A Curious Mind (7 page)

“You can't buy anything—you can't buy a script treatment. You can't buy a book. You don't know anybody. You certainly don't represent anybody. You have no leverage. You really have nothing.

“But the only way you can be anything in this business is if you own the material. You have to
own
it.”

Then Wasserman reached over and grabbed a legal pad and a pencil from his desk. He slapped the pencil on the pad and handed them to me.

“Here's a yellow legal pad,” he said. “Here's a number-two pencil. Put the pencil to the pad. Go write something. You have to bring the idea. Because you've got nothing else.”

I was stunned, but also amazed. Wasserman was the first person to cut through the swirl of the movie business for me and say, Here's what you, Brian Grazer, can do to become a movie producer, to rise above legal clerk.

Write.

Otherwise you'
re all talk.

I was with Wasserman no more than ten minutes, but it felt like an hour. That time with him changed my whole perspective on the movie business—it disrupted my very youthful point of view.

What Wasserman was telling me was that since ideas were the currency in Hollywood, I had to get myself some ideas. And he was saying that since I didn't have any influence or money, I had to rely on my own curiosity and imagination as the source of those ideas. My curiosity was worth more than money—because I didn't have any money.

I didn't walk off with Wasserman's yellow legal pad and pencil. I'm pretty sure I got nervous and set them back down in his office. But I did just what he suggested: I got busy using my curiosity to create ideas.

•  •  •

WHAT DOES IT MEAN
to be a great supermodel like Kate Moss, and how is that different from what it takes to be a great attorney like Gloria Allred?

If we're going to make movies that feel authentic, we have to be able to understand many corners of the world—places that operate much differently than Hollywood. As I've tried to show, I consciously use curiosity to disrupt my own point of view. I seek out people from other industries and other communities—physics, medicine, modeling, business, literature, law—and then I try to learn something about the skill and the personality it takes to perform in those worlds.

But if disrupting the point of view of someone like me—a moviemaker, a storyteller—is useful, consider how powerful it is for people doing other kinds of work.

You certainly want your doctor to be able to look at the world through your eyes—you want her to understand your symptoms, so she can give you what you need to feel better. You also want a doctor to be curious about new approaches to disease, and to care and healing. You want someone who is willing to listen to colleagues and researchers with views that may disrupt her comfortable, routine ways of taking care of
patients. Medicine is full of disruptions that changed the typical ways doctors practiced it, starting with hand-washing and sanitation and coming all the way forward to laparoscopic and robotic surgery, saving or dramatically improving the lives of millions of people. Medicine is one of those arenas that steadily, sometimes radically, advances precisely because of curiosity, but you need a doctor willing to step outside her comfortable point of view in order to benefit from those improvements yourself.

Being able to imagine the perspective of others is also a critical strategic tool for managing reality in a whole range of professions. We want our police detectives to be able to imagine what criminals will do next, we want our military commanders to be able to think five moves ahead of opposing armies, we want our basketball coaches to discern the game plans of their rivals and counter them. You can't negotiate an international trade agreement without being able to understand what other nations need.

In fact, the very best doctors, detectives, generals, coaches, and diplomats all share the skill of being able to think about the world from the perspective of their rivals. You can't simply design your own strategy, then execute it and wait to see what happens so you can respond. You have to anticipate what's going to happen—by first disrupting your own point of view.

The same skill, in a completely different context, is what creates products that delight us. The specific genius of Steve Jobs lay in designing a computer operating system, and a music
player, and a phone that anticipate how we'll want to compute, and listen to music, and communicate—and providing what we want before we know it. The same is true of an easy-to-use dishwasher or TV remote control.

