Move Deliberately & Build Things

Bell Labs technicians preparing the
Telstar communications satellite for
launch in 1962.

Describing the post World War II golden age of innovation in the US, Jon Gertner posits that the Bell Laboratories' motto might well have been:

Move Deliberately & Build Things.

And build they did. Bell Labs was the most prolific innovation factory of the 20th century.

Reviewing The Idea Factory, Gertner's book about Bell Laboratories innovations, Walter Isaacson suggests that the first intercontinental phone call between New York and San Francisco, master-minded at Bell Laboratories, ushered in the novel model of the collaborative industrial organization — an organization that deliberately seeks and models cross-functional, cross-disciplinary teams.

The problem was one that required not just engineering skill but advances in pure science. They needed, among other things, to create a repeater or amplifier for the electric signals so that they would not attenuate after a few miles. Thus was the seed planted for a new collaborative industrial organization — teaming up theoreticians, experimentalists, material scientists, metallurgists, engineers and even telephone pole climbers — that eventually became Bell Labs.
― Walter Isaacson

Isaacson asks,

What causes innovation? Why does it happen, and how might we nurture it?

In The Idea Factory Gertner offers insights into how an engineered organizational structure, and an intentional physical layout led to and sustained decades of unprecedented innovation if the US until the monopolistic breakup of the Bell System in 1982.

Contrary to the popular notion of a lone genius conjuring culture-changing inventions in the isolation of a garage workshop, Bell Labs inventions grew incrementally from teams of people with diverse expertise and temperaments. It grew incrementally from people learning from and extending the discoveries and inventions of their colleagues and historic predecessors.

If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants. ― Isaac Newton (1642 – 1727)

One of the many triumphs of Bell Labs was to connect us through digital machines shrinking our collective cultural & communication sphere. And connect us they did.

Conveying break-through scientific theory into useful consumer products is incremental and deliberate. The product development path was rarely direct, rather setbacks and diversions were not only expected but redoubled resolve ― resolve to drive toward better and cheaper products.

REFERENCES

• Inventing the Future, a book review of Jon Gertner's The Idea Factory, by Walter Isaacson, New York Times, April 6, 2012.
• The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, by Jon Gertner.
• True Innovation by Jon Gertner, New York Times Opinion, February 25, 2012.

Open or Closed

A closed door shields us from our shortcomings, but robs us of humanity's greatest currency ― sharing ideas.

Richard Hamming left many insights about learning to learn from his career as mathematician. Hamming retrospectively concluded that his cloistered colleagues had made less impact.

Bell Laboratories, where Hamming worked from 1946 to 1976, capitalized on the physical proximity of brain power combined with a floor-plan that co-mingled multiple-disciplinary thinkers and doers.

Bell Laboratories

"Traveling the hall’s length without encountering a number of acquaintances, problems, diversions and ideas was almost impossible. A physicist on his way to lunch in the cafeteria was like a magnet rolling past iron filings."
― Jon Gertner

The mixing of disciplines at Bell Laboratories, attributed to Bell Laboratories President (1951-59) Mervin Kelly, orchestrated harmony and tension that incited change. It was the frequency of change that sped up the flurry of innovation.

"If you're going to have progress, there has to be change. Change does not mean progress, but progress requires change."
― Richard Hamming

Traveling the halls of Bell Laboratories, Hamming observed the difference between those whose doors were open and those whose doors were shut.

I cannot prove to you whether the open door causes the open mind or whether the open mind causes the open door.
― Richard Hamming

An open door is an apt metaphor for an open mind. Hamming argued for diversity of input.

"You have to get wide cleave of what's going on."

He observed,

"Those who work with the door shut don't know what to work on. They're not connected with reality."

A closed door leads to fewer interruptions, and fewer interruptions allow one concentrated time to knock off problem-solving tasks. What if it's the wrong problem?

"The guys with their doors closed were often very well able, very gifted,but they seemed to work always on slightly the wrong problem."
― Richard Hamming

Learning is our imperative. The door is our metaphor. Today we have many channels vying for our attention or what Linda Stone calls Continuous Partial Attention. Paradoxically we must be both open and selective.

Being Open and Selective is a discipline of that demands daily exercise and vigilance.


REFERENCES

• True Innovation, by Jon Gertner, New York Times Opinion, February 25, 2012
• You and Your Research, lecture by Richard Hamming recorded June 6, 1995. This lecture was from the capstone course "The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn" for graduate students at the Naval Postgraduate School.