Patience Isn’t A Virtue. It’s A Strategy
When Claude Shannon brought a prototype of a magnetic mouse to his office – which happened to be a highly respected and internationally recognized bastion for higher thinking – no one protested. The mathematician and electrical engineer had done all the work at home, including writing a paper on the machine mouse and perfecting the real brains behind the wood-and-wire rodent: an aluminum-paneled maze that, through an electromechanical relay circuit, could learn to navigate the labyrinth. Fellow researchers watched admiringly as the creature, Theseus, performed its little trick. It was actually a big trick for 1950 – the first artificial learning device.
It was also a snapshot of his broader vision of creating learning, thinking machines that could interact with people. The “father of information theory” – had an ongoing interest in machine learning that manifested in quirky ways. The mouse shenanigans weren’t out of character for Shannon (who also published a paper on chess programming and said he could envision research in game-playing machines leading to a clearer understanding of the human brain). Those close to him knew him as the seemingly absent-minded tinkerer who would ride a unicycle through hallways during breaks, sometimes while juggling. That was before he discovered the irresistible challenge of the pogo stick and added that to his break-time activities. This was a scientist who never stopped building or dreaming and didn’t see a reason to separate curiosity from science or play from progress.
Luckily for him, and for the rest of us, neither did his employer: Bell Labs.
His freedom was not just good fortune for Shannon and his pet projects. By the late 1960s, Bell Labs was providing the same supportive structure to some 15,000 employees, including around 1,200 PhDs, and had become known as a magnet for creative scientific thinkers, ushering in new and better ways of living for all of us. How? Through a more patient culture of innovation than we see today. Bell Labs’ system of slow-but-steady theory and invention cycles laid the groundwork for revolutionary advances in American discovery. Their people introduced technological leaps like communications satellites; lasers; the groundwork for optical fiber and cell phone communication; the transistor, a device that allows for the binary code that supports all digital products, including our cell phones and computers; and the Unix operating system, which made the Internet useful beyond government applications. Those are just a few – and they are in addition to revolutions in engineering and manufacturing processes as well as advances in the collective scientific community, with papers that expanded the understanding of physics, chemistry, and mathematics.
How did they accomplish so much, with sustained momentum?
While Shannon had to loosely connect his endeavors with the aim of Bell Labs (he couched his interest in artificially intelligent computing as being part of a vision that telephone systems were more computer than communications networks), he was allowed to be who he was. He was permitted to patent the mouse’s circuitry. He was given freedom to pursue a machine that could serve as a chess champion – and then opine about the concept’s broad implications. He was permitted to work with another employee – a bow-tie outfitted PhD named David Hagelbarger – to build two machines, plus one mechanical umpire, to compete against each other in guessing whether a coin would land heads or tails up in a boisterous, hours-long match cheered on by his Bell Labs cohorts.
To see them, it might have been easy to forget these were people at work or to imagine that such an unconventional workplace existed decades before Google or LinkedIn built sprawling playground-campuses meant to foster epiphany-inducing cross-disciplinary meetings. Bell Labs was the trailblazer. Its researchers and engineers set the groundwork for today’s tech firms with
the same hunger to create new products, minus the emphasis on immediacy. The organization took a more holistic approach to innovation, one that favored mixing applied science with roving scientific pursuits and melded minds from the entire development spectrum – from theory to manufacturing – to solve perplexing problems and imagine a different future.
In other words, it made stunning long-term progress because it moved more slowly. Its leaders imbued the group with a shared Purpose – discovery – and they were willing to accept that it would require them to take the long view to get there.
Everything about the company was designed with that intention in mind. Bell Lab’s Murray Hill, New Jersey, campus was a place with seemingly endless hallways where even the most brilliant had to follow an open-door policy and diversions and impromptu meetings among disciplines were inevitable. The projects from teams that resulted, and those meshed together by managers, were expected to meet the organization’s top aim, but team members also were sometimes given free rein to pursue open-ended research for years.
A culture like that doesn’t just happen. It can only be built with intention and with an eye on the long view. It requires personalities with the tenacity to see (and gently guide) a greater pattern in the sometimes frenzied and rabbit-hole ridden every day of curious characters hunting for solutions.
