Borrowing Brilliance: The Six Steps to Business Innovation by Building on the Ideas of Others - Brossura

Honor Among Thieves

Traveling back in time twenty-five years, I find myself sitting in a waiting room. I recognize it as the Westborough State Hospital in Massachusetts and I recognize myself as a young man with a full head of hair waiting for my friend Sarkis Kojabashian. I call him “Tuna” because his name sounds like “Starkist,” the company that sells canned tuna fish, and because I have no idea what a “Sarkis” is. He works at the hospital and I’ve come to pick him up so we can drive to Cape Cod for the weekend.

Tuna had told me this was called the Westborough State Colony for the Criminally Insane when it opened a hundred years ago. Then it was renamed the Westborough State Insane Asylum. Next it was called the Westborough State Mental Hospital and now it was more cryptically known as the Westborough State Hospital. It smells of medicinal alcohol, damp linens, and dried piss. It gives me the creeps and I hate to think of my friend spending time in here. Sarkis wants to become a psychiatrist and he’s working as an orderly to get experience and college credits. A bad idea, I think.

Across from me sits a frail, thin man, middle- aged and dressed in a green hospital-issued smock, like a doctor or surgeon wears. He isn’t acknowledging me and doesn’t seem to care I’m in the room. He rocks back and forth, mumbling something. I am certain he isn’t a doctor. I struggle to hear what he’s saying, but can’t. He chants to himself, the same thing, over and over.

Where the hell is Tuna? I think. I want to get out of this place. I listen. Now I can make it out, barely, now I am certain what he’s saying.

He wants something.

“I gotta get a gun,” he mumbles. Oh, that’s just great, I think. Tuna leaves me in here with a psychotic killer, a leftover from the colony for the criminally insane. This guy’s going to pull out a Smith & Wesson from under his smock or attack me with a homemade shank.

“I gotta get a gun. I gotta get a gun,” he repeats, faster, louder and more desperately. “I gotta get a gun.”

Just then Tuna bursts into the room. “Hey, Murray! How the hell are ya?” he says as he smothers me in a bear hug. I push him away, pissed off, and motion toward the would-be assassin.

“Get me the hell out of here,” I say.

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

“What’d ya think?” I say as we walk out to the safety of the corridor.

“Oh, you aren’t scared of Billy, now, are you?” he asks.

“That guy’s nuts.”

“No shit. Where do you think you are?” he replies.

Down the hall, faintly, I hear, “I gotta get a gun. I gotta get a gun.”

I say to Sarkis, “He’s dangerous. He keeps saying that he’s going to get a gun.”

Tuna laughs and says, “He isn’t saying he’s gonna get a ‘gun.’ He’s saying he’s gotta get some ‘gum.’ Something to chew on, Murray, not something to blow your brains out with.” In the car on the way to the Cape, Sarkis tells me that Billy was admitted to the hospital two years ago. Sadly, he’s been saying he needs “gum” over and over for most of that time. As Sarkis understands it, he lost his life savings in a bad business deal, double crossed by his partner, and now finds himself in a dank room, hidden in a mental hospital in an obscure part of New England. Every day Tuna gives him a pack of gum, Juicy Fruit, Big Red, and even Bubblicious, but every day he just repeats the request, over and over, even as he chews away.

Go figure, right?

***

Twenty-five years later, hidden in Tempe, Arizona, I can’t help but think of Billy and wonder if he ever pulled out of it. Did he ever stop repeating himself? Did he ever escape from Westborough?

I don’t know the answers to those questions. I never will. I do, however, start to wonder about my own sanity. While I’m not incessantly chanting for chewing gum, repetitive thoughts are echoing in my mind, and even though I’m thousands of miles away, I wonder how close I am to being admitted to Westborough. To joining Billy.

I’m consulting for another leasing company, hired to create new ideas. The only problem is, all the ideas I create are just rehashed ones from my glory days. Nothing new. I’m known by my colleagues as an “idea guy,” but now every time I sit down to think of one, I keep coming back to Preferred Capital. My thoughts are repetitive, like Billy’s, trapped in the past, in a canyon of thought I can’t escape. I need some new ones.

