Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Grant Adam

Author:Grant, Adam [Grant, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-02-02T05:00:00+00:00

7

Rethinking Groupthink

The Myths of Strong Cultures, Cults, and Devil’s Advocates

“In fact, the only sin which we never forgive in each other is difference of opinion.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Standing on stage in front of a captive audience, a technology icon pulled a new device out of his pocket. It was so much smaller than competing products that no one in the room could believe his eyes. The founder’s flair for theatrical product launches wasn’t the only source of his fame. He was known for his singular creative vision, a passion for blending science and art, an obsession with design and quality, and a deep disdain for market research. “We give people products they do not even know they want,” he remarked after introducing a revolutionary gadget that helped to popularize the selfie.

The man urged people to think different. He led his company to greatness and redefined multiple industries, only to be unceremoniously forced out by his own board of directors, and then watch the empire he created start to crumble before his eyes.

As much as this story seems to describe Steve Jobs, the visionary was actually one of Jobs’s heroes: Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid. Today, Land is best remembered for inventing the instant camera, which gave rise to an entire generation of amateur photographers—and enabled Ansel Adams to take his famous landscape photographs, Andy Warhol to make his celebrity portraits, and NASA astronauts to capture the sun. But Land was responsible for something bigger: the polarizing light filter that’s still used in billions of products, from sunglasses and digital watches to pocket calculators and 3-D movie glasses. He also played a vital role in conceiving and designing the U-2 spy plane for President Dwight Eisenhower, which changed the course of the Cold War. In total, Land amassed 535 patents, more than any American before him other than Thomas Edison. In 1985, just a few months before getting kicked out of Apple, Steve Jobs shared his admiration for Land, “one of the great inventors of our time. . . . The man is a national treasure.”

Land may have been a great original, but he failed to instill those attributes in his company’s culture. In an ironic twist, Polaroid was one of the companies that pioneered the digital camera, yet ultimately went bankrupt because of it. As early as 1981, the company was making major strides in electronic imaging. By the end of the decade, Polaroid’s digital sensors could capture quadruple the resolution of competitors’ products. A high-quality prototype of a digital camera was ready in 1992, but the electronic-imaging team could not convince their colleagues to launch it until 1996. Despite earning awards for technical excellence, Polaroid’s product floundered, as by then more than forty competitors had released their own digital cameras.

Polaroid fell due to a faulty assumption. Within the company, there was widespread agreement that customers would always want hard copies of pictures, and key decision makers failed to question this assumption. It was a classic case of groupthink—the tendency to seek consensus instead of fostering dissent.

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