How an Entirely New, Autistic Way of Thinking Powers Silicon Valley

  • By Temple Grandin and Richard Panek
  • 05.23.13
  • 9:30 AM

book excerpt

The Autistic Brain

by Temple Grandin and Richard Panek

“

I’ve given a great deal of thought to the topic of different ways of thinking. In fact, my pursuit of this topic has led me to propose a new category of thinker in addition to the traditional visual and verbal: pattern thinkers.

The Autistic Brain book cover

Reading an interview with Steve Jobs, I came across this quote: “The thing I love about Pixar is that it’s exactly like the LaserWriter.” What? The most successful animation studio in recent memory is “exactly like” a piece of technology from 1985?

He explained that when he saw the first page come out of Apple’s LaserWriter — the first laser printer ever — he thought, There’s awesome amounts of technology in this box. He knew what all the technology was, and he knew all the work that went into creating it, and he knew how innovative it was.

But he also knew that the public wasn’t going to care about what was inside the box. Only the product was going to matter — the beautiful fonts that he made sure were part of the Apple aesthetic. This was the lesson he applied to Pixar: You can use all sorts of new computer software to create a new kind of animation, but the public isn’t going to care about anything except what’s on the screen.

He was right, obviously. While he didn’t use the terms picture thinker and pattern thinker, that’s what he was talking about. In that moment in 1985, he realized that you needed pattern thinkers to engineer the miracles inside the box and picture thinkers to make what comes out of the box beautiful.

I haven’t been able to look at an iPod or iPad or iPhone without thinking about that interview. I now understand that when Apple gets something wrong, it’s because they didn’t get the balance between the kinds of thinking right.

The notorious antenna problem on the iPhone 4? Too much art, not enough engineering.

Contrast this philosophy with Google’s; the minds behind Google, I guarantee you, were pattern thinkers. And to this day, Google products favor engineering over art.

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The Next Big Thing in Crowdfunding? Kickstarting People

  • By Dave Girouard
  • 04.19.13
  • 7:30 AM

photo: cohdra / morgueFile

One market that has always seemed immune to disruption (as popularized by Clayton Christensen in the Innovator’s Dilemma) has been the market for money itself.

While all sorts of companies were being disrupted — by fledgling competitors introducing lesser-featured products no one really wanted — those who financed the disruptors gained most. Venture capitalists and investment bankers reaped the benefits when those fledgling companies’ innovative features finally moved into mainstream markets.

But those days of benefitting, while remaining immune to, disruption are done. Because of crowdfunding, Christensen’s heartless yet proven principle is finally turning its steely gaze toward the very way capital is allocated and accessed. However, I’m going to argue here not just for the popular notion of crowdfunding as backing “projects,” but as backing people, too.

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I Tried to Make the Intelligence Behind the Iraq War Less Bogus

  • By Nada Bakos
  • 03.18.13
  • 6:30 AM

U.S. Army 1st Sgt. Shane Chapman yells for a medic after a car bomb explodes in Mosul, Iraq, March 2008. Photo: U.S. Army

Ten years ago this week, the U.S. invaded Iraq, citing intelligence that turned out to be bogus. I had to work on some of it — and I also had to work on keeping the really, really terrible versions of it out of our analysis.

Specifically, I was a CIA analyst working in the Counterterrorism Center in the overburdened days after 9/11. As analysts, we spend most of our time identifying burgeoning issues based on communications intercepts, reports from CIA case officers, imagery from satellites, accounts from other governments, and piecing together a story.

What we don’t do routinely is tie one catastrophe to another. But that was exactly what I was asked to do in November 2002, shortly after Congress voted to authorize war with Iraq. That war was predicated on Saddam Hussein’s (ultimately nonexistent) stockpiles of deadly weapons, but lurking in the background was the assertion that he’d pass them on to al-Qaida. At the CIA’s Iraq Branch in the Counterterrorism Center, we didn’t think Saddam had any substantial ties to al-Qaida. But soon we found ourselves fielding questions from determined Bush administration officials about whether Saddam was tied to 9/11.

That’s how my team ended up in a windowless room with my branch chief, “Karen,” who was pretending to be Dick Cheney or his chief of staff, Scooter Libby.

That month, Vice President Cheney scheduled a meeting with our Branch to discuss our assessment of Iraq’s relationship with al-Qaida and 9/11. It was his second visit to the Branch; there always seemed to be more questions. The Branch Chief called us together for a practice session in a bland conference room a few days before their arrival. At this so-called “murderboard” session, we weren’t stripping down our analysis to find data we’d missed. We were practicing how to defend our perspective when questioned by the Vice President of the United States.

The Branch Chief would get the ball rolling with questions designed to lead us down a rabbit hole. Karen had briefed Libby, so she was skilled at impersonating both the Vice President and Libby — that is, she was being relentless and insistent — to anticipate the questions they would ask. We had a bottom line: Fear of Islamic extremism growing in Iraq would limit Saddam’s willingness to work with bin Laden. Fake-Cheney would rejoinder: Would ideological differences really hinder their cooperation? Anticipating the response, she’d come back with: What if bin Laden convinced Saddam that acting against the United States was in both of their best interests; you have told us we don’t know exactly how much communication has taken place between the regime and al-Qaida; and you have already found information that specified safe havens, contact and training?

We needed to poke holes in our analysis, to be sure we were right.

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Twitter’s Surprising Solution to the Patent Problem: Let Employees Control Them

  • By Ben Lee
  • 02.21.13
  • 6:30 AM

Drawing taken from a Twitter patent application (source: USPTO)

Here’s the current state of affairs in the industry. Engineers and designers typically sign an assignment agreement with their company. That agreement irrevocably gives that company ownership of any patents filed related to the employee’s work.

The agreements all read the same: The inventor agrees to “sell, assign, and transfer” to the company “all right, title, and interest” to their inventions. Once the agreement is signed, the company has control over the patents. In other words: The companies can use inventors’ patents however they want. This includes selling the patents to others — including patent trolls — to use them however they want.

But what if we could keep control of the patent in the hands of engineers and designers … the very people who created the innovations in the first place?

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Google X Head on Moonshots: 10X Is Easier Than 10 Percent

  • By Astro Teller
  • 02.11.13
  • 6:30 AM

Photo: Fitz Villafuerte / Flickr

Here is the surprising truth: It’s often easier to make something 10 times better than it is to make it 10 percent better.

Yes … really.

Because when you’re working to make things 10 percent better, you inevitably focus on the existing tools and assumptions, and on building on top of an existing solution that many people have already spent a lot of time thinking about. Such incremental progress is driven by extra effort, extra money, and extra resources. It’s tempting to feel improving things this way means we’re being good soldiers, with the grit and perseverance to continue where others may have failed — but most of the time we find ourselves stuck in the same old slog.

But when you aim for a 10x gain, you lean instead on bravery and creativity — the kind that, literally and metaphorically, can put a man on the moon. You’ve all heard the story before: Without a clear path to success when we started, we accomplished in less than a decade a dream several generations in the making. We chose to go to the moon, John F. Kennedy said, not because it was easy … but because it was hard. Suddenly everyone from schoolchildren to the largest institutions were rallying behind the mission. Kennedy understood that the size of the challenge actually motivates people: that bigger challenges create passion.

And that, counter-intuitively, makes the hardest things much easier to accomplish than you might think.

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