I begin to read. Voraciously. The little money I have is being spent on vodka, cranberry juice, and books. I’m reading more than two a week. Books on innovation and creativity. Business books. Books on psychology and philosophy. Science books. Books on neurology and biology. Anything that can help to get the creative juices flowing again. The books seem to work. The vodka does not.

Over the next couple of years I manage to think my way out of the one- bedroom apartment in Tempe and begin a journey out of bankruptcy and into a completely new occupation. I start a small consulting company called Kord Marketing Group, a reference to my mother’s maiden name and my middle name, and begin developing new marketing programs for small, medium, and even large companies.

Within a year, I get the opportunity to consult for one of the most prominent software companies in Silicon Valley. While there I come up with an innovative direct- marketing program that dramatically increases retention rates, boosts revenues by fifty million dollars, and adds similar bottom-line profits to the company. In retrospect, the idea would seem so simple and so obvious that the senior managers would scratch their heads and ask, “Why didn’t we think of that before?” The founder of the company, a veteran of the Silicon Valley software wars and one of the few to beat Bill Gates at his own game, would find himself more intrigued to know how I came up with the idea than with the idea itself.

“How’d you think of it?” he asked me.

I explained to him how I’d studied his business problem and then looked at how other companies in other marketplaces had solved a similar problem. Then I had constructed the new direct- marketing program out of the borrowed ideas from these other places. It wasn’t hard. Once I had the material, it was obvious which pieces would best combine to solve the problem I had defined.

“Cool,” he said. He was so impressed by the simplicity of the idea and how I’d come up with it that he created a new position at the company for me. I became the Head of Innovation, a position I hadn’t even known existed at Fortune 500 companies, and I was told to come up with new ideas and to teach others in the company to do the same. It was this assignment that led to the book you now hold in your hands.

At first, I was intimidated by my new position. How do you teach people to innovate? Is it even possible? I started to study innovative thinking. As an engineer by training, I was looking for a practical approach to innovation, but everything I read seemed to be shrouded in a fog of mystery. On the other hand, my personal approach to creative thinking was pretty much hack, I just stole or borrowed ideas from other places. In my new position I’d have to develop a more sophisticated approach—or so I thought.

I found that most people believed that creativity was a gift. It can’t be taught, they said, it’s innate in your thinking process. Either you had it or you didn’t. The more I delved, the thicker the fog around creative thinking became. As a subject, innovation was bizarre. The ones who did teach it used words like synthesis, lateral thinking, empathy, and pattern recognition to describe it. I didn’t want to say so outright, but I had no clue what these experts were talking about. I didn’t understand—­it was over my head. I learned how to moderate a brainstorming session by suspending the criticism of new ideas but quickly realized this was a complete waste of time. The sessions were fun and intellectually intriguing but nothing practical ever came out of them. The more I learned about innovation the deeper into the fog I ventured.

I studied the work of Teresa Amabile of the Harvard Business School. She is one of the country’s foremost experts on business innovation and she said, “All innovation begins with creative ideas.” Okay, I said to myself, that makes sense, but how do you define a creative idea? What is it? Over time I came up with this simple explanation:

A creative idea is one that’s new and useful. A new idea that isn’t useful, I reasoned, isn’t worth much in the business world. I could design a car with square wheels, it would be new and different, but it wouldn’t be of much use. Later I’d come to realize that this definition transcended business, for it also applied to science, entertainment, and even the arts.

I continued down this thinking path and asked myself two separate questions. What makes an idea useful? And what makes an idea new? The first question was easy to answer. Since ideas are the solutions to problems, it’s your definition of the problem that makes it useful. Solve an important one and you’ve got a useful idea. Right? The second question, however, was a little more difficult to answer.

To figure it out, I began to study ideas. I looked at my own ideas, the ideas of my colleagues, and the ideas of others in business, science, and the arts. I read biographies of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and the Google guys. I looked for the source and form of their new ideas. Then I studied Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, and George Lucas. Again, I looked at their ideas. I wasn’t trying to determine their thinking processes, I was just trying to determine the structure of their ideas. What made them new and different? It took a while, and I had to wade through a lot of crap, but when the fog finally cleared I realized that each new idea was constructed out of existing ideas. It didn’t matter whether it was my simple direct- marketing idea or Einstein’s sophisticated theoretical-physics idea—they were both just combinations of existing stuff. Sure, Einstein’s stuff was much more complex, but it was still constructed out of borrowed ideas. He even said, “The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.”