You can always tell when you settle into the driver's seat of a car you haven't driven before whether the people who designed the dashboard and controls were the least bit curious about how their customers use their cars. The indispensable cup holder wasn't created by the engineers of great Eurocars—BMW, Mercedes, Audi. The first car cup holders debuted when Dodge launched its Caravan in 1983.
⁸

With the iPhone, the cup holder, the easy-to-use dishwasher, the engineer has done something simple but often overlooked: he or she has asked questions. Who is going to use this product? What's going to be happening while they are using it? How is that person different from me?

Successful business people imagine themselves in their customers' shoes. Like coaches or generals, they also imagine what their rivals are up to, so they can be ready for the competition.

Some of this disruptive curiosity relies on instinct. Steve Jobs was famously disdainful of focus groups and consumer testing, preferring to refine products based on his own judgment.

Some of this disruptive curiosity relies on routine. During all the decades he ran Wal-Mart—the largest company in the world—founder Sam Walton convened his top five hundred managers in a meeting every Saturday morning. The “Saturday
Morning Meeting,” as it was called, had just two purposes: to review in detail the week's sales, aisle-by-aisle through the store; and to ask the question: what is the competition doing that we should be paying attention to—or imitating? At every Saturday morning meeting, Walton asked his employees to stand up and talk about their visits, during the workweek, to competitors' stores—to K-mart, Zayre, Walgreens, Rite Aid, and Sears.

Walton had strict rules for this part of the meeting: participants were only allowed to talk about what competitors were doing right. They were only allowed to discuss things they'd seen that were smart and well executed. Walton was basically curious about why customers would want to shop anywhere besides Wal-Mart. He didn't care what his competitors were doing
wrong
—that couldn't hurt him. But he didn't want them to get more than a week's advantage on doing something innovative—and he knew he wasn't smart enough, alone, to imagine every possible way of running a store. Why try to guess your way into your competitors' heads when you could simply walk into their stores?

Some of this disruptive curiosity relies on systematic analysis that evolves into elaborate corporate research and development programs. It took H. J. Heinz almost three years to create the upside-down ketchup bottle—but the project got started when Heinz researchers followed consumers home and discovered they were storing their tall, thin, glass ketchup bottles precariously, upside down in their refrigerator doors, in an effort to get out the last servings of ketchup. The inverted
ketchup bottle that Heinz invented as a result relies on an innovative silicone valve that seals the ketchup in, releases instantly when the bottle is squeezed, then closes immediately again when the squeezing stops. The man who invented that valve is a Michigan engineer named Paul Brown, who told a reporter, “I would pretend I was silicone and, if I was injected into a mold, what I would do.” H. J. Heinz was so determined to understand its customers, it followed them home from the grocery store. Engineer Paul Brown was so determined to solve a problem, he imagined himself as liquid silicone.
⁹

Procter & Gamble, the consumer products company behind Tide, Bounty, Pampers, CoverGirl, Charmin, and Crest, spends more than $1 million a day just on consumer research. P&G is so determined to understand how we clean our clothes, our kitchens, our hair, and our teeth that company researchers do 20,000 studies a year, of 5 million consumers, where the goal is principally to understand our behavior and habits. That's why Tide laundry detergent now comes in little premeasured capsules—no pouring, no measuring, no muss. That's why you can buy a Tide pen that will remove stains from your pants or your skirt, while you're wearing them.
¹⁰

My approach to curiosity is a blend of the approaches we see in Steve Jobs, Sam Walton, and Procter & Gamble. I am, in fact, curious by instinct—I'm curious all the time. If someone walks into my office to talk about the music for a movie or about the revisions to a TV script, and that person is wearing really cool shoes, we'll start out talking about shoes.

I know that not everyone feels like they are naturally curious—or bold enough to ask about someone's shoes. But here's the secret: that doesn't matter. You can use curiosity even if you don't think of yourself as instinctively curious.

As soon as I realized the power of curiosity to make my work life better, I consciously worked on making curiosity part of my routine. I turned it into a discipline. And then I made it a habit.

