Walter Isaacson: How Collaborative Genius Drives Innovation

Learn more about The Innovators at http://books.simonandschuster.com/The-Innovators/Walter-Isaacson/9781476708690. Walter Isaacson, bestselling author of 'Steve Jobs' and 'The Innovators,' discusses how the digital age's most crucial breakthroughs were the results of teamwork, symbiosis, and a marriage of liberal arts, business, and science.

[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]