Former board Chairman and one-time AT&T researcher Mervin Kelly, who came from the school of physics and served as president from 1951 to 1959, was one of those personalities. He was meticulous about implementing his concept of an “institute of creative technology” – so much so, and so successfully, that he would later tour Europe sharing his formula for sustained, long-term innovation. He spent decades perfecting a systemized process, bringing together key players in discovery, development, and application. But perhaps most importantly, he knew how to help them shine. He valued people, constantly sought a “critical mass” of talented individuals working in close proximity, and he created a framework for a relationship-centric environment that allowed them to do their best work.
Bill Baker, Bell Labs president from 1973 to 1979, is remembered for his nurturing leadership style, an illustration of how Kelly’s concept helped the organization remain prolific in its output and continuously entrepreneurial, despite success. With an eye on “civilizing the future,” Baker worked to create the optimal present environment, one rich with resources and one that gave the right balance of freedom and responsibility to those helping to shape that better future.
Through Kelly’s approach, leaders like Baker worked to build the right connections with those under them and within the organization’s teams. Baker created an environment where researchers were safe being themselves, he supported them with the knowledge they needed, and he let them pursue curiosity even while he kept them trained on a bigger, long-term goal. Yes, the research needed, ultimately, to provide some improvement in communications and information handling. But those improvements could be incremental, and following knowledge and understanding – even and maybe especially through oddly-paired synergies – was fruitful in itself. The lab had to meet objectives and provide end products, but Kelly gave the human talent the space, support and time to flourish.
The next time you reach for your cell phone, and the “world of information” literally at your fingertips and your ability to communicate with almost anyone, almost anywhere, ask yourself this: How did you get it? I mean before your cell phone provider’s storefront and even before the laborers across the world who built its components. How did all of that technology – and the systems that power it – come together to rest in the palm of your hand?
It took more than a half century of research and implementation. It took sharp but creative minds with time to study, to meander into other disciplines, to theorize and test real-world applications to an extent that just doesn’t happen now, when most corporate research demands rapid innovation, when applied research has to promise products in a three- to five-year window.
The power behind the ways we communicate – and all those lean and swift startups that now run with the technology – required time. It required nurturing relationships in the right environment. It took Bell Labs, an organization willing to invest in researchers who provided more than immediate payoffs, one where managers worked to create loyal relationships with the aim of building a better engine for creativity and discovery.
Contrast that with what we see most often today. Not only do today’s version of tech titans dismiss the long-view, they take a certain pride in their ability to crash into the next newest tool or product. This hit-or-miss approach rewards only those who hit hardest and fastest and most frequently.
Think of Amazon. Founded in 1991 by Jeff Bezos, the any-and-all things retail giant won top billing on Fast Company’s list of 2017’s most innovative companies for its “bold bets” and tendency to make more and move faster. It’s another version of the hit-or-miss tactic, only Amazon has the resources to keep swinging. In Fast Company, Bezos himself admitted this, though he characterized it more as a carrot for his people to continually lunge toward in scrappy, startup fashion: “Our customers are loyal to us right up until the second somebody offers them a better service. And I love that. It’s super-motivating for us.” Compare that – or Google’s “gospel of speed” – with the purposeful patience of Bell Labs.
I grew up with several sisters who each, from ages 10 to 15, had a star of the year – a special place on the wall for the poster of their most current burning teen obsession. One year it was the Bee Gees. Then they were bumped to make room for David Cassidy. Then he was abandoned for Bobby Sherman. New year, new idol.
Those responses are infatuation, something we all go through. They shouldn’t be mistaken for genuine loyalty. For most people or organizations, you won’t achieve long-term success if you’re trying to tap into a temporary craze. Taking the long road pays off in spades in the end. The results Bell Labs achieved – in longevity and discovery – remain unrivaled, even against the innovative luster we assign to Silicon Valley and current tech leaders. Their more rowdy moves work if you happen to be fastest in the world. Or the best financed. Or the most talented. But lose your foothold for a moment, and your position at the top vanishes. You’ll lose it “the second somebody offers a better service,” as Amazon has learned, and you be cast into a ruthless, winner-take-all game.
Operating there can only encourage the scarcity mentality; there’s only one spot available, after all, and so everything becomes a zero sum arrangement. There’s no playing nice – and there is no room for a moment of error. That applies to tech firms, but also to performers, nonprofits, churches – any of those organizations that sometimes latch onto a catchy, new effort that brings people in the door, or to your website, but can’t keep them there.
The “loyalty” you can win with these “best of” technique results in something, but it’s short-term. It’s a fad or phase, red hot for a while but about as sustainable as teenage fascination.