reservations translate into a wealth of data about patrons’ booking habits that can be marketed to restaurants themselves. OpenTable knows how far in advance people make Valentine’s Day reservations and what percentage of those early bookings get canceled. OpenTable knows whether slow turnout on Tuesdays is typical for your city or whether your restaurant is missing out on midweek traffic that everyone else is enjoying. The data insights will jolt your confidence in how well you are running your restaurant—which makes this information hard to look at and impossible to ignore.
On any given day, at least a hundred OpenTable experts fan out across the United States, iPads in hand, so they can brief restaurateurs on countless business metrics that can affect profitability. These emissaries’ backgrounds? Exactly what you would expect. OpenTable doesn’t restrict itself to employing business or hospitality majors. It repeatedly hires Spanish majors, child psychology majors, English majors, and political science majors. Those are the sorts of recruits best suited to sharing properly dosed—and properly couched—nuggets of data analytics with the proud, prickly bosses at leading restaurants.
To see how this works, hop in a car with Shawna Ramona, one of OpenTable’s most effective restaurant-relations managers. She paid her way through San Francisco State in the late 1990s by waitressing part-time. It took her six years to earn an English degree, but she still loves to chat about the characters in Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. She likes people. She likes figuring out what makes them tick. And when she visits restaurants, she thrives on the kaleidoscopic subtleties of figuring out each character’s inner story.
First stop: Town Hall, a busy San Francisco restaurant that specializes in country ham and other Southern-inspired cuisine. Ramona’s iPad is loaded full of data suggesting that the restaurant isn’t doing enough to attract large groups. But Town Hall’s business manager, Bjorn Kock, isn’t in the mood to hear about it. He’s a sharp-tongued German immigrant with strong opinions about what makes his restaurant succeed. He glances at an OpenTable pie chart showing that his restaurant hardly ever seats parties of ten or more—and angrily waves it away. “Our design does not lend itself to a lot of large parties,” Kock declares. Big groups take too long to finish, he explains. Their rush of orders at the same time strains the kitchen. Besides, his restaurant’s long, angular layout would make big tables as unwelcome as a boulder in the midst of a stream. “Those tens!” he says with a dismissive sweep of his hand. “I don’t want them in our dining room.”
Ramona doesn’t give up. “I see your point,” she says. “But what about trying an experiment on Sundays, when traffic is lighter. You could offer one ten-seat booking at five p.m. That wouldn’t strain the kitchen. It might be extra business that you wouldn’t get otherwise.” Kock smiles. He’s been won over. “That could work,” he says.
Next stop: Park Tavern, a wine bar and restaurant in San Francisco’s trendy SoMa District. It’s run by Anna Weinberg, who greets Ramona with a big hug and a shriek of joy. Being in Weinberg’s presence is like watching a sped-up movie where characters flit across the screen faster than you can recognize them. She’s sitting. She’s standing. She’s summoning someone to pour glasses of sparkling water. She’s telling a story. She’s flipping her blond ponytail back as she laughs at her own punch line. She’s rearranging everyone’s chairs and it’s all happening faster than you can read this sentence. For Shawna Ramona, it’s a wonderful show and there’s no reason to interrupt.
Then comes a lull. Ramona pulls out her iPad and invites Weinberg to take a look at a giant “opportunity.” In the past year, it turns out, hundreds of OpenTable users had been told that seats weren’t available at Park Tavern. Ardent fans try to book tables in advance, only to discover that the restaurant offers a mere thirty-day look-ahead. Ramona puts on a sad face—and lets the implications sink in. “Fine!” Weinberg declares. “Let’s do sixty days, then. We’ll do it for all three of our restaurants.”
