AS A MEMBER OF THE seminal gangsta rap group N.W.A., a pioneer of the sound known as “g-funk”—the West Coast rap style heavily influenced by George Clinton and Isaac Hayes—and a producer who has worked with or helped launch the careers of a number of the biggest rappers—Eminem and 50 Cent, to name just two—Dr. Dre is considered one of the most influential recording artists and producers in hip-hop.
He’s also known to be a perfectionist in the studio. But you might not know the full extent of his hard work if you listen to his songs on standard headphones. “People aren’t hearing all the music,” Dre was quoted as saying. “Artists and producers work hard in the studio perfecting their sound. But . . . most headphones can’t handle the bass, the detail, the dynamics. Bottom line, the music doesn’t move you.”
In his three decades making music, Dre has created an empire around his brand—as of 2012, he was ranked third on the Forbes list of the richest hip-hop figures. But what good was his brand if the majority of people listening weren’t really hearing what he was creating?
Dre didn’t just want to make a better pair of headphones, he wanted to connect his fans to the music as it was created in his studio and played in the clubs. He wanted them to hear his sound profile, heavy at the bottom but with clarity and good range. He couldn’t make it happen alone. He needed to partner with someone who had a track record of bringing ideas to life.
THE MAN DRE TEAMED UP with was product designer Bob Brunner, though before I discuss his work with Dre, it makes sense to share a bit about how Brunner came to develop that skill.
Brunner is famous in design circles for many things—among them, hiring Jonathan Ive while director of industrial design at Apple in the nineties. By 1996, he was partner at lead graphic design consultancy Pentagram in San Francisco, heading up a team offering product, identity, and design services to clients.
While at Pentagram, Brunner was approached by the Discovery Channel to participate in a show about the design of a real product. The cable company wanted to take its audience inside the process, to show how a product is actually created and made. Brunner was game, but client privacy clauses prevented this kind of inside look at the projects Pentagram was working on. Brunner came up with a solution: Why didn’t the firm just make something up? Brunner and his team rose to the challenge and invited the Discovery crew in to spend time with them as they developed something entirely new.
But what should they design? What would the Discovery Channel audience relate to? Well, the team reasoned, they did live on the West Coast, where people loved to cook outside, so why not do what no one had ever done before: redesign the old, tried and true outdoor grill?
The team went to work, observing how people used their barbecues at parks in the Bay Area and in their homes. “Barbecuing is a social event, and the barbecue a social hub,” said Brunner. “There’s a fire, there’s food, and people like to crowd around.” And yet, the team realized, most barbecues are designed so that the chef has his back to his guests (yes, they learned, men still did most of the grilling).
The team decided to make a new kind of grill, one built with great materials but, most important, round—a fire pit that people would love to gather around. With the Discovery Channel cameras in mind, they set out to create something that would stand apart from the typical drab forest green grills. Something beautiful. So beautiful that both the Pentagram and the cable television people said they wanted one when the grills were done.
Normally Brunner’s job would have ended there—but it didn’t. Like many top designers, Brunner had long felt that those in his field didn’t really participate in the full value of what they created. Designers got paid for the services, sure, but then another company typically would take over, manufacture the product, and sell it—often for big profits. So Brunner and his team decided to go further with the design of the grill, which he owned, by starting a new company, Ammunition.
Thanks to Discovery, Brunner and his team designed a series of grills, set up manufacturing in China, came up with a great brand name—Fuego—and launched a new company. Priced from $350 to $700 and sold at Williams Sonoma and other high-end stores, the grills were a success.
Brunner now has two partners, Brett Wickens and Matt Rolandson, as well as forty-five people working at Ammunition. He still does regular design service work for some clients but prefers to partner up or start new companies. “It’s much easier to get things made today given the lower cost of outsourcing, things being made in China and around the world, and lower costs of technology. The channels are already there and there’s no reason you can’t do it.”
IN A VERY ORGANIC WAY, Brunner made the pivot from creating new products to participating in the creation of companies. But he’s hardly the only one. So pervasive is the change in the nature of creative work that designers everywhere are becoming entrepreneurs. Not only have a large number of today’s leading start-ups been founded by people with design backgrounds, but walk into almost any classroom in the top design schools in America and Europe and you will find the majority of the students planning to start their own companies upon graduating. Many major design schools now offer courses on entrepreneurialism. Stanford, of course, has been doing this for decades, but an entrepreneurial spirit is spreading throughout the academic design society.
Venture capitalists and other investors have taken note. In 2011, the Designer Fund was set up by a group of successful designers to help would-be designer-entrepreneurs turn their ideas into businesses. The real draw of participating isn’t the financing offered, but the network: The members of the Designer Fund match young would-be entrepreneurs with mentors and the whole constellation of start-up capitalists—angels, seed funds, and later-stage venture capitalists like Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures.
This pivot from creativity to business creation is one of the strongest economic forces of our time, but it isn’t just happening with the fields of design. There is an explosion of entrepreneurialism in America today, especially within that Generation called “Y.” Many young people are making the leap from curating their digital spaces and creating physical products to launching businesses and social organizations. About 180,000 master’s degrees in the field of business are given every year and, increasingly, students are focusing on starting their own companies rather than managing existing ones. Courses in entrepreneurialism are among the most popular in B-schools at Columbia, Harvard, Wharton, Chicago, the University of Toronto, and others trying to keep up with Stanford’s wild success. Harvard Business School, a longtime training ground for the corporate elite and consultancies, recently opened the $25 million “i-lab” or Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship (named after an HBS alum who invested in Intel and Apple). Where in previous decades graduate-level business programs focused on how to use capital efficiently, more and more courses now focus on how to harness creativity.
The widespread pivoting from product concept to business creation is beginning to revive and remake cities. Richard Florida has long discussed the role of the “creative class”—the 40 million or so working in the fields of design and architecture, art, media, entertainment, science and technology, education, and health care—in driving the innovation and economic growth in cities. But even Florida might be surprised at how fast creatives are transforming such giant cities as New York, Berlin, and, perhaps, even staid Singapore.
A 2012 study for the Center for an Urban Future called New Tech City concluded that in the past five years, New York has become the country’s second leading hub for tech start-ups after Silicon Valley. Since 2007, local venture capital firms such as Union Square Ventures and IA Ventures, as well as other investors, had funded nearly five hundred digital start-ups, the Gilt Groupe and Tumblr among them. Tumblr CEO David Karp describes the New York start-up scene “as very design-centric and very media-centric.” There were around a dozen tech incubators in New York City in 2012, where in 2009 there had been only a few. Go to a meeting of NY Creative Interns, a network set up to promote entrepreneurship among creatives in New York City by Emily Miethner, and you’ll see up to two hundred recent graduates scurrying to make connections to help them launch their ideas.
Even New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who began his career at Salomon Brothers and whose financial data company provides sophisticated analytics on “Bloomberg Terminals” to more than 300,000 professionals around the world, has become an advocate of start-ups. In 2011, he set up a contest that resulted in a partnership between Cornell University and Israel’s Technion (Israel Institute of Technology) to build a new engineering campus. The hope is that it could rival Stanford, with its success at spinning off high-tech start-ups. For some time, policy makers like Bloomberg have viewed the nation’s economic future through a finance-centric lens; dot-coms and start-ups were certainly fascinating but considered by many to be peripheral to real economic growth. The core courses at nearly all business schools focused on managing operations and marketing, not starting new companies. Students were taught how to use capital to grow, not create new things entirely. Now the direct connection between the creative nature of start-ups and capitalism is beginning to be made central again.
The shift in the focus of economic thinking back to entrepreneurial creativity presents the questions: How do you transform an idea into a thriving business? What can you learn from designer/entrepreneurs who’ve made that pivot?
