Category Archives: Innovation

Innovation Is Hard

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I’ve read two articles in the last 24 hours that seem profoundly important. Both of them suggest that we are a somewhat lazy species—we aren’t really interested in putting in the hard work to change the world. The first article entitled Infinite Stupidity, by the great evolutionary biologist, Mark Pagel. Read the whole piece, but here is his thesis.

A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we’ve seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What’s happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we’re being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We’re being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by. And so, in the cold calculus of evolution by natural selection, at no greater time in history than ever before, copiers are probably doing better than innovators. Because innovation is extraordinarily hard. My worry is that we could be moving in that direction, towards becoming more and more sort of docile copiers.

If only a few people in the society have to be innovators and their innovations flow more from ideas than massive factories or deployed capital, then maybe we should be a little more protective of intellectual property. I’ve been having a battle with the Copyleft mob on Twitter (@JTTaplin) over an interview of the doyenne of copying as art, Nina Paley. 

“Intellectual disobedience is civil disobedience plus intellectual property,” Paley explained. “A lot of people infringe copyright and they’re apologetic … If you know as much about the law as, unfortunately, I do, I cannot claim ignorance and I cannot claim fair use … I know that I’m infringing copyright and I don’t apologize for it.”

Ms. Paley cannot claim fair use, because she copies whole sections of other artists work to construct her “original” work. I may have been a little rough with Paley over what she claims to be art, but the main point is that to call this act of theft “civil disobedience” is an insult to Thoreau, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King. What human right is Paley asserting with her civil disobedience? The right to steal other artists work? I don’t get it.

That brings me to the second article, written by one of my favorite writers, John Ralston Saul. Saul is wondering why so little has been accomplished in the half century of the environmental movement. And like Pagel, he reaches the conclusion that we would rather let someone else do the hard work.

We believe we live in an era of facts and of proofs. Yet what we don’t feel able to take on has little to do with those facts and proofs. It has everything to do with a failure of imagination.

The first error has to do with misunderstanding the nature of power. The environmental era mirrors almost exactly that of the rise of the NGOs. Why? The central characteristic of the globalist era is that we came to believe the power of the citizenry had been weakened by the power of economics. We gradually accepted that the power of national politics was therefore limited. It followed that the power to ignore the public good was international and amorphous in the sense that it had to do with broad economic assumptions. In that case, the best way to fight back was also international. And since there were no international representative legislative institutions devoted to the public good, well then, we would devote ourselves to creating institutions that would set the global agenda, our contemporary NGO army.

These new institutions would not have actual power – the power to act. But they would speak for us all, for the shared public good. And those devoted to the international economic interests would have to listen. We convinced ourselves that the persistent sound would be too loud to be ignored by those with power.

Except they didn’t listen to these NGOs. And they didn’t – don’t – have to listen. After all, economics is power. Real power. The NGOs – the new institutions of the public good – have only influence. Influence can have periodic successes. But this is a weak hand to play if you have other options. Imagine if the tens of millions of hours devoted to influencing power and opposing power had been devoted to taking power. Imagine if the millions of NGO members had joined political parties and virtually taken them over. That is how change is actually made – through political parties, elections, governments and laws.

 Think about the Occupy Movement last year. What if all that energy had gone into taking over local Democratic Parties and reinvigorating them with young voters? What if all the culture-jammers who got so upset about SOPA had actually gotten involved politically? But it’s so much easier to sign an online petition.
Pagel may be right that we are engaged in a devolutionary infinite stupidity. But ultimately Saul has the more important point. Economics is power and the only way to counter the control of the 1% over government is to engage in electoral politics. If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.

Obama and SOPA

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Obama and Google's Eric Schmidt

The White House has weighed in on the Online Piracy Act. They are clearly walking a tightrope between two competing powers, both of which have traditionally supported Democrats. On one side there is Hollywood and the music industry and on the other is Google. There has been an incredible amount of misinformation floating around about piracy for years and of course there are also some real bully boys who will threaten anyone who opposes their right to “free culture.” We have had these battles for two years on this blog. So here is my thoughts about all of this.