Third stop: Perbacco, a traditional Italian restaurant in the heart of San Francisco’s financial district. The silver-haired owner, Umberto Gibin, has spent more than forty years in the restaurant trade. Gibin never went to college; he started as a teenage waiter in Italy, learning to carve ducks at tableside. He’s old-school and proud of it. Other people stare at spreadsheets to see how business is doing; he can tell just by walking up the staircase of his restaurant and taking in a hundred diners’ gestures. He and Ramona sip coffee together for nearly an hour. They gossip. They reminisce. She brings up the importance of creating a mobile-friendly website—raising the subject so gently that he hardly notices the conversation has switched from his business to hers. “I’m a dinosaur when it comes to technology,” Gibin protests. Still, he acknowledges that mobile matters. By the time their chat is over, Ramona has made the next generation of technology seem more inviting (and less scary) than it did before she arrived.
Within OpenTable, about a hundred and twenty people are involved in the flow of data to individual restaurants. Only fourteen of those people are data scientists. By a ratio of nearly eight to one, this expertise squad is dominated by nontechnical emissaries like Shawna Ramona. Tagging along with her, I’m fascinated to see how the data revolution touches a mainstream industry. The big surprise: Getting the numbers right is the easy part, requiring only a few people. The hardest challenges relate to human habits and hesitations. That’s why only a small slice of Ramona’s restaurant visits focus on the charts and graphs tucked away on her iPad. The heart of her job involves understanding each restaurateur’s hopes and anxieties. As we’ve seen before, a tight nucleus of tech-driven innovation creates an enormous number of nontechnical jobs for the people who can build connections between what already is and what will be.
OpenTable’s top performers are defined by “endless curiosity and the sense that they are fun to be around,” says Andrea Johnston, the company’s senior vice president in charge of sales. “They don’t dominate the conversation, positioning themselves as experts,” she adds. Instead, her stars “connect with all the different kinds of personalities in our industry. They become trusted consultants, whose starting point is: ‘I’m here to work with you.’”
If that description resonates with the back-and-forth of a lively liberal arts class, it’s hardly a coincidence. Johnston herself started out at Vassar (class of 1989), where she was an international relations major.
The Power of Plain English
Danielle Sheer earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from George Washington University before heading to law school and embarking on a career in corporate law. Since 2009, she has been the general counsel at Carbonite, a Boston-area data-protection company. When Sheer joined the company, she felt intimidated by the constant stream of technical terms and acronyms in major meetings. She tried to be invisible during the discussions. Before long, though, she realized that a simpler, clearer style would help Carbonite’s customers as well as its own specialist employees in different areas.
The payoff has been bigger than she ever expected. “By articulating complicated technical or strategic ideas in plain English, you’d be amazed at how much progress we’ve made solving problems,” Sheer told Fast Company magazine. Often, Carbonite employees have been chagrined and then relieved to discover that they’ve been arguing over a misunderstanding of what a certain term means. In other cases, people have been racing too quickly to lock down a particular solution to a problem without rechecking assumptions to see if a faster, simpler solution might be available. “I don’t believe there is one answer for anything,” Sheer said. “That makes me a very unusual member of the team.”
Before the rise of coding boot camps, at least a thousand liberal arts majors a year recast themselves as full-time software developers. Since the baseline year of 2010, that migration rate has probably tripled. Magazine stories often portray these nontraditional coders as refugees from failed job hunts who picked up new skills out of necessity when it turned out that their chosen majors had no professional value. But that stereotype doesn’t do justice to the enduring value of a liberal arts education. One of my workplace neighbors in California, Diana Nemirovsky, earned a history degree from Colgate before taking up coding as a hobby and then as a career. “I don’t use my degree to write code,” Nemirovsky told me. “But I use it constantly in working with clients. It helps me be clear about what the client wants—and what I’ve committed to do. That has a huge positive impact on my productivity.”
In jobs that straddle technical and nontechnical domains, the power of plain English is one of businesses’ great open secrets. Just ask NeKelia Henderson, whose route to a well-paying, bridge-building job is highly instructive. Born in 1986, she grew up in Gwinnett County, Georgia, about thirty miles northeast of Atlanta. Her mother was an accountant; her father was a mechanic. She excelled in math as a high-school student but enjoyed English and writing classes more than anything. What should she do with those dual talents? Her parents and high-school advisers provided the standard recommendation that every academically strong teenager in a striver’s family hears: become a doctor.