The word “pivot” is often used in Silicon Valley to describe the move from one idea to another in the early stages of a start-up. Often founders start out with one idea, only to “pivot” to a second or third before hitting on the product that brings them great success. Instagram, for example, started out as Burbn, a location check-in app for smartphones similar to Foursquare. Burbn didn’t succeed, but the photo posting function that founder Kevin Systrom built into the app got a lot of traffic, so Systrom changed strategies and built Instagram.
I’m using “pivot” in a larger sense, to describe the movement from inspiration to production, often production on a wide scale. Pivoting is the scaling of creativity that’s essential to creating new products, new models for business and nonprofit organizations, and even entire industries. How and when to Pivot are the key strategic questions every entrepreneur, leader, or aspiring creator should be asking today.
On a deeper level, Pivoting involves taking the intangibles that money can’t buy—our dreams, our desires—and turning them into the things that it can. Artists have always known this—painters like Edvard Munch, musicians like Patti Smith, writers like Kurt Vonnegut have been willing to transform their deepest hopes and fears into something that speaks to us all. So, too, have creative people in every industry. That’s what creativity can do, create gold from straw, art from angst, and yes, household products from wishes for a better life; in that way, it’s a kind of alchemy. But no economic model analyzing innovation has ever factored in these intangibles.
In fact, many assume that “what money can’t buy” and “what money can buy” are mutually exclusive categories. In his book What Money Can’t Buy, based on his popular Harvard class, Michael Sandel attributes this to the conflict between social norms and market norms—and our discomfort at mixing them. Yet asking yourself “what money can’t buy,” and using your answers as a source of inspiration for creating new products and services, has always been intrinsic to capitalism and necessary for economic growth.
Pivoting from creativity to creation bridges the gap between social and market norms, and so it requires skills that we may not ordinarily associate with economics or business. At a time when people are no longer as willing to believe an advertiser’s passionate pitch about a new widget, today’s creative thinkers are embedding deep meaning into the products they create, imbuing their products with a kind of aura typically found in great works of art. And leaders are adopting a deeper kind of charisma—one that has less to do with flash and more to do with deep connection to their followers.
Of course, people have been pivoting from concept to creation since the first goods were ever sold, and so there is wisdom to be gleaned from looking back at some of the great innovation stories that predate our current era of entrepreneurial capitalism. Whether they sought out inspiration from a muse, support from a general manager, or the embrace of an audience, creative innovators have rarely worked alone.
AURA: EMBEDDING MEANING IN YOUR OFFERINGS
Music moves people. It lifts them out of their everyday moments and takes them to another place. Sales of the headphones that Dre created with his longtime partner Jimmy Iovine, founder of Interscope-Geffen-A&M Records, and Bob Brunner are soaring because they are giving fans of hip-hop the gift of music as it was meant to be heard. The name of the audio company came directly from the source of the sound. “Dre came up with the name Beats,” according to Brunner, because “he said ’people come to me for my beat.’”
Dre and Iovine shaped the sound profile they wanted to come out of the headphones (and later earphones, speakers, and boom boxes) and worked with the manufacturing and distribution teams at Monster Cable to develop them. The headphones—there are models for consumers as well as for professional DJs—generate deep, rich bass. And the design, too, was key: the Beats are decidedly rapper nasty, in a wide range of color: black, moody red, hot pink, white. They’re made from soft rubber, sculpted metal bezels, and soft-touch plastics that feel good in the hand. Brunner also helped design rich, intricate packaging for the Beats—a box has multiple compartments and folding doors that open easily, but slowly. Opening the box becomes a kind of ceremony culminating in the gift of authentic music.
Dr. Dre has amplified the Beats community by getting big-name athletes and musicians to wear his headphones; in August 2012, the NPD Group reported that the brand accounted for around 50 percent of the premium headphone market. A Beats store just opened in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood and, like Apple stores, it will showcase just a few products. The company is now looking to expand its success beyond headphones; in 2012, Beats Electronics bought Berkeley-based music subscription services MOG, giving Dre a way to deliver music directly to his listeners; that year Beats also dropped its association with Monster, and Taiwan-based HTC became a big investor. If current projections continue, Brunner believes that Beats will be a $1 billion company soon.
It’s perhaps no secret why the Beats have taken off: a hip-hop legend teamed up with a renowned designer-creator to build a unique set of headphones that delivered a hip-hop sound. But far more important, Brunner and Dre built a special bridge between Dre’s music and his audience. After using the Beats headphones and hearing, for perhaps the first time, the sound that artists like Dr. Dre set out to create, people sense they are connecting to something that transcends the everyday.
Which, of course, is a lot to say about headphones. Yet by creating a product that takes people closer to the moment of creation in the studio, the team that worked on Beats is giving people the opportunity to have “secular epiphanies.”
In his 1933 essay on Japanese aesthetics, In Praise of Shadows, novelist Jun’ichiro Tanizaki describes a similar transcendent experience—albeit one triggered not by new technology but by something more traditional: rice. “A glistening black lacquer rice cask set off in a dark corner is both beautiful to behold and a powerful stimulus to the appetite. Then the lid is briskly lifted, and this pure white freshly boiled food, heaped in its black container, each and every grain gleaming like a pearl, sends forth billows of warm steam—here is a sight no Japanese can fail to be moved by. Our cooking depends on shadows and is inseparable from darkness.”
Tanizaki doesn’t use the term “aura,” but it’s the best word I’ve come across to define that powerful engagement we have with certain objects and products. Walter Benjamin argued in his 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” that unique works of art have an ineffable quality to them, an “aura.” They beckon us. Paintings, sculpture, live performances all share a certain aesthetic quality that we can experience face-to-face in museums or theaters but that cannot be reproduced when a work is copied. Cinema and other reproducible art forms such as photography, he argued, lack aura because the process of “mechanical reproduction” disconnects the viewer from the original work of art. But the technology of our time—their improved features and lowered costs, their ability to make us all creators and not just passive users—can, in fact, connect people in ways that the films or photographs of seven decades ago could not.
As with many of the Creative Intelligence competencies, the road leads back to Apple. Consumers call Apple products “cool” and “easy to use,” and more sophisticated business analysts applaud Apple’s “ecosystem” of integrated software and hardware. But none of those qualities alone explains why we feel the way we do about Apple products; it’s impossible to discuss Apple products without mentioning how they feel in the hand, look to the eye, and connect to our deep emotions. The story of how Apple began creating beautiful, easy-to-use products should be required reading for anyone interested in creating something that’s not just useful but meaningful.
WHEN STEVE JOBS RETURNED TO Apple in 1997, after twelve years in exile, he bet the company and his future on a radical new idea: an easy-to-use, stand-alone PC that looked unlike any other computer before it—translucent, colorful, fun. As much as we hail Apple for its cool design these days, so many other companies have stepped up with well-designed products of their own that it’s easy to forget how very not fun computers used to be. They were hard to use and ugly to boot, all of them some variation on the color putty.
But no one in the late nineties knew how to make a translucent casing for a computer, especially one with colors. And certainly no one knew whether you could make these things for a profit.
Designers Jonathan Ive and Danny Coster looked beyond the world of computers for inspiration until one of them, it’s not known who, came up with the answer: jelly beans. They’re colorful, translucent, and manufactured in large scale—not to mention they’re one of those rare things that can bring a smile to just about anyone’s face. After making this observation, Ive’s team of designers and engineers spent time in a candy factory, analyzing how jelly beans are made, examining how bright colors are applied to shiny surfaces, and how hard plastic jelly beans are extruded by the tens of millions from specially designed machines.
