Reading Notes - Rex Mitchell 11/9/10

Murray, David Kord (2009). Borrowing brilliance: The six steps to business innovation by building on the ideas of others. New York: Gotham/Penguin Books.

My reaction to the book: One of the most interesting books I have read in the last year. One of the best books on creativity I have read ever. His basic thesis

There are no truly original thoughts. Originality lies in the construction of other conceptions, for brilliance is borrowed (p.273)

...is reasonable and is clearly useful from a pragmatic standpoint. His six-step process, in which the sixth involves selective iteration of earlier steps, is well thought-out and explained well (see a summary at the end of these notes). There are lots of relevant examples to support the thesis and process. The book is very readable, written in an interesting style. Although there is a bit of egoism in the autobiographical story woven through the book, his experiences are relevant. I recommend it highly!

A few of his quotations:

(34) The mere formulation of a problem is far more essential than its solution. - Einstein

(34) Looking back, I think it was more difficult to see what the problems were than to solve them.

- Charles Darwin

(221) Genius borrows nobly. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

(14) The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. - Einstein

(271) The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas. - Linus Pauling

(186) Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next. -Jonas Salk

(254) Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less traveled by,/And that has made all the difference. - Robert Frost

(249) Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently - Henry Ford

(239) Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler. - Einstein

(261) But if you have nothing at all to create, then perhaps you create yourself. - Carl Jung

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(16-17) How could I teach borrowing ideas without making the obvious connection that your competitors are, often, your greatest source for innovative materials? ...The fine line between theft and originality was blurring the creative process. ...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.

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 understood to be improvement rather than originality—in other words, creative imitation." He goes on to explain that "the puzzle is not that creative imitation was cherished in Shakespeare's time, as it is today, but that `originality' in the modern sense, in which the imitative element is minimized or at least effectively disguised, was not." In his book he explains that the concept of originality and plagiarism arose during the Italian Renaissance of the fourteenth century. Before this time, it was unusual for artists, architects, scientists, or writers to sign their work. Innovation and creativity were understood to be collaborative efforts in which one idea was copied from another and evolved through incremental enhancements. The concept of plagiarism didn't exist. Copying and creating were rooted in the same thing. The person who copied had an obligation to improve the copy, that was it.

In fact, the term renaissance means "rebirth" in French. While we think of the Renaissance as a moment in history when creative thought exploded, at the same time it was an era in which copying exploded, too, for the rebirth was based upon the rediscovery of the ideas of the ancient Greeks.

...Today, the chasm is so broadly separated that creativity and copying appear to be contrary concepts rather than the parallel ones that they truly are.

(21) talks about the Industrial Age, Information Age, possibly next/now as the Conceptual Age.

(24 His recommended process) I refer to the first three steps as The Origin of a Creative Idea:

Step One: Defining: Define the problem you're trying to solve.

Step Two: Borrowing: Borrow ideas from places with a similar problem.

Step Three: Combining: Connect and combine these borrowed ideas.

However, the construction metaphor only extends so far. Creating a new idea requires a process of trial and error, something an engineer or architect would never suggest doing in the construction of a house. So, I think of the next three steps using an evolutionary metaphor. An idea forms over time the way an organic species forms. An idea is a living thing, a descendent of the thing it derived from, the way a rock evolved into the wheel, the wheel into a chariot, and the chariot into the automobile. Ideas give birth to one another. Using this metaphor, your subconscious mind becomes the womb in which new ideas are created. You'll learn how to give birth to them by teaching your subconscious to define, borrow, and combine and so you'll feed it with problems, borrowed ideas, and metaphorical combinations. Then you'll incubate your idea and let your subconscious form a more coherent solution. I'll teach you to use your judgment of this new solution as the mechanism by which to drive the evolution of the idea, in the same way that the fight for survival drives the evolution of organic species. Then you'll separate your judgment into positive and negative, thus revealing the strengths and weaknesses of your new solution. You'll use judgment to improve the idea by eliminating its weaknesses and enhancing its strengths. In other words, you'll create the way the Renaissance masters did, through the incremental improvement of existing ideas. Over time, though, your new idea will grow and evolve, and eventually when you present it to the world it will appear to be completely new and original and the incremental steps will merely be fossils in the process. I call these steps The Evolution of a Creative Idea:

Step Four: Incubating: Allow the combinations to incubate into a solution.

Step Five: Judging: Identify the strength and weakness of the solution.

Step Six: Enhancing: Eliminate the weak points while enhancing the strong ones.

The sixth step isn't really a step at all, it's a return to the previous five steps: defining; borrowing, combining; incubating; and judging; all in an attempt to advance your idea through elimination and enhancement. While the first five steps are linear and build off each other, the sixth step is more of a haphazard one. It's more organic, a self-organizing process, one in which the process creates itself and is unique to each project. After passing judgment, you'll return to the problem, reconsider it, perhaps redefine it or decide to solve a completely different one. Your positive/negative judgments will develop your creative intuition and give you greater insight into what to borrow and from where. You'll replace ill-fitting components with new ones that work better. This will help you to restructure your idea and thus make new combinations that work better to solve your problem. You'll simulate :the mind of a genius by using left-brain thinking to take your idea apart, reconfigure it, and then use right-brained thinking to put it back together. In between these steps, you’ll re-incubate, returning to the well of subconscious thought as the process evolves. The order in which you do these things will depend upon your unique situation.