Google- The world’s largest search engine has made hundreds of millions allowing makers of pirated or counterfeit goods to advertise using Google Ad Words. It signed a non-prosecution agreement with the Federal Government and agreed to forgo $500,000,000 worth of counterfeit drug advertising. Google does not want to stop the worldwide revenue it gets from pirated content advertising. Google and it’s competitors could eliminate the need for Piracy legislation by immediately adopting the following rules:

  1. We won’t sell advertising on pirate websites.
  2. We won’t have our search engine link to pirate websites that can’t prove they have legitimate licenses to the content they host.
  3. We will stop pretending we can’t control what gets posted on You Tube.

Hollywood and the Music Business- What I can’t figure out is how did movies and music get to a position that the public feels they are entitled to these works for free? So you never feel you are entitled to a meal at a restaurant for free, do you? What is it about digital entertainment: movies, music, TV and very soon, books that makes them special? Why should the worker in these business not get paid? We built a knowledge society, and the best products we export are all digital objects of desire. But no one seems to care about the notions of intellectual property. It’s so self destructive.

So the President has to thread the needle. That’s why the statement yesterday from the White House was important.

We expect and encourage all private parties, including both content creators and Internet platform providers working together, to adopt voluntary measures and best practices to reduce online piracy.

Google could begin these voluntary measures listed above and reduce the pressure to push a flawed act through Congress. Without some middle ground this whole discussion is going in a very stupid direction.

New Liberalism

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I had dinner last night with one of the most important conservative media voices in America and some of his friends. I had gone to the dinner expecting some fireworks, but was totally caught off guard by his charm and what he had to say.

First, he was disgusted by “the pygmies” in the Republican Presidential Race. As much as he dislikes Obama, there was not a one of the current Republican candidates that he could be enthusiastic about.

Second, we found ourselves in agreement that the issue of Crony Capitalism is perhaps the most pernicious threat to our Republic. Crony Capitalism distorts everything from Crop subsidies flowing to agribusiness to our inability to cancel useless Pentagon weapon systems. And the disease effects both political parties.

As the evening progressed I kept trying to move us beyond the Left-Right dialectic we are trapped in and to suggest that we might find some common ground in the liberal principles that are the basis for our Republic:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Now the word “liberal” is seen as poisonous to conservatives, but it’s origins in John Locke’s Natural Rights theory were the basis for our revolution. Continue reading →

Republican Rope a Dope

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Barack Obama learned a political trick from Muhammad Ali called Rope a Dope. For you youngsters, this refers to the epic Rumble in the Jungle Heavyweight fight against George Foreman in 1974. Here is the Wikipedia explanation.

The rope-a-dope is performed by a boxer assuming a protected stance, in Ali’s classic pose, lying against the ropes, and allowing his opponent to hit him, toward the end that the opponent will tire and make mistakes which the boxer can exploit in a counter-attack. By leaning against the ropes, much of the punch’s force is absorbed by the ropes’ elasticity rather than the boxer’s body.

In competitive situations other than boxing, rope-a-dope is used to describe strategies in which one party purposely puts itself in what appears to be a losing position, attempting thereby to become the eventual victor.

Last summer during the debt ceiling hostage crisis, Obama appeared to be the loser, but yesterday Republicans woke up to the reality that they lost Big Time–that we were going to get $1.2 trillion in deficit reductions, with 50% of the cuts coming from the military and none of the cuts from Social Security and Medicare. The Congressional water carriers for the Military Industrial Complex are in a panic.

Republican lawmakers moved quickly Monday to protect the Pentagon from automatic budget cuts that will be triggered by the supercommittee’s failure, with the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee saying he’ll soon introduce legislation to repeal them.

President Obama immediately threatened to veto any attempt to undo the spending cuts. That means that Republicans would have to get a 2/3 rds majority to undo the first meaningful cutback in the Military budget in 60 years. In addition, if Obama also threatens to veto any attempt to restore the Bush Tax cuts in 2012 (they expire automatically on January 1, 2013), progressives will have totally changed the inequality dynamic, without having to pass a single piece of legislation.