Next the team traveled to Japan to meet with the best injection-molding tool makers to configure a new way to inject molten plastic and metal through tiny feed lines, getting the right number of holes so that it would cool to a perfect surface in seconds. Ive then spent yet more months in Asia with manufacturers, pushing factory owners used to “faster and cheaper” to focus on quality. In the end, Ive’s team devised sophisticated processes for manufacturing millions of jelly bean–like iMacs. (And, along the way, in a little-told tale, Ive and Apple pretty much transformed China from a nation known for cheap and shabby exports to one able to make computers, TVs, and, later, iPhones and iPads of the highest quality.)
iMacs were an amazing surprise. These brightly colored, round machines were warm and friendly, the opposite of the lifeless, putty-colored boxes on office desks. But Ive’s team didn’t stop at designing the iMac. They also designed a beautiful “reveal.” The process of taking the computer out of the box was designed to be a delight. It was simple and easy—a ritual that people wanted to participate in. The packing materials themselves had a Bauhaus feel—clean, simple lines with materials that felt good in your hands.
The iMac’s launch in 1998 marked Apple’s return to profitability after years of being in the red and helped make one of the men responsible for the amazing look and feel of Apple products, Jonathan Ive, a hero in the design world and beyond.
In a 2006 interview with Peter Burrows, who covered Apple at the time for BusinessWeek, Ive shed some light on Apple’s process. “We don’t make very much stuff,” he said. “That’s a very important part of our approach to what we do, which is to not do a lot of unnecessary stuff but just to focus and really try very sincerely to care so much about the few things that we do. We just make lots and lots of prototypes. Then we spend a lot of time at the manufacturing sites. We’ll be there right to the end when we’re in production.”
As I write in late October 2012, Apple is the world’s largest company by market value, with stocks valued at around $650 per share for a market value of over $600 billion. But financial numbers alone don’t tell us anything about the “aura” of Apple, about why people so identify with its products that Jobs’s death seemed almost to be a national day of mourning, as numerous memorials appeared outside Apple stores the morning after his death was announced.
As Walter Isaacson’s biography reveals, Jobs was not a nice guy or an easy person to get along with, especially if you were close to him. Yet he wanted to instill a level of aesthetic perfection in Apple products so that they would remain distinctive and never fall into the rut of “mechanical reproduction” or pure salesmanship (which is where he saw Microsoft going under Steve Ballmer’s leadership). He saw himself as a designer of things that people didn’t even know they wanted until he created them.
But there’s more to Apple products than their beauty. Their common aesthetic suggests that they are connected to one another, a “family” of products. The iTunes app acts as both a commercial and a community hub, allowing music and other entertainment to be purchased with ease, and linking all the products to the ever-evolving “cloud” that represents designers’ dreams of connectivity. Each app allows consumers to “personalize” their access to Apple and interaction with other users. And the recent addition of Siri adds a new sense (voice) to touch and vision, re-creating a part of that face-to-face dimension so important in Benjamin’s account of ritual aura. What Apple has done (and what Google and Facebook are trying to do) is involve the individual customer and wider community in an open-ended process of creating.
But, of course, a company cannot live on what it’s already created alone. It has to continually maintain the aura of its products to keep the company going and support its creativity. We have recently seen a spate of what seemed to be innovative companies fail in maintaining that aura in their products, and there is no guarantee that Apple will succeed despite Jobs’s assurances that his successor, Tim Cook, understands the need to have goals that transcend simply making a profit. Certainly Apple’s aura has been compromised because of labor conditions at Foxconn, the Chinese manufacturer of iPads and iPhones, as well as the less than perfect launch of Apple Maps.
The power of aura cannot be underestimated. I remember seeing a Ferrari designed by Italian firm Pininfarina at a conference in the mid-nineties that mesmerized me. After the speeches, I broke away from my colleagues and draped myself over the hood of the Ferrari and announced that I had “product lust.” I was swept away by the Ferrari and its promise of beauty, power, celebrity, speed, excitement, whatever. That level of engagement is the reason why Apple fan boys and girls wait in line for hours for the newest iPhone, and why so many aging boomers won’t ride anything but Harleys. When making the pivot from creativity to creation, thinking about how people connect with things is crucial to the success of the effort.
But what happens next? What if you have the idea but don’t know whether, or how, you should pivot and turn it into something real? Whether you are working in a big company or alone in your studio or apartment writing or painting, you need someone trained to spot creative ideas and help turn them into creations. You need a wanderer.
FIND YOUR WANDERER
In their early days, many of the big corporations we now consider traditional, risk-averse, and efficiency-focused were every bit as creative as today’s start-ups. They were younger, more in touch with their roots, and connected to the culture of their founders. They could jump on new creative ideas and pivot them into wildly successful products and brands. And many are trying to achieve this same creative spirit today—Boeing has begun using new composite materials for its 787 Dreamliner, IBM has moved into crowdsourcing and wiring cities for innovation, and Corning is developing new glass for iPhone screens. But few companies have enjoyed the success that Hewlett-Packard had in its heyday.
From its founding in 1939 in a Silicon Valley garage, HP had the kind of culture that today’s start-up entrepreneurs would love to emulate. Managers gave their employees, especially the engineers in HP labs, the freedom to play, to mine knowledge from sources that interested them, and to frame ideas however they wanted. Just as important, HP provided a network of wandering general managers who moved from lab to lab, screening inventions and deciding where to invest. These wanderers helped lift new ideas off the drawing board and transform them into reality.
That shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who knows the history of Silicon Valley. The open, collaborative culture we associate with companies from Google to Facebook was modeled in large part on HP—or, rather, on the creative culture and organization built by HP’s founders William “Bill” Hewlett and David Packard. The culture of freedom and trust remained intact even four decades after they began the company in which some of the greatest technological advancements of the last century were created, including one that made printing available to the average consumer at a low cost—and without inky fingers.
The story of the HP’s ThinkJet is a prime example of how people from different disciplines can work together to create something few imagined possible. The people who helped make the inkjet printer a reality had, among them, advanced degrees in electrical engineering and high-temperature physics, and experience with “integrated circuitry” and “photolithography”—but it was a college drop-out named John Vaught who came up with the idea for the breakthrough technology and then pursued it passionately until it became a reality.
Despite his lack of traditional engineering education, John Vaught loved working at HP. For Vaught, a self-taught engineering associate and technician, “HP Labs was a wonderful place. I had to work in a single field for only two or three years and then, like magic, it was a whole new field; a paradise for creativity.” An ideal environment for a man who said of himself: “I bore easily.”
According to Lee Fleming, Vaught’s partner Dave Donald had a more conventional engineering background, his attention to details a contrast to Vaught’s tendency to go “very far, very fast.” Like so many partnerships, they complemented each other.
In 1978, Vaught and Donald has just finished adopting Canon 2680 printing technology for HP in the company’s big Boise lab and were returning to Palo Alto to begin work on an electrostatic gravure printer for the commercial publishing world. But Vaught kept thinking that the real prize would be a low-cost printer that could deliver much higher quality than the conventional dot matrix.
From the beginning of what we now call the Computer Revolution in the 1960s through most of the 1980s, offices used dot-matrix printers. Remember, this was before computers became “personal” and migrated into our home offices. The technology of dot matrix was pretty simple—pound it out. Dot-matrix printers were “impact printers”—mechanical machines that worked like typewriters: Pins struck an ink ribbon to form characters on a page. But the simplicity of the mechanism was reflected in the results: Printing was slow and loud, and the highest resolution was 100 DPI. Most researchers at HP and elsewhere thought the solution was to put more dots into the existing dot-matrix printer, but Vaught wondered if there was another solution entirely.
HP didn’t start out in the consumer printer business—and it certainly wasn’t in the low-cost printer business. In fact, the joke going around at the time was that “HP” stood for “high price.” For most of its early history, the company made scientific instruments like oscilloscopes, computers, and calculators. As HP’s Frank Cloutier later reflected, in the late seventies, around the time Vaught began thinking of a dot-matrix alternative, “We weren’t the largest printer company on the planet.. . . We had no business going into that as an enterprise.”