Mindful of everyone’s advice, Henderson headed off to college as a premed at Georgia Southern University. That didn’t click, so she switched to a pharmacy major. That didn’t click either. After two years, she transferred to Georgia State and became an English major, minoring in Spanish. She loved the enchanting, baffling cadence of Chaucer. She became intrigued by Dante’s Inferno. She graduated in 2009 with a 3.8 grade point average, no obvious job prospects, and two very anxious parents.
What ensued was the classic liberal arts journey: several years of quirky-job-hopping accompanied by additional training that eventually led to a happy resolution. Henderson started with a postcollege gig as a customer-service representative in a call center. “I was good at it, and I made a lot of money, but I didn’t like it,” she recalls. After that, a brief move to New York, where she wrote nearly one hundred blog posts for a fashion designer. (Her verdict: Exciting, but not a durable career.) She returned to the South and did a social-media internship at CNN. (The scorecard on that one: Intriguing, but still not quite a match.) She enrolled in the public relations program at Georgia State and embarked on a second bachelor’s degree, eager to see what new opportunities might arise.
Right place, right time. The public relations industry was being upended and revitalized by the rise of social media. A single Tweet—effusive or caustic—could transform a corporate brand’s reputation within hours. Local PR agencies were scrambling to build up data-analytics teams that could provide clients with both the insights and strategy suggestions necessary to “win” Twitter, Facebook, and the like. One of Henderson’s professors pointed her toward the Atlanta office of Porter Novelli, a global agency with clients such as NASCAR, the Centers for Disease Control, and the Almond Board of California. Could Henderson tell stories with numbers? If so, this was the right job for her.
Success at last.
Two years into the job, Henderson is the new face of data in a more inclusive world: an African American woman whose reports can be as serious as a math exam or as whimsical as a blog post. Analogies come easy to her. She likens her data-minded role within the company to that of “a cook or a medic on an expedition to climb Mount Everest.” It’s a sly comparison, because cooks and medics aren’t merely anonymous helpers on big team projects. In lumber camps, the cook is always the best poker player. In war movies, the medic’s mordant wit gets us laughing in spite of ourselves. At Porter Novelli, Henderson is the jaunty one who rounds out her social-media posts with the hashtags #NumbersDontLie and #BowDownToTheData.
While numbers don’t lie, they need to be interpreted—and that’s where Henderson earns her keep. Porter Novelli’s clients often want to enlist the paid support of a big-time social-media personality who can help generate excitement about a particular brand. In some categories, such as health care, that’s easy to do. Star bloggers (or Tweeters) appreciate the extra cash and don’t mind talking up a product that appeals to them anyway. In other categories, it’s much harder to find the right boosters. Henderson frequently builds “influencer maps” that show the forty or so most active social-media personalities on a particular topic and give some guidance about which ones might be best suited for a client’s cause.
Getting those recommendations right is an intricate test of Henderson’s ability to think in multiple directions at once. Statistical packages such as Affinio, Traackr, and Little Bird can tell her right away which social-media personalities have the greatest relevance and reach on the topic in question. But figuring out which ones will be the most credible champions of a particular brand message is an art that can’t be automated. Cough-medicine makers won’t win many new fans by banking on a holistic-health enthusiast to carry their message. Tech companies that are looking for “wholesome rappers” to create youthful buzz about their gadgets might want to think twice. The terrain is changing so rapidly that there aren’t any sure formulas yet for what will build (or destroy) brands online. When clients ask Porter Novelli for advice, it’s the subjective discernment of experts like NeKelia Henderson that ultimately matters most.
“So much of what we’re doing is story-telling,” explains one of Henderson’s bosses, Brooke Balch. “We present data to people who aren’t data people. That means explaining things simply and creating trust by making other people feel smart.”