So why aren’t progressives celebrating this morning? Got me. As long time readers know, it has been my contention that the key to revival of our democracy and our economy lies in radically reordering where we spend our collective resources. That more than 60% of our discretionary budget flows to the Military Industrial Complex is just the most egregious example of Crony Capitalism. If you had suggested to me last spring that a Republican House would pass a bill cutting $600 billion from the Pentagon budget over ten years, I would have called you crazy. But that is just what happened.

So there is only one election that matters a year from now. And that is that President Obama will be reelected and able to keep his veto threat. There is no possible 2012 electoral realignment of the Senate and House that would give the Republicans a 2/3 rds majority.

This is an amazing victory and all we have to do to hold on to it is reelect the President.

Next Steps for OWS

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The leaderless Occupy Movement should quietly thank Mayor Bloomberg for ending the encampment in Zuccotti Park. As Ad Busters, the culture jamming magazine which first proposed Occupy Wall Street, suggested yesterday that there are two routes forward.

STRATEGY #1: We summon our strength, grit our teeth and hang in there through winter … heroically we sleep in the snow … we impress the world with our determination and guts … and when the cops come, we put our bodies on the line and resist them nonviolently with everything we’ve got.

STRATEGY #2: We declare “victory” and throw a party … a festival … a potlatch … a jubilee … a grand gesture to celebrate, commemorate, rejoice in how far we’ve come, the comrades we’ve made, the glorious days ahead. Imagine, on a Saturday yet to be announced, perhaps our movement’s three month anniversary on December 17, in every #OCCUPY in the world, we reclaim the streets for a weekend of triumphant hilarity and joyous revelry.

We dance like we’ve never danced before and invite the world to join us.

Then we clean up, scale back and most of us go indoors while the die-hards hold the camps. We use the winter to brainstorm, network, build momentum so that we may emerge rejuvenated with fresh tactics, philosophies, and a myriad projects ready to rumble next Spring.

Strategy #2 is the way to go. I don’t even think you need the “die-hards” to hold geography, because the movement is not about territory, but about ideas. What is needed over the winter months is a series of Teach-Ins like the epic events that made the Anti-Vietnam War Movement coalesce in the winter and spring of 1965. Now is the time on college and high school campuses to educate the wider public on the issues of economic inequality. The movement has a powerful meme–”We are the 99%”–which was in danger of being diffused by the inevitable crime and sanitation problems that come from putting a small cities in public parks all over the country. Out of these teach-ins should come some specific proposals that OWS would push during the 2012 election. Here are four suggested pillars:

  1. A surtax on incomes over $1 million
  2. A Tobin Tax on Stock Trading
  3. End the corrupting influence of money in politics
  4. Bring the troops home

One last thought. In the last few weeks I have often thought “What would Martin Luther King do in this moment?” Ultimately the great social justice movements in America like women’s suffrage, ending child labor or the civil rights movement have come about out of a strict adhesion to the loving principles of non-violence. Dr. King, who I marched with in Boston in April of 1965, consistently held up a vision of a better world that we would make through non-violence. His most famous speech was “I have a dream” not “I have a nightmare”. I know that there is a small group of angry young anarchists trying to influence the OWS movement. Those of us with grey in our beards have been here before, watching the Weathermen subvert a non-violent peace movement. What we ended up with was Richard Nixon (running on a law and order platform) as our President.

We should not make that mistake again.

Inequality Smackdown

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I always love it when David Brooks and Paul Krugman tussle on the pages of the New York Times. On Monday, Brooks wrote a column called The Wrong Inequality, arguing that the Occupy Movement was wrong to target the 1% and that the real inequality problem was between the people who didn’t have a college degree and those who did. This is what I call the feeble attempt on the right to change the subject.

So this morning Krugman weighs in with Oligarchy, American Style and without ever mentioning Brooks by name, performs an epic smackdown.

Pundits try to put a more benign face on the phenomenon, claiming that it’s not really the wealthy few versus the rest, it’s the educated versus the less educated.