And yet on Christmas Eve in 1978, when, according to HP tradition, families of the engineers and researchers came to the labs and offices to celebrate the holiday, Vaught, Donald, and the team of engineers began to throw around ideas about their ideal printer. Their goals included color imaging and a printing speed of a page a second.
The meeting eventually ended and the families went home for the holiday, but it was after the break that Vaught came up with the idea that has become HP legend: According to Fleming, as Vaught caught sight of a coffee percolator he kept on his desk, he watched the coffee heating up, exploding through small holes in controlled bursts.
It took a while for Vaught to work through the implications of the coffee percolator. It wasn’t just a “eureka” moment for Vaught. “Inventors just don’t go home and see it at that moment in time,” he recalled later. “When it comes to the moment of truth, you think about a lot of things.”
The percolator gave him the image and the idea of heating a liquid to the point of explosion. With the percolator, “if you think about it, if you left the top off, it went poof, poof, poof, and blew gobs of coffee all over the place,” he said. (Because of this explosive process, according to Thomas Kraemer, the inkjet project would later be named “St. Helens” after the nearby volcano.) But the explosions would have to be directed, controlled. The printer would need nozzles to work.
And so the real work—the pivot into creation—began. Of course, to Vaught and Donald, it didn’t feel like work. I’ve known a number of scientists and researchers, and I’ve always been struck by their glee at working in labs. A lab with the right team of people who trust each other to play at experimenting and discovering new things is the perfect example of a magic circle. The way that Vaught and Donald described their time was no different. “They had tremendous fun,” wrote Alan G. Robinson and Sam Stern in their book, Corporate Creativity. “Like children at play, they were full of enthusiasm, trying first one thing and then another.” They used resisters to heat up and vaporize ink, causing it to shoot out microdroplets onto paper. The ink passed through tiny holes in a nozzle, which controlled the flow. In three months’ time, they had built a working prototype.
The process promised to be fast, clean, and simple enough to mass-produce at a low cost. And it was also patentable, which was always important with Japan competing fiercely in printers. Vaught didn’t know it at the time, but across the Pacific, Ichiro Endo, an engineer at Canon, a leader in printers, was also working on a process to heat up ink and shoot it onto paper. An accident had led Endo to direct his research along the same lines as Vaught two years earlier—while someone was refilling an old inkjet, the ink syringe came into contact with a soldering iron, the heat of which caused ink to splash out. Years later, of course, HP and Canon became close partners.
John Vaught may have bored easily, but he “carried the ball in selling the innovation,” Donald told Lee Fleming. According to the Economist, “Vaught doggedly pursued his interest in the inkjet printer. He demonstrated his work to anybody who took an interest.”
Despite his enthusiasm, there was a problem with Vaught’s process. He couldn’t really explain why it worked. He couldn’t articulate the physics of the process, the science part. “Because its inner workings were not understood, even a number of people who actually saw the device operating told him the approach could not work,” wrote Robinson and Stern. Later, when university scientists had a look, they described it as a “phreatic reaction.” But that was a year away.
Without an explanation, Vaught couldn’t get the attention of his general manager—the person who could finance his concept and make it a reality. Eventually, Vaught’s manager reassigned him, leading to what he later described as “the worst period of his life.”
MEANWHILE, FRANK CLOUTIER, A GENERAL manager who worked at the HP Corvallis campus in Oregon, was charged with finding something new for HP to make. In 1979, there was extra capacity in HP manufacturing and a need to fill it. Because Corvallis had also been involved in developing printers for HP’s portable calculators, Cloutier began to search for something new in the printing field.
Cloutier’s role was to support innovation by wandering around. HP at that time had a lot of wanderers. When Hewlett and Packard set up the company, they routinely walked around the labs, checking out what was happening, connecting people, looking for ideas that might be transformed into new products. This later become formally known in management consulting circles as MBWA—management by wandering around. It was a way to cut through the formal organizational hierarchy of big companies that divorced managers from their most productive employees. But at HP, it was simply the way the founders had always done things. It became known as the “HP Way.”
The key was to keep the labs autonomous and the engineers free to experiment as they saw fit. But the essential link in pivoting from concept to product was the general manager. The GM, whose role was not unlike a modern VC, was very close to the engineers and had a lot of leeway in allocating resources to develop new products. Most GMs were engineers themselves and they knew one another. Throughout HP, there was friendly competition between engineers as they developed new technologies.
After traveling to HP’s senior research lab in Palo Alto, Cloutier found what he was looking for in Vaught’s percolator-inspired thermal printer technology. And he knew members of the team he’d just been working with were well-qualified to take on the task of bringing the idea to market. But first they had to figure out the physics of Vaught’s thermal printing. Just how exactly did the vapor explosion work that sent the hot ink onto the page?
Thanks to help from colleagues like Larry LaBarre, a longtime HPer who had been drumming up support for the idea, and a researcher named John Meyer who helped Vaught make a pitch for resources, Vaught received $250,000 to work on the project, as well as a recommendation to bring in high-temperature physicists from the California Institute of Technology, who were instrumental in getting the technology right.
Typically, Cloutier reflected, a project like this would not be considered until “technological performance and manufacturing promise are well-established.” It became clear that in the case of this new project, an entirely new approach to managing and scheduling would be necessary in order to meet their timing goals: “One was unrivaled communications between the product and technology groups,” wrote Cloutier. “The other was an extremely strong commitment to a true team approach, where the whole was clearly equal to more than the sum of the parts. The phrase ’that’s not my job’ was sufficient grounds for termination from the project.”
In a 2004 speech at MIT, Cloutier recalled a meeting that took place as they were developing the new printer. After a number of people threw out goals for the product, one of his team members put a recent National Geographic magazine with a beautiful toucan on the cover and said, “We want to do that,” Cloutier said.
Cloutier agreed. Though the toucan picture inspired different goals among different members of the team—to some, it represented scalable fonts; to others, full color—Cloutier said the image became a “galvanizing vision” for the team. “As you think about visions, you can . . . look at the past and you just extend that linearly into the future,” said Cloutier in his MIT speech. “But rather than that, when we said we wanted to do the cover of National Geographic, it set the bar at a very different place.. . . And it meant we had to do things we didn’t initially recognize we had to do.”
It took the work of hundreds of people to bring the printer to market. And it took time—it wasn’t until 1984 that the company’s first inkjet printer, the ThinkJet, was manufactured, ending the reign of the noisy dot-matrix printer, just as the pocket calculator, the HP 35, eliminated the need for slide rules. That year, HP also released its first laser printer, the LaserJet. Only in 1988 did HP get the price down below $1,000, and its first color inkjet was not released until 1989, but the printer went on to become one of HP’s most profitable products. About 300 million have been shipped since 1988. In 2011, HP’s Imaging and Printing Group had revenues of $26 billion, much of which came from sales of the ThinkJet.
A month before the launch of the revolutionary new product, John Vaught resigned, freeing himself to work on whatever he wanted.
SCRATCH BENEATH THE SURFACE OF a creative organization, business or nonprofit, and you’ll find a wanderer. Steve Jobs was, of course, a lifetime wanderer: He wandered into the calligraphy classroom at Reed College after dropping out to pursue what interested him. He wandered into Xerox PARC in 1979 to see its work on graphical user interfaces and what we would come to call the “mouse.” He wandered into the animation studios of Pixar when he was in exile from Apple. And when he returned, he wandered into the studio of his chief designer, Jonathan Ive, nearly every day, to see what new ideas were percolating.