(36) The first problem with problems is that they say “Solve it now! while you have time. The second problem with problems is a result of this unnecessary constraint. Today I’ve learned to slow down. I study the problem before I begin constructing an idea.

(37) According to Morgan Jones, a former CIA analyst and author of The Thinker's Toolkit, the most common mistakes people tend to make when defining a problem are mistakes of scope—defining a problem too narrowly or too broadly. For example, if you're the vice-president of direct mail at a Fortune 500 company and you define your problem as "the color of the envelope," this may be too narrow a problem and so not yield positive results. If you define your problem as "response rate," this may be too broad and simply lead to the current solutions. These mistakes are the result of looking at each problem in isolation. A narrow problem is a low-level one while a broad problem is a high-level one.

(72) Borrowing from Competitors

When you borrow from someplace close, from your competitors, you're often considered a lowly pirate. However, borrow from outside your industry and you're considered a creative genius. The historical pirates of the Caribbean, such as Englishman Henry Morgan, were not considered bandits but soldiers of fortune because they stole exclusively from Spanish colonies and not British ones. Captain Morgan was called a "privateer" in England, hailed as a hero, and given important political appointments by Queen Elizabeth. It wasn't until years later, when his men started stealing from British colonies and British merchant marines, that they were considered thieves and outlaws. The privateers became pirates and they were hunted by the same people who had sanctioned their trade in the first place. They'd been taking all along but had been taking from foreigners, not from their own countrymen. The source of the theft changed how it was perceived.

Intellectual borrowing works the same way. Borrow from within your industry and you are considered a thief or lowly pirate. Borrow from another industry and you're considered a hero and a creative privateer. Does this mean you stay away from the ideas of your competitors? Certainly not, just don't take exclusively from them. Mix it up. Do lots of borrowing to cover your tracks. As screenwriter Wilson Mizner noted, "If you steal from one author, it's plagiarism; if you steal from many, it's research." Do lots of taking and you'll be fine. Your borrowings will be lost in the combinatory construction and hard to detect.

(Darwin 85ff, then on 86) Borrowing from the Opposite Place

When looking for borrowed ideas, your first step away from your industry should be in the opposite direction. If success in your market is in making big things, then try making small things. If your success is in making soft things, then consider making hard things. To adopt the opposite of a popular idea is always a novel approach. So go to the opposite place and gather its material. This is one of my favorite thinking techniques because it's simple to use and yet is perceived as being extremely creative. If you take someone's idea, but then disguise this borrowing by using its opposite, they'll call you a creative genius. Every idea has an opposite. In fact, you can't define something without implying an opposite.

(89) You can’t beat a bigger, stronger competitor by copying them exactly, but you can often beat them by doing the opposite, because the opposite is hard to defend against. ...The opposite place doesn’t always work...but you should always explore the possibilities.

(93-98 examples of borrowing: Nash, Velcro, Sonar, Radar, Darwin)

(98) Borrow from another industry and you’re an intellectual privateer. But travel far away and borrow from a subject not associated with yours and you’re a creative genius. Then combine all of these things in a unique way, thereby covering your tracks, and adjust them so they can best serve your purpose and solve your unique problem

Some of the many examples of borrowing:

(102, 114, 242) Lucas and Star Wars

(38, 225) Sergey Brin and Larry Page creating Google

(123) Sony Walkman

(127, 217, 277) Walt Disney

(129) Joseph Campbell

(173) Alexander Graham Bell

(195) Gregor Mendel

(205) Steve Jobs and Apple

(186, 227) Edison

(230, 240) Gutenberg

(244) Michael Faraday re generating electricity

(224, 244) Henry Ford

(244) Quentin Tarantino

(253, ) Newton

(110-111) The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of think in terms of another. ...Every new idea is conceived this way because every new idea is a combination of existing ideas. Creative thinkers are metaphorical thinkers. Period.

(146) The subconscious mind...does its thinking differently than the conscious mind. The subconscious sorts things out by making multiple combinations on different matters all at the same time. ...The conscious mind, on the other hand, thinks linearly, only able to handle one thought at a time. And this is why, in part, the subconscious is so much better at creative thinking. ...(147) Freud imagined the subconscious mind as a large banquet hall, with thoughts as guests, and the conscious mind as a smaller drawing room adjacent to it. The banquet hall can hold thousands of guests, while the drawing room can only accommodate a few at a time. In the doorway to the banquet hall stands a watchman. It’s his job to allow guests to enter and exit the drawing room. Once in this room, these guests, thoughts, become known to a person... (he develops this metaphor, including the following)

(148) In the drawing room, guests are expected to act a certain way. There’s a code of behavior that allows conscious thoughts to be logical, coherent, and consistent with a person’s beliefs. The watchman refuses thoughts that don’t adhere to this code. ...Also, the watchman turns away unrelated thoughts, such as new ideas, because they’re not congenial with the other guests currently in the room...

In the banquet hall the code of behavior is much more relaxed. The lights are dim and it’s a party in there. Thoughts can rage, get drunk, and interact with each other without the constraints of reason, logic, or adherence to a strict belief system. ...Two existing ideas meet, combine, and form a new idea, just for the hell of it...