So what you need to know is that all of these claims are basically attempts to obscure the stark reality: We have a society in which money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people, and in which that concentration of income and wealth threatens to make us a democracy in name only.

He then goes on to point out that the biggest gains are really going to the top .01%, whose incomes have risen more than 400% since Ronald Reagan first started cutting taxes for the wealthy. Of course the rationale for Republican supply side economics from 1980 on has been that cutting taxes on the wealthy encourages investment in the productive industries which in turn fuels employment for all, leading to higher consumption of products in a virtuous circle. But that obviously is not working out to be true and so the Republicans now contend that the investment of all this surplus wealth from both corporate and billionaire balance sheets is not happening because they are “uncertain about the future” under the Obama administration.

This is nonsense. What has happened in the last 30 years is very clear. Because all of the income gains have gone to a very small number of people, the purchasing power of the average household has fallen dramatically. For a while (1989-2006) this was masked by the explosion of consumer credit as people used their home equity like an ATM to keep up with the aspirational lifestyles of the rich and famous. As for the rich and famous, they were not investing in new productive enterprises, they were speculating in the casino we call Wall Street. Investment bankers worked long hours to invent new instruments of speculation as the explosion of derivatives masked the sad truth that the traditional role of finance as the engine of new enterprise faded into the background noise on the trading floor.

As for the one real area of Innovation in our society, the Internet Industries, it has become increasingly obvious that the capital needs of these businesses are relatively low compared to the last boom of industrialization that fueled the post war growth of steel, autos, chemicals and oil. Why else would Microsoft, Apple, Google and IBM each have over $50 Billion in cash sitting in the bank?

We are not going to get out of this stagnation until the gains of our economy are spread a little bit more evenly. The Koch Brothers and their mouthpiece Herman Cain (with Rick Perry in the Green Room) are trying to cut their taxes even further by floating flat tax proposals. I think an election fought on the lines of “Whose side are you on?”–forcing the Republicans to defend their “Oligarchy, America Style”–will be good for our fading democracy.

Steve Jobs

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I will add but a few words to the millions that will be written in the next few days about Steve Jobs.

At the Innovation Lab we try to inculcate the notion that you can’t be afraid. You can’t be afraid to fail. You can’t be afraid to “be different”. You can’t be afraid to celebrate the weird mix of art and science that is true innovation. Steve Jobs embodied all of those qualities. I wrote a bit about him in my new book and there is a cool video in the book of his graduation speech at Stanford that you will see replayed too often in the next few days.

I think Steve Jobs represents everything we hope for in our vision of the entrepreneurial America we have in our dreams. As a country and as leaders, we fall short of that dream on a daily basis. At Apple, which has been a wonderful partner to our Lab, they have a saying, “Culture eats strategy for lunch every day.” Steve inculcated a culture of innovation into the people he worked for. That may have been his greatest gift.

New Federalism Revisited

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I run an Innovation Lab at USC. It is supported by some of the most innovative companies in the world. I can tell you one thing with certainty—the truly innovative companies have learned to devolve power and flatten organization structures. If the United States is to survive as the design and innovation hub of the digital world, it is going to have to have a government structure designed for a 21st Century World. And that means that power and funding is going to need to devolve from the Federal level to the State and City level. I’ve been writing about this idea for almost five years, but I’m more convinced than ever that some sort of New Federalism is the only way out of the grinding political gridlock that is destroying our country. Democrats cannot fight this notion that power that is closer “to the customer”, is more efficient power.

But the problem with giving the states more responsibility is that you need to encourage mobility in America, not discourage it. If my 2050 version of Social Security is being managed at the state level, it’s just harder to move. The beauty of a Federal social insurance system is that there is never any impediment to get up and move to where the work is. Your social security number is good anywhere.