The reason for linking up to a wanderer is simple. Pivoting from creativity to creation requires scale. That scale comes in two forms—capital and markets. Creators by themselves usually don’t have access to capital or markets. But wanderers do. It’s their job to provide scale, to offer financing and connections to an audience.
These key people, of course, don’t call themselves wanderers, but they are everywhere. Talent scouts, coaches, lab chiefs, VCs, curators, agents: people who make their living bringing ideas to life. Without Peggy Guggenheim, who in 1945 financed Jackson Pollock’s move to the Springs in Long Island where his Drip paintings were created, the artist may never have developed his unique style of abstract painting. Guggenheim also introduced Pollock’s work to the art world in her gallery. Of course, Guggenheim played a pivotal role in the lives of many artists. “It seemed to me she was like an open sesame. She was full of plans,” John Cage was quoted as saying. “Peggy had the keys to the whole art world.” More recently, Stanford University computer science professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng may not have gotten their online education start-up, Coursera, off the ground were it not for $16 million from John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins, one of two VCs who invested in the platform that delivers courses in a variety of subjects in short video episodes.
If finding the right professional wanderer proves difficult or simply unappealing, crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter, Kiva, Indiegogo, Crowdtilt, and Wefunder make wanderers out of all of us. In December 2009, Jesse Genet, a graduate of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, asked backers on Kickstarter to finance a project called Lumi, a printing system based on a new technique that allows you to snap a photo and use a smartphone app to turn it into a negative that can be screened onto your T-shirt, jeans, and other objects. The next iteration of the Lumi Process, released in mid-July of 2012, which allows you to print on fabric using sunlight, has also been wildly successful. Genet and her business partner Stéphan Angoulvant needed $50,000 to create kits for anyone who wanted to experience this technology. Their “wanderer” came in the form of 3,525 people who pledged $268,437 to bring the project to life. Welcome to the socialization of wandering.
While so much of Creative Intelligence hinges on our social interactions and relationships, pivoting from creativity to the creation of things takes us out of ourselves more than any other. The competencies of Knowing, Framing, and Playing take us down the path of creativity, and Making involves combining preexisting skills and new tools to create things we might have never imagined possible. But then we often need someone outside our circle, our playground, to provide the resources to complete the journey.
Often wanderers have formal titles, but other times they don’t. They can be people with access to capital, networks, and markets that lie outside their usual job categories or careers. Or they can simply be the people who encourage us to keep going. Your pivot circle may start small, with family and friends, and widen to include new partnerships and networks. And it may change dramatically as you scale.
What’s important is that you start looking.
BUILDING A PIVOT CIRCLE
Eddie Huang was a twenty-three-year-old law student, living out his immigrant parents’ dream of having their son become a successful professional. But his own dream was bigger. During his childhood in Florida, Huang had two big loves: hip-hop music and Taiwanese street food. As he grew up, Eddie became aware of the ways that people connect with their own and other cultures through food. He witnessed people expressing their passions and prejudices in what they listen to, what they wear, what they consume. He wanted to connect the music he grew up with to the food his grandparents had brought over from Taiwan, the small meat-filled buns called gua bao, and use this connection as a way to challenge perceptions of immigrant culture in his family’s adopted home country. Marry the music of his generation to the traditional Chinese street food of his grandparents, and frame it as critique: Crazy, right?
Huang wanted to call the restaurant Baohaus—a play on the German Bauhaus architecture and aesthetic movement of the early twentieth century. But how to pivot from this idea to launching an actual restaurant—or, more grandly, how to launch a Baohaus brand with a network of restaurants?
Huang did what a huge percentage of start-up founders do; he turned to his family circle. After drawing up a business plan, he went to his father, who’d managed restaurants for years (though never a Chinese one) and he showed it to his brother, Evan, who was majoring in sociology and marketing at the University of Central Florida. Their response? Not wildly supportive. Evan said the idea was original, but further details needed to be worked out for Baohaus to succeed. He said he would help, and jumped on board, thinking they’d get things rolling properly.
Not so for Eddie’s parents. Eddie’s father may have been in the restaurant business, but he and Eddie’s mother wanted their children to do “better” than they did. And so they refused to support his start-up. Luckily, several of Eddie and Evan’s aunts and cousins were willing to bet on their idea. But where do you launch such a high-concept restaurant? Not Florida, they knew. On the East Coast, it had to be New York.
THEY ARRIVED IN 2009—A BUST year for the economy, but one that also turned out to be an extraordinary year to launch new companies in the city. As Evan and Eddie checked out neighborhoods, there were FOR RENT signs on storefronts everywhere. They chose the Lower East Side, with its own hip confection of artists, media, and marketing people, plenty of young people—and proximity to Chinatown. In fact, they set up shop in a four-hundred-square-foot space on Rivington Street, not far from the headquarters of another start-up with a musical mission at its core: Kickstarter. Evan’s two-week assist stretched on; in fact, he never did go back to school in Florida, enrolling instead in classes on sustainability at The New School.
Baohaus catered the Kickstarter launch party, and the start-up’s employees and network were among the first of what Evan calls Baohaus “fans.” Not customers, but loyal fans. The circle of people that helped Eddie pivot from creative concept to the actual creation of his brand began with family and friends and expanded to neighborhood people who loved the idea of good street music meeting good street food. Of course, it didn’t hurt to have neighbors who were in the process of launching a game-changing start-up.
For about $4, the right price in a downturned economy, people could feast on soft, fluffy buns steamed in lotus leaves, including the signature Chairman Bao, named, of course, after the chairman, Mao, who loved the “red-cooked” Mandarin-style meat. The Chairman Bao is made from high-end Niman Ranch pork belly: flash-fried; simmered in rice wine, soy, ginger, rock sugar, star anise (plus Cherry Coca-Cola, which adds a hint of caramel); topped with peanuts; and tossed with red sugar, pickled mustard greens, and cilantro. With offerings like the vegetarian Uncle Jesse Bao, named for a friend, not the character on Full House, the menu is constantly evolving.
So is Eddie’s pivot circle. Eddie and Evan use social media—Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare—to extend their network of fans and spread their message. Evan even hired one woman who ate at Baohaus so frequently she’d been awarded the badge of “mayor” on Foursquare. The original Rivington Street shop has closed and a foray into a larger Chinese food restaurant did not succeed, but Eddie and Evan are expanding their Fourteenth Street location and planning to open more restaurants. They are also working on scaling the brand by widening their circle of contacts and expanding Baohaus. Eddie has worked with fashion designers and launched his own line of clothing, Hoodman Clothing, that features illustrations criticizing gentrification and other trends that Huang believes are destroying the Lower East Side. On his blog Fresh Off the Boat, and on Twitter and Facebook, he is outspoken about “hipster chefs,” the role of food in transforming culture, and the Chinese immigrant experience in America. The Huangs have networked with major radio, TV, and online shows to talk about baos, culture, and the politics of food. Eddie has been a guest on Martha Stewart Living Radio, offering advice on becoming a chef, and he appeared as the host of a special on the Cooking Channel called Cheap Bites. He also has a memoir due out in January from Random House and a new show on Vice.com.
ASK VENTURE CAPITALISTS AND THEY will tell you that what Evan and Eddie are doing is very similar to what successful high-tech start-up founders do. They set up shop in a bustling area congested with people launching their own businesses. They cultivated a network of people who can help them scale their creativity. They didn’t limit themselves to one platform, looking instead for natural partners in other industries who would “get” them.
No matter your field, your pivot network is key to getting your idea into the world. One incubator that nurtures young entrepreneurs and helps them develop their ideas, Y Combinator, was founded on the premise that an entrepreneur’s original idea may not even matter when it comes to building a new company. The important thing is the circle of people who surround the founders, providing the scaling skills and capital necessary for pivoting.
So how do you build your own pivot network?