Tim O’Reilly Explains It All
In the opening paragraphs of this chapter, I raced past what might be the most valuable part of Tim O’Reilly’s story. In the years between his college graduation (1975) and his eye-catching appearance onstage as Barack Obama’s warm-up act at the Frontiers Conference (2016), O’Reilly needed to find his path. Knowing a bit about Plato and Samuel Johnson wasn’t enough to guarantee a living, let alone a significant impact in the wider world. Somehow, he found his way. What did he get right—and can we extract modern-day lessons from his experiences?
It turns out that O’Reilly’s postcollege years mirror this chapter’s three main points: connecting different worlds, taking technical information to good places, and the power of plain English. By mastering all three of those realms, O’Reilly didn’t just secure a steady income for himself; he laid the groundwork for what has become a robust, inventive collection of media properties. Over coffee one morning, O’Reilly revisited those years with me, marveling at the way early stumbles pay off in spite of themselves.
Coming out of Harvard, O’Reilly spent his first three years writing obscure treatises for tiny audiences. He got a federal grant to translate Greek fables. He spent a year poring through the cryptic notebooks of social theorist George Simon, annotating and editing them as best he could. After that, O’Reilly embarked on a biography of Frank Herbert, author of the science-fiction classic Dune.
“That’s where I learned to write,” O’Reilly told me. By O’Reilly’s account, the biography’s first draft was as tangled as Herbert’s own writing. The book editor, Dick Riley, kicked that version back, demanding a clearer rewrite. On the second try, O’Reilly found his voice. His topic sentences became crisp and magisterial. He turned into a patient, lucid explainer, repeatedly using entire paragraphs to introduce key concepts that would be needed in a page or so. There wasn’t anything flashy about O’Reilly’s writing, but it all made sense. The denser the material, the shorter O’Reilly’s sentences became.
Without knowing it, O’Reilly had discovered the style that would eventually make him the king of a technical-publishing empire. All he needed was a community that cherished his skills. Fortune struck when an experienced programmer, Peter Brajer, wanted help writing technical manuals for some of Digital Equipment’s lab products. The pay—forty dollars an hour—was too good for a classics graduate to turn down. O’Reilly knew so little tech jargon that at first he would take notes silently while Brajer quizzed Digital’s experts, afraid that even a brief stray remark would reveal his ignorance. For someone who had labored to make sense of fragmentary Greek texts, though, nothing Digital conjured up could be any harder. After a few months of applying his close-reading skills—and cursing the opacity of Digital’s vocabulary—O’Reilly was ready to create any kind of technical manual on demand.
O’Reilly’s biggest insight came soon afterward. Harnessing his bridge-building skills to the commercial needs of product-pushing tech companies wasn’t the best use of his talents. Instead, he realized, he should be writing for engineers and technicians who needed to use these tech products to get ahead in the world. He could become their champion. He could reveal clever shortcuts that would save them time. He could turn his manuals into tools of self-improvement and enrichment, paving the way to a better life for any aspiring techie who picked up an O’Reilly manual.
From the early 1980s onward, that’s exactly what Tim O’Reilly—and many hundreds of editors and writers on his team—have done. Not only does O’Reilly Media explain tech to millions of people at all levels of understanding, the company’s conferences and webinars have become rallying points for a sprawling, global community of people who share an interest in a particular technology. His earliest bosses saw tech publishing as a business obligation. He sees it as an uplifting crusade.
Linda Walsh, one of O’Reilly Media’s earliest employees, has this image fixed in her mind: Tim O’Reilly pacing back and forth in a sparsely furnished attic with about a dozen of his employees sprawled on beanbag chairs, pillows, or whatever else they have found to sit on. O’Reilly has taped a piece of butcher paper to the wall and is jotting down titles of possible projects that everyone could work on next. “This is a seed of an idea,” O’Reilly says excitedly. “Just a seed.” Waving at everyone and no one, he declares: “I want to know what you think.”
Add up Tim O’Reilly’s impact over the years, and it’s clear that the people who came to his conferences or bought his manuals have ended up making far more money from the tech boom than he has. O’Reilly says that’s fine with him. “You should always create more value than you capture,” he tells me. If we want to know where that aphorism originated, he can help us trace it back to Diogenes.