But here's an important distinction between me and even the hyper-analytical folks at Procter & Gamble. I actually use the word “curiosity” to talk about what I do, to describe it, and understand it. The rest of the world, though, almost never talks about this kind of inquiry using the word “curiosity.”

Even when we're being intently curious, in an organized, purposeful fashion, we don't call it “curiosity.” The coach and his assistants who spend five days watching film to prepare for a game aren't considered “curious” about their opponent, even as they immerse themselves in the thinking, personality, and strategy of that team. Sports teams simply call it “watching film.” Political campaigns call their form of curiosity “opposition research.” Companies that spend enormous sums of money and expend enormous effort to understand their customers' behavior and satisfy their needs aren't “curious” about their customers. They use phrases like “consumer research” or say they've developed an “innovation process.” (If they've hired expensive consultants to help them be curious, they say they've developed a “strategic innovation process roadmap.”)

In 2011,
Harvard Business Review
published a nine-page case study of Procter & Gamble's innovation and creativity efforts. The story is coauthored by P&G's chief technology officer, and it is literally as long as this chapter, to this point—5,000 words. The authors say they want to describe P&G's effort to “systematize the serendipity that so often sparks new-business creation.” In Hollywood, we call that “lunch.” But “systematizing serendipity”—finding ways to uncover great ideas—is exactly what any smart organization tries to do. Sam Walton was “systematizing serendipity” in the Saturday morning meetings. I have “systematized serendipity” with my curiosity conversations.

In the
Harvard Business Review
story on P&G, the word “innovation” appears sixty-five times. The word curiosity: not once.
¹¹

That's crazy. We simply don't credit curiosity. We don't even credit curiosity when we're using it, describing it, and extolling it.

The way we talk about this is revealing and important. You can't understand, appreciate, and cultivate something if you don't even acknowledge that it exists. How can we teach kids to be curious if we don't use the word curiosity? How can we encourage curiosity at work if we don't tell people to be curious?

It's not a trivial, semantic argument.

We live in a society that is increasingly obsessed with “innovation” and “creativity.”

Twenty years ago, in 1995, “innovation” was mentioned about eighty times a day in the U.S. media; “creativity” was mentioned ninety times a day.

Just five years later, the mentions of “innovation” had soared to 260 a day; “creativity” was showing up 170 times a day.

By 2010, “innovation” was showing up 660 times a day, creativity close behind at 550 mentions a day.

Curiosity gets only a quarter of those mentions in the daily media—in 2010, about 160 times a day. That is, curiosity gets as many mentions today as “creativity” and “innovation” did a decade ago.
¹²

The big U.S. universities maintain online databases of their faculty “experts,” so media and business can consult them. MIT lists nine faculty members who consider themselves experts on creativity, and twenty-seven who are experts on innovation. MIT experts on curiosity? Zero. Stanford lists four faculty experts on creativity, and twenty-one on innovation. Stanford faculty offering to talk about curiosity? Zero.

It's essential to cultivate creativity and innovation, of course. That's what has driven our economy forward, that's what so dramatically improves the way we live—in everything from telephones to retailing, from medicine to entertainment, from travel to education.

But as indispensable as they are, “creativity” and “innovation” are hard to measure and almost impossible to teach. (Have you ever met someone who once lacked the ability to be creative or innovative, took a course, and became creative and
innovative?) In fact, we often don't agree on what constitutes an idea that is “creative” or “innovative.” Nothing is as common as the innovation I come up with that I think is brilliant and you think is dumb.

I think that this intense focus on being creative and innovative can be counterproductive. The typical person at work in a cubicle may not think of himself or herself as being “creative” or “innovative.” Those of us who don't work in the corporate research and development department may well be clear that “innovation” isn't our job—because right over in that other building is the “department of innovation.” In fact, whether we might think we are creative or not, in most workplaces, it's pretty clear that creativity isn't part of our jobs—that's why customer service reps are reading to us from scripts when we call the 800 number, not actually talking to us.