Pivoting Organically
Starting with those close to you, whether people inside your large organization or your family and friends, is perhaps the most common first step in moving from creativity to creation. The first customers of most architects, artists, and start-up founders, for example, are often their parents or friends. Architect Charles Gwathmey was known for his contributions to the style of High Modernism, designing a number of high-profile commercial buildings as well as residential buildings for clients including Steven Spielberg and Jerry Seinfeld. But his first building, an unusual round summer cottage and studio in Amagansett, New York, was for his parents.
In cases like Eddie Huang’s, starting with family members might be enough. His dad’s restaurant experience, his brother’s business management training, and investment from other family members were crucial in the launch of Baohaus. But at a certain point, Huang needed to move beyond his small circle, and he did so with the help of people in fashion, the media, and the wider world of food culture.
Once you’ve looked to your circle of friends and family for advice, support, and investment, with certain companies it can make sense to “rent” space on a sales platform such as Etsy and Amazon and eBay. There are also manufacturing platforms around the world, OEMs (original equipment manufacturers), that make it easy to scale. Pivoting by renting space on a platform is allowing thousands of people to keep control of their creations while scaling them nationally and globally.
PIVOTING WITH THE HELP OF LOCAL NETWORKS
Investors and other wanderers tend to group around cities and universities. They can be found right in your own company, of course, or among your circle of friends; many young entrepreneurs find their partners in their dorm rooms or right down the hall. Universities are excellent places to begin building a pivot network—a growing number are even providing capital and marketing advice to their students through venture funds consisting of their own successful alumni.
Going to networking or start-up events in your city—here’s where being in the “right” city can really pay off—is a great way to meet people who can help you make your idea a reality. NY Creative Interns, started by Emily Miethner, puts on events for young graduates all the time. Past events have included speakers from NBCUniversal, Bravo TV, Mediabistro, Etsy, Google, Condé Nast, and Christie’s who’ve talked and mingled with the audience.
Pivoting is a way to leverage your creativity through the kindness, expertise, and capital of family, friends, and strangers. Your goal is to take your original creation and find others who see value in it and are willing to supply resources to bring it to life. In the past, this meant networking among a relatively small number of gatekeepers to these resources. Thanks to social media, that number is vastly larger—but much easier to access. You don’t need to be “connected” anymore, although it certainly helps. You can crowdfund your ideas and get them in front of millions who might be willing participants in your dream.
Pivoting by Linking Up with Another Company or Platform
Pivoting is a Rorschach test of your entrepreneurial self. Moving from creativity to capitalism will always require some level of scaling up, but there is more than one way to increase the size of your start-up. There are, in effect, two kinds of pivots and two types of pivoters. Knowing which kind of pivoter you are is key to your creative success. Ask yourself: Do you love the early stages of creation—the “whiteboard” moment, the prototyping process—more than the idea itself? Or do you want to go further with a particular idea, nurturing and growing it into a big, dynamic business or nonprofit?
Many creators are “serial entrepreneurs” who go from one creation to another, leaving it to others to develop and grow each idea. Other creators are “entrepreneur builders,” who transform themselves into leaders and managers of big organizations as they build out their singular creative ideas. Understanding yourself—your true desires and your real capabilities—is an important part of pivoting. Deciding how far you want to go with each idea is a key personal and business strategy.
YouTube cofounder Chad Hurley found himself in this position not long after launching his start-up. He needed to grow, but couldn’t do it alone. In a sense, his wanderer came in the form of a multibillion company, itself a start-up less than a decade old.
Hurley was born into the world of social media. He went to Indiana University of Pennsylvania in the nineties as a computer science major but switched to graphic design with a minor in printmaking. He figured that computers and code were a means to an end, not an end in themselves. What he really wanted to do was design great interfaces online that allowed people to engage and interact in an easy, pleasurable way. “I wanted to use computers as a tool, not make them,” he said, in an interview with Bill Moggridge.
Hurley’s first big job as a designer out of school was to come up with an easy way for people to pay online. We take for granted how easy it is today, but back in the nineties, it was a nightmare. While working at the PayPal division of eBay, Hurley worked closely with another young designer, Steve Chen, and they came up with a simple solution—a big button. There are now buttons on nearly every online site that allow you to pay now, donate money, move to a shopping cart, and more.
Hurley got his start designing at the dawn of the era of social media; Friendster and MySpace, the forerunners of Facebook, were already popular. Caterina Fake had already launched Flickr, allowing millions of people to post their pictures and images online and share them with their friends. But no one had yet designed a way for people to upload their videos and share them. There were video sites in existence, “but they didn’t let the community post their videos,” says Hurley. “We wanted to give people the power to deal with their own video.”
Hurley left PayPal and took his buddies Steve Chen and Jawed Karim with him to start a company that would do just that. They successfully built out the company to sixty-seven people, but there were big issues with advertising, maintaining servers, and dealing with big media companies. Hurley was looking to expand the community of video makers and sharers that he was part of, but there were constraints on his ability to do it.
And so, Hurley and his cofounders turned to people who were members of his generation but not necessarily the culture of social media to which they belonged—Google. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google, were all about the mathematical algorithms of search, not the emotional connections of sharing and community. They were wildly successful at enabling individuals to search for information and had built a multibillion-dollar corporation based on it. But whenever Google tried to do social, it had trouble. The company had tried to build Google Video, but it was too complex. And Google had asked people to pay for the service—free on YouTube.
So Hurley sold YouTube to Google for $1.65 billion in 2006, only eighteen months after he launched, thereby freeing himself up to pursue other projects. Pivoting by linking to a bigger platform—YouTube’s sale to Google, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger’s sale of Instagram to Facebook—is perhaps the strategy we’ve become most familiar with in the era of start-ups.
Of course, the strategy works the other way too—rather than selling to a larger platform, some entrepreneurs scale by expanding their original platform. Brian Chesky, cofounder of Airbnb, bought smaller platforms similar to his company’s model—Crashpadder and Accoleo, both in Europe. This has been Larry Ellison’s strategy at Oracle as well. And eBay has grown by buying PayPal and other smaller companies. Even Apple has begun to do this by buying the company that made Siri.
Of course, you can still pivot and decide not to scale, at least not much. The growing local movement is putting a higher value on staying in the neighborhood than it had in the era when globalization was uncritically celebrated. Besides, there are many platforms today such as eBay or Etsy that allow you to market globally while staying put.
BUILDING THE RIGHT KIND OF pivot circle is essential when you’re still in the “idea” stage, when you’ve begun prototyping or testing your idea but need feedback, or when you’ve got the business in motion but need help growing. Not only can this trusted circle of advisors and partners help you build upon your creativity, inspiring you to explore areas or think in ways you might not have had before, it is indispensable when it comes to transforming your idea into something tangible and, in the case of business, marketable.
But what if you’re a “newbie” and haven’t ever created anything, let alone a business? The idea of reaching out to a network of strangers, or even tapping your family and friends, can seem daunting. Chasing after contacts requires a level of confidence you may not yet have.
Yet you probably have a passion about something that so animates you it gets other people excited too. You know something so well or are interested in something so new or simply see something old in such a totally different way that people are drawn to you. You may not consider your enthusiasm a sign of a “calling” but that’s what it is. You may not see your friends and colleagues who find meaning in what you’re interested in as a “following,” but they are. And you may not think you can harness that enthusiasm to become more charismatic, but you can.
THE POWER OF CHARISMA
On January 28, 2010, the Economist featured a religious image on its cover. A man in robes stood smiling, beams of light emanating from a sun behind his head, a tablet in his hands. The man was Steve Jobs, the “tablet” he was offering humanity was the iPad, and the message was clear: On the cover of one of the world’s most important business magazines was the Prophet of Profits. The text above the picture read “The Book of Jobs,” clearly framing the Apple cofounder and CEO as a religious figure engaged in a powerful relationship with his acolytes and believers.