So let me specify what I think we need a Federal Government for:Departments of Defense, State, Treasury, Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security as well as  Social Security and Medicare benefits. Everything else should be a State matter. Certainly law enforcement agencies like the FBI and SEC would operate at the Federal Level to enforce Federal statutes, but the funding and the personnel for the departments of Education, Agriculture, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Commerce, Transportation and Labor should primarily exist at the State level. Obviously both the Housing and the Agriculture departments in California and Mississippi would be concerned with very different issues. And of course as the Imperial Dreams of America come down to earth, the bloated Defense and Homeland Security budgets would shrink dramatically. Continue reading →

Progressive Disappointment Syndrome

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What is at the heart of the great disappointment Liberals are having with President Obama? I wonder if it is inherent in any of the three progressive “change elections” I have experienced in my lifetime. Do we really believe that just because the Presidency passes from a conservative Republican to a progressive Democrat that anything really essential to the established power structure of America is going to change? My first experience of Progressive Disappointment Syndrome (PDS) was when I was too young to even vote in 1960. Somehow a teacher of mine convinced me that Kennedy would really listen to Eisenhower’s warnings about the unwarranted power of the Military Industrial Complex and move us towards a more peaceful stand with the rest of the world. But all you have to do is look at this picture of the first meeting after the election where Ike and JFK met.

There lurking behind the Presidents were the Joint Chiefs, as if to say, “don’t worry, nothing is going to change”.

And then there was Bill Clinton, heading out for his first trip on Air Force One, and for the Wall Street establishment, Bob Rubin is right by his side as if to say “don’t worry, nothing will change”

And then we come to President Obama, elected in the middle of the biggest financial disaster of the last 70 years, caused by Bob Rubin and his buddies. And who does Obama show up with on the White House front steps? You got it. Larry Summers and Tim Geithner, Bob Rubin’s acolytes, saying to the barons of finance, “Don’t worry, nothing will change.”

I really feel like Obama has to prove in the next week that he is not a prisoner of the establishment. He has to show that he can break with the twin powers of the Military-Industrial Complex and the Financial-Congressional Complex that have bankrupted our country, compromised our democracy and condemned us to years of stagnation and drift. It’s obvious the Republicans have no solutions to our current crisis. There are solutions out there. Whether Obama get’s his balls back on Thursday seems to be the only question.

Steve Jobs and America

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I’m lucky in that I get to work pretty closely with Apple at the USC Annenberg innovation Lab. So if I have anything to add to the reams of copy written this morning about Steve Jobs’ decision to step down as CEO of Apple it is this: “Culture eats strategy for lunch, everyday.” That’s a saying you hear around Apple a lot and it is one that needs to be understood in the halls of Congress, in other executive suites and in the society in general. Apple is the most innovative organization in the world, not because it has a strategy of innovation, but because it has a culture of innovation.

From my vantage point that culture has two elements: reward risk and marry science to art. In the long succession of hit products in the last decade, it’s hard to remember that Steve Jobs had some epic failures early in his career. Anyone remember the Lisa or the Newton? Both were total flops, but the Lisa morphed into the Mac and one could argue that the dream of the Newton ultimately was realized in the I Pad. So the culture rewards both risk, failure and the lessons learned from both. And then there is the marriage of science and art, at which Steve Jobs and his team excelled beyond his competitors. There is a bad tendency in this country to think our “innovation deficit” lies in what policy makers call STEM (science,technology, engineering and math). But Jobs understands that the magic formula is STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art and math). It is the basis of what we teach at The innovation Lab and it is the core of the Apple brand. Steve’s obsessive belief in the role of the artist goes way beyond his early fascination with typography. What makes each of his products so thrilling is that they are aesthetically pleasing just to look at, never mind how cool they are to operate.

So here are my take aways from Steve’s departure. We better start building a culture of innovation all over this country. That means we have to let lots of experiments happen at the state and city level in order to start putting people back to work. Some of them will fail, but hopefully we will all find the best practices quickly. In congress, they better stop thinking about strategy every morning and start thinking about culture. And in our schools we better keep teaching the arts and not just concentrate on math and science. As to the continuing success of Apple, I have no doubt. Because innovation was never a top down strategy, but rather a bottom-up culture, Apple will thrive. Steve’s vision will be missed, but he embedded the culture throughout the organization.