Be careful hiring “experts” when what’s really required is “innovators”! The best people are able to do both. But they can be very hard to find and difficult to pick out of a crowd.
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Tyranny of Experts
Category: Innovation
In his latest book, The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective, Steven Johnson explores a fascinating paradox: Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite and founder of the Nobel Peace Prize, unwittingly provided a weapon for radical anarchists. Nobel, seeking a safe way to harness the power of nitroglycerin for infrastructure projects, unleashed a destructive force that could be wielded by a single individual.
The chaos caused by anarchist bombings sparked a national outcry for a more sophisticated federal response to crime.Enter a young J. Edgar Hoover, who at the time was a rising star in the Bureau of Investigation (BOI), a precursor to the FBI. Hoover, with his keen eye for organization and ambition, saw the anarchist threat as an opportunity to transform the BOI into a powerful national agency. Johnson explores how the BOI’s pursuit of anarchists under Hoover’s leadership laid the groundwork for the FBI’s methods and tactics. While effective in capturing some dangerous criminals, these tactics also foreshadowed the FBI’s later controversies surrounding surveillance and civil liberties.
The chilling irony is that the fight against anarchists fueled by dynamite led to the very surveillance methods we grapple with today, a legacy with both significant benefits and sometimes serious drawbacks.
Johnson, a master storyteller, weaves these narratives together in a way that reminds me of another historical connector,James Burke, and his classic series “Connections.” Both shine a light on the unexpected ways seemingly unrelated events can be deeply intertwined.
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Magic in the Air
I’m not sure what provoked my interest earlier this week, but I enjoyed watching the documentary from a few years ago on the history of General Magic. Living in Silicon Valley, I remember hearing stories about the company – and the talented people working at the company led by CEO Marc Porat.
Watching the documentary provided some great background into how the company innovated in so many ways yet wasn’t able to be a commercial success. Lessons learned included how great ideas fail when they’re too early for the technology to support them, the implications of trying to partner with other large companies, and the dangers of competition that “fast follows” on your ideas.
Last night, I stumbled across another fun video produced by the Computer History Museum about the history of MacPaint, Quickdraw, and more as told by Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld. They were both early employees at Apple, very important software developers on the Mac platform, who left Apple to be early founders of General Magic. Listening to them talk about the early days of development at Apple was very interesting.
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