I imagine the Economist chose the religious metaphor, in part, because it’s one that’s familiar. But Walter Isaacson, too, described Jobs using language typically reserved for religious leaders, arguing that his “absolutism, the ecclesiastical bearing, the sense of his relationship with the sacred, really works.”
Look around a bit and you’ll notice that many of the new ideas and products that are transforming our lives were brought to us by entrepreneurs who are, in their unique ways, charismatic. Charisma, secularized from its religious roots—it comes from the Greek 
, meaning “gift of grace,” or “divine favor”—is a powerful force responsible for the creation of some of the most important changes in our economic lives. Yet in the rush to build processes of innovation in our organizations, individual charisma has been largely ignored as a driving force for creativity, the creation of new products, competition, and capitalism itself. Charisma is not central to any economic model, and yet it is often what helps innovators bring their idea beyond the moment of conception and into the lives of hundreds, thousands, millions of people. And it’s something we might overlook if we’re content with the standard definition of charisma.
Many people assume charisma is a state of being. In this way it’s a lot like our views of creative genius—either you’re charismatic or you’re not. We see the charismatic person as imbued with an internal light (or in some cases darkness), that rare person who “has” it because he or she was born with it. The rest of us can do little but follow.
But that view of charisma—one that focuses solely on the individual and not the community that gets behind him or her—doesn’t hold much water at a time when even the shiest or geekiest among us can make YouTube video that attracts a massive audience of followers, when leaders of even the largest organizations are held up to constant scrutiny by anyone with a Twitter account. And perhaps that definition never really did hold up; where, after all, would the charismatic leader be without loyal followers?
IN The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber argues that there are three forms of authority. There is power that comes from tradition, such as the power of parents over children. There is power that stems from the legal and rational authority that flows from organizational structures, such as the role of CEO or the President of the United States or the pope. And then there is the power that comes from the “quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men,” according to Weber. “The holder of charisma seizes the task that is adequate for him and demands obedience and a following by virtue of his mission.”
Weber argues that charismatic leaders tend to arise in times of social stress. They challenge established bureaucracies and the normal routines of everyday life. Perhaps most important, charismatics challenge the established economic order and the orthodoxies of conventional business. “In contrast to any kind of bureaucratic organization of offices,” wrote Weber, “the charismatic structure knows nothing of a . . . regulated ‘career,’ ‘advancement,’ ‘salary,’ or regulated and expert training of the holder of charisma or of his aids.”
In other words, the charismatic sounds a lot like an entrepreneur.
Charisma Is a Calling
When Facebook “went public” in May 2012, eight years after it started up, it was valued at over $100 billion and Mark Zuckerberg’s personal fortune (on paper) soared to about $19 billion. But in all the conversation around this enormous financial transaction, there was nary a word from Zuckerberg about shareholders or profits. In his IPO letter to potential shareholders, Zuckerberg said, “We believe that a more open world is a better world because people with more information can make better decisions and have a greater impact. That goes for running our company as well.” To ensure that sentiment, Zuckerberg arranged for a special stock arrangement enabling him to continue controlling Facebook no matter what the public owned.
We’re inclined to dismiss vision statements of corporations as nothing more than public relations, but the statements of entrepreneurial founders should be taken much more seriously. They are often more than PR pablum and represent strong beliefs that the founders actually act on. Most important, they often reveal a great deal about a founder’s motivation for creating.
To my mind, Zuckerberg was revealing his belief in his “calling” to make society more open. This drive to do something more than simply generate profits is common to most charismatic entrepreneurs. Money, certainly, is a factor, but either as a means to continue implementing the dream of the calling or as a marker, to show other charismatics how well you are doing. Of course, the subsequent IPO disaster, with the initial offering price of $38 plummeting to half, left many individual Facebook investors angry and feeling betrayed by Zuckerberg. The closed nature of the IPO, with insiders selling out at high prices to small investors who then lost money, eroded Zuckerberg’s message. If he is to retain the loyalty of his following and keep them engaged with Facebook, Zuckerberg has to prove his calling is not primarily about money but about meaning. He took one step in that direction in September 2012 by announcing he would not sell his stock and cash in for at least another year.
A secularized version of a calling has long been associated with capitalism. From the 1920s through much of the 80s, when professional managers ran most of America’s large corporations, business leaders saw themselves as professionals serving a broad range of interests, many of them social. They felt a collective responsibility to stakeholders—employees, local communities, the national government, customers, suppliers—as well as shareholders. In the 1990s, the CEO’s role was recast as a maximizer of shareholder values, but before that “a higher interest was the sin qua non of business professionalism,” says Harvard Business School professor Rakesh Khurana. The heads of big corporations felt they had a “calling” to do good for the nation.
This sense of calling is now rare among CEOs of global corporations, who focus on shareholders and see themselves as global citizens, not leaders of local communities. CEOs often have international responsibilities that surpass local and even national obligations. But the idea of a calling is alive and well among the founders of start-ups like Zipcar or Method who often embrace a social challenge with an entrepreneurial solution. The notion of creating neighborhood jobs and sourcing materials locally is strongest today among new companies growing up, rather than big companies going global.
Back in 2004, when Sergey Brin and Larry Page were taking the company they founded public, they, too, expressed a “calling” for their effort. “Sergey and I founded Google because we believed we could provide an important service to the world—instantly delivering relevant information on virtually any topic,” wrote Page. “In pursuing this goal, we may do things that we believe have a positive impact on the world, even if the near-term financial returns are not obvious.”
Charismatic leaders understand that the relationship between a leader and a community involves an exchange. What binds charismatic leaders to their followers is the promise of a gift, an unexpected surprise or powerful tool, that gives meaning to their lives. Charisma is a quid pro quo. If the gifts stop coming, if they lose their meaning, the allegiance of the following dies and the relationship ends. Think of all the great writers and artists who lost their “glow” when their work faded and their audiences disappeared.
Charisma starts with your calling, but how you present that calling is a different story. It often takes months, years to develop the confidence to present your ideas and yourself in a way that truly grabs people and makes them want to get involved. Once you clarify your passion, your next step is to communicate that passion effectively.
Your favorite actor, your best teacher, your impressive friend who just raised thousands of dollars on Kickstarter or persuaded a VC to invest in her company, all have some amount of charisma. But most of them probably weren’t born that way. They learned how to be charismatic, and so can you. The challenge is to find your own personal kind of charisma.
Charisma Can Be Learned
Though Steve Jobs is now considered one of the most charismatic CEOs of the decade, he did not start out that way. Jobs progressively increased his level of charisma over the years, choosing a signature style of personal dress, the simple black turtleneck; learning to introduce products with Broadway-level drama, whipping off a cloth to reveal a new offering and promoting what Apple employees called his “reality distortion field,” demanding even that which appears to be impossible.
I saw Mark Zuckerberg for the first time at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2009. He was sitting in front of several hundred people in a large conference room on a panel about the future of mobile along with Chad Hurley and a number of other high-tech luminaries. Panel moderator Mike Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch, said it was the first time he ever saw Zuckerberg with a tie on. Zuckerberg responded, jokingly, “No, I wore one all through boarding school.” Over the next forty minutes or so, he smiled, laughed, and talked easily about Facebook, privacy, and his goal of having a more open society. He was, in a word, charismatic.
But he didn’t start out that way.
Mark Zuckerberg was once seen as a strange young man who took an unusually long time responding to people when asked a question. But charisma requires delivering “secular epiphanies” again and again to your followers—and that means learning how to manage a complex series of relationships and information. You need to find people who can teach you. Successful entrepreneurs are adept at using their pivot networks as mentoring schools.
