The Genius Machine by Gerald Sindell

Author:Gerald Sindell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New World Library
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

We Are Not Alone

Genius thinkers recognize that,

when they have created something of value

in any one area, it will probably be of value

in many areas.

Let’s imagine we’ve just developed a complete pneumatic tube system for our large pharmaceutical manufacturing campus. (Pneumatics were popular in the nineteenth century, with narrow-bore tubes that carried mail under the streets of Paris and the first demonstration subway in New York both running on pneumatic principles: if you fit a cylinder into a tube of a slightly greater diameter, you can propel the cylinder at high speed using only air pressure.) Imagine that we’re able to take materials, even delicate ones, and send them several miles around our campus in a few seconds. To develop this system, we have reengineered those nineteenth-century pneumatics, and we also have new, self-switching thermally stable capsules, clear pneumatic tubing, switches, and bullet-proof logic, so that no matter what the failure, nothing can ever be damaged.

Now that we’ve got this system up and running, we can begin to ask who else might benefit from all of our innovations. The first possibility is: No one! It could just be that something we have seen or created for ourselves has an audience or interest group of one. Part of the essence of identity is that we are unique, and therefore there is some likelihood that, even though something we have created absolutely drives us wild with joy, we are completely alone in this appreciation. This goes for authors, inventors, composers, and other innovators of all kinds. It can be quite a challenge to find that what pleases us so much has no other takers. When the whole world says no to you, it can be a lot of rejection to handle, unless you can accept it as a recognition of you as an individual. Undoubtedly, other creations of yours will find acceptance, especially if they are created with the identity of users other than yourself in mind.

As a pharmaceutical manufacturer, we can make a reasonable assumption that we are not, in fact, alone. So we certainly have potential customers for our pneumatic system in other pharmaceutical manufacturers. We can also imagine all kinds of other manufacturers who might benefit from the just-in-time capabilities of our pneumatics. If we really want to expand our vision, we could imagine convincing UPS to replace their entire truck parcel delivery system with a national system of larger bore pneumatics delivering everything from books to food. Imagine if the speed of ordering over the Internet could almost be matched by delivery speed. One click on Amazon and your book slips into a capsule and heads through the network at a thousand miles an hour to your office or residence drop box.

As we solve our local problems and innovate for our own organizations, or even just for ourselves, we need to ask, who else needs this knowledge? If what I am saying is so, for whom would this knowledge be valuable? This question forces us out of focusing solely in our own area and may even lead us to find new universals that underlie our work.

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