Aha, I said to myself. Maybe I’m not such a hack. Maybe there really is honor among thieves. Maybe we’re all thieves. With this new insight, things became clearer and clearer. I began to tell people: Ideas—not just some but all of them—are constructed out of other ideas. I felt like the kid in the fairy tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes” who states the obvious: that the emperor is naked. I began calling bullshit, stating the obvious about creativity and changing the perception of it from a waiting game to an exploration game. In other words, creative thought is the search for an idea that already exists, not the act of waiting for one to pop into your head.

Brilliance, I began to say, is actually borrowed. I learned that this wasn’t just a characteristic of modern intellectual life, but has been so throughout human history. Some of the most creative people who have ever lived, such as Isaac Newton and William Shakespeare, were accused of idea theft and plagiarism. It didn’t surprise me. Since ideas are born of other ideas, this creates a fine line between theft and originality.

In fact, it was during the inquisition of Isaac Newton, after having been accused of stealing in the creation of calculus, that he successfully defended himself with the confession, “Yes, in order to see farther, I have stood on the shoulders of giants.” In other words, Newton pled guilty to the obvious, that he built his ideas out of the ideas of others.

As I thought more about this, I came to understand that ideas, like species, naturally evolve over time. Existing concepts are altered and combined to construct new concepts; the way geometry, trigonometry, and algebra combine to form calculus. Thousands of years ago, I reasoned, a Neanderthal man accidentally dislodged a large rock as he climbed a hill behind his cave. He watched as it magically rolled down the slope and he went “aha.” The next day he chiseled the first wheel out of another stone and amazed his neighbors with his new invention that he had borrowed, copied, from his observation the day before. Another industrious Neanderthal copied the rock-wheel, except he made it out of a fallen tree, so it was easier to roll. Then another combined the wooden wheel with a basket and created the first wheelbarrow and used it to haul the carcass of a dead saber-toothed tiger. Later, this was borrowed and combined with a horse and a second wheel and the first chariot was created. Two more wheels were added to the chariot and the first carriage was constructed. Ultimately, the horse was replaced with a steam engine to make the first automobile. And so on…; each new idea being built out of a combination of the previous ones. The more I studied, the more I realized that borrowing ideas isn’t just a thinking technique, it’s the core thinking technique. The fog was gone. For me, creativity was now obvious and I wondered why the fog had ever existed.

So I began to teach this methodology at the software company where I worked. Then something interesting happened. After a presentation to the CEO and his executive staff, the chief counsel of the company took me aside. “David,” he said, “I loved your presentation and I think you’re onto something, but you can’t teach this to our employees.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“You can’t teach our employees to steal ideas from other companies,” he said. “It’s just too risky from a legal point of view. You have to take that part out of your presentation.”

I was in shock. How could I teach borrowing ideas without making the obvious connection that your competitors are, often, your greatest source for innovative materials? It was then that I realized why there was so much fog of misunderstanding in the creative process.

No one wanted to admit that they were thieves, that at the core of the creative process was the act of borrowing. In order to create, you had to copy. The plagiarist and the creative genius, ironically, were doing almost exactly the same thing. The chief counsel was telling me to disguise the process. He was telling me to put a layer of fog over it so we couldn’t be sued in the future.

It was this experience that showed me, firsthand, why the creative process was so confusing and so shrouded in a hazy mist. The fine line between theft and originality was blurring the creative process.

Most had a vested interest, like the chief counsel, in keeping the true nature of creativity a secret. I would learn that this wasn’t a conspiracy to hide the process so much as it was a natural outcome of an economic-and legal-based society. You see, it was the monetary value in ideas that created the concept of originality. And it was the concept of originality that laid a layer of fog over the concept of creativity.

Let me explain.

Origins of Originality

According to Richard Posner, a judge for the United States Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and author of The Little Book of Plagiarism, “…;in Shakespeare’s time, unlike ours, creativity was unde...