Zuckerberg is a master at finding teachers, mentors, and partners—and also at knowing when to part ways with them, as Henry Blodget detailed in a 2012 article in New York magazine. Early on, he enlisted the help of Sean Parker, cofounder of Napster, who connected him to Silicon Valley VCs like Andreessen Horowitz, but when Parker’s “party boy” persona was deemed a “liability,” Zuckerberg dropped him. With enough money to do a start-up, Zuckerberg hired Owen Van Natta from Amazon, and Van Natta was instrumental in increasing revenue and building out the company from twenty-six employees to hundreds. Then he fired Van Natta and hired Sheryl Sandberg, a veteran manager from Google, to help him scale Facebook to a global corporation. Along this journey, according to Blodget, Zuckerberg sought counsel from the likes of Peter Thiel, who was an early investor; Marc Andreessen, now a board member; and LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman.
None of this was easy for Zuckerberg, who was far more comfortable as a software programmer and product designer. But he pushed himself to find people who could teach him a wide variety of communication and business skills, which he used to further his vision. When I saw him in Davos, he was already on his way to shape shifting from computer nerd to high-tech entrepreneur, exuding a confidence in his calling that didn’t exist when he was in school. Today Zuckerberg, a multibillionaire, is one of the most charismatic people in business. His learned charisma was an essential tool in pivoting his tiny social media company—started years after MySpace and Friendster launched the concept and each built up an impressive number of users—into one of the largest companies in the world.
PIVOTING: TURNING YOUR IDEA INTO A GAME-CHANGER
No two people will have the same pivoting strategy. For some, pivoting might begin the moment you decide to go from knitting scarves for your family to setting up an online storefront. For others, it can happen when you get enough funding to hire thirty more people to join your start-up. For still others, it may mean finding the person at your company with enough clout to make your dream a reality. But while the precise pivoting strategy will differ from person to person, the essential ingredients remain the same: You need a product with aura, you need a wanderer to help you bring your idea to the wider world, you need to build a pivot network and decide over time how to nurture and grow that network, and you need to cultivate charisma by learning how to clearly articulate your calling.
And so your first challenge is to figure out where in the pivoting process you are. Are you still in the idea phase? If so, what kind of feeling do you want your creation to inspire in people? Where might you go for inspiration? The story of the creation of the iMac reveals how something as simple as a jelly bean can inspire in surprising ways. Your own journey toward imbuing the things you create with a deeper feeling or meaning can involve taking a trip to the country as the leaves are changing, remembering a toy you loved as a kid, or listening to a forgotten style of music. But that initial inspiration is only part of the magic of aura. Ives and his team didn’t just think of the jelly bean as visual inspiration and leave it at that; their investigation into the way the candy was made became a road map for the entire manufacturing process.
Throughout the pivoting process—long before you think about scaling and long after you’ve bought your product to market—the importance of cultivating charisma cannot be underestimated. There are few classes at business, art, or design schools where students can go to learn how to be charismatic. It’s a quality that you’re supposed to be born with, something you inherit, a quality you either have or don’t. But there are dozens and dozens of examples of people who over the course of time became charismatic.
So how did they do it? More important, how do you?
You can begin by asking yourself what you’re passionate about. We all have a passion, something that we love. It’s often off to the periphery of our jobs or our lives. It’s that secret hobby or that thing you used to be really good at, or that new approach at work that you feel would be so much better than what everyone is doing now. It’s that idea that you have about a product that your friends would really love to try if they could.
Much has been written about the importance of following your passion, but anyone who’s juggling life’s many demands—moving up the career ladder, raising children, making ends meet in a tough economy—might wonder how to find the time. But a quick glance on Kickstarter will tell you that following your passion to create something can be a very smart investment.
Moreover, that thing that electrifies you, that you can’t stop talking or thinking about, is what can draw an audience to you. When we talk about what we love, our faces light up, the words flow, and the excitement can be contagious. What animates you can animate others and make them want to get involved. Once you identify what excites you, start talking about it. If the first person you talk to isn’t interested, keep talking until you find someone who is. Start in your local community, find people interested in similar ideas online. Seek out mentors and “pivot network” members with different areas of expertise. Who do you know who’s great at logistics? Who seems to know everyone and might put you in touch with people who can help make your idea a reality? Most important, who gets you excited? Who’s supportive and encouraging? We all have that friend (or hopefully more than just one) who makes us feel energized and invigorated; even if he or she doesn’t have “traditional” business expertise, this kind of support cannot be underestimated, and this kind of person may be an invaluable member of your pivot network.
Your pivot network will vary depending on your current position and goals. Are you an artist or designer looking to take over more control of the creation and distribution of your product? Are you a manager charged with finding the next big thing for your company? Where do you need help right now—can you bring in others who excel in areas where you lack experience?
It’s also helpful to recognize which side of the pivot you lean toward. Do you love coming up with ideas and bringing people together, do you thrive on the enthusiasm and excitement of the whiteboard stage? Or do you like building things, linking people from different networks, managing day-to-day operations?
Challenge yourself here when answering these questions. Like many people, you may see yourself as an “idea person” who either can’t or doesn’t want to focus on implementation. But what happens when you can’t get enough people behind an idea you really believe in? What if you can’t get funding through traditional channels? Don’t let the “idea person” label stop you from following through. Having a lot of ideas and enthusiasm at the early stage of a project is incredibly important, but you may not yet see how your experience organizing other areas of your life can be applied to this work. In short, there’s nothing wrong with embracing the idea stage of the pivot. But don’t write off the other side if you’ve never given it a try.
On the other side of the spectrum, you may feel more comfortable throwing your support and implementation skills behind other people—perhaps those you consider “more creative.” In her classic book on creativity The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron wrote about “shadow artists,” people who defer their own creative dreams for any number of reasons, working in support roles or even dating artist types as a kind of consolation prize. Of course, support roles can involve work that’s every bit as creative, challenging, and rewarding as those traditionally viewed as “artistic” or “creative.” Indeed, wanderers are just as essential to the creation process as the person who had the first spark of an idea—and we should be celebrating these people every bit as much as we do those who prefer the whiteboard stage. But it’s important to take stock of whether you’re putting off personal projects to focus solely on furthering someone else’s creative dreams.
Once you understand that charisma is a social relationship, the steps you need to take to make yourself more charismatic become clear. Finding your passion gives you the emotional capital that you need to begin connecting to a larger audience. Learning how to communicate gives you the tools to do that. And reaching out to find mentors to teach you how to scale your message and your audience takes your charisma to an even higher level.
Pivoting should play an important role in any organization’s strategy. That means not being afraid to step away from hierarchical models in order to facilitate innovation and giving people more control about how they team up and partner. It means hiring or training in-house wandering managers who can help employees bring their ideas into being. These wanderers should have experience in the design or creation of products, not simply in managing. They need the right blend of vision, discernment, and domain knowledge—an understanding of the company or industry’s past and a willingness to drive it into the future.
It’s important for individuals and organizations alike to understand that the work of pivoting is never really done. Starting with your circle of friends and reaching out to local networks is a key starting point, but once your business is up and running you’ll need to enlist the help of new wanderers with new skills and areas of expertise. You’ll need to continually deliver on the promise you’ve made to the community from your first days of existence. When your product loses its aura—when quality goes down or the brand grows too large and diluted—people notice. When charismatic founders leave, they often take the aura of the product with them, and so it’s up to the people who remain to keep the original dream and spirit of creation alive.
Pivoting is the stuff of legend. It is the narrative of your origin myth. How you went from having a little idea to launching a game-changing business or nonprofit is a story we all love to hear. And why is that? Perhaps it is because for all the emotion we feel for creators, it is the builders whom we hold in highest esteem. Those who take our creativity and make it manifest in living, breathing, useful ways are at the apex of our admiration. And rightly so.