[Collaborative Genius]
When you look at partnerships, first you think of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.
Steve Jobs, a great marketer, the person with the design sense, and the flare.
Wozniak, who could take very very few microchips and make an amazing circuit out of it.
You always need to team people who have great vision with people who know how to execute things.
That's even true of the original computers. People like Presper Eckert, a great engineer,
working with a visionary like John Mauchly.
These names aren't know to as many people, because they weren't single individuals
that you could carve on a pantheon, or put on a magazine cover.
They were usually teams of people who worked together.
Every now and then you run into an innovator who did not know how to collaborate.
Somebody like John Atanasoff, out in Iowa State.
He was sitting there in a basement, trying to build a computer
with just one graduate student helping him.
And he never was able to get the punch card burners to work,
and after he gets drafted into the Navy, the machine just sits there in the basement
until somebody finally throws it away.
So, if you don't have that team around you, if you are unable to execute,
you get consigned to the dustbin of history.
A great team is one that has many players who can play many positions,
just like a baseball team.
If you look at the founders of the United States, you had passionate people, like John Adams
and his cousin Samuel; you had really smart people, like Jefferson and Madison;
and you had people of great rectitude, like George Washington;
and, finally, somebody like Ben Franklin, who could be the glue who holds them all together.
And that, to me, is a type of team that's replicated, whether it's Intel,
with Gordon Moore, and Robert Noyce, and Andy Grove;
or Bell Labs, which has wonderful people who can do things like be information scientists
as well as pole climbers with grease under their fingernails
all working together as a team.
So, when you look at the teams that created the great innovations of the digital age,
it was usually not just one type of person,
but a team that could pull together with many types of talents.
[Walter Isaacson — The Innovators]