Talent Is Overrated (21 page)

In a different industry, how does Target thrive as a discount retailer against the massive power of Wal-Mart, a company more than five times its size that commands by far the world's most advanced retail computer systems? In part it does so by arranging for some of the world's top designers, such as Michael Graves and Isabelle de Borchgrave, to design some of the home's most pedestrian products, such as teakettles and breadbaskets, and then selling them in massive volume at discount prices. Following that strategy, Target can never be commoditized.

The phenomenon is sufficiently widespread that the MFA degree—master of fine arts—is gaining ground on the MBA as the preferred graduate degree for young people who want to make their mark in business. New York University has even begun offering a joint MBA/MFA degree.

Creativity and innovation have always been important; what's new is that they're becoming economically more valuable by the day. The issue, then, is how individuals and organizations can best respond. To help them, all those consultants, conferences, books, and magazines have coalesced into a vast innovation industry that offers virtually infinite advice and guidance. Our task is not to inspect it all—impossible and fruitless—but rather to see if the principles of great performance provide any deep insight into the nature of creativity and innovation that would be useful to anyone trying to grow on these dimensions. They do, and these insights are especially valuable because, as with great performance generally, they run counter to many people's deeply held beliefs.

Two views in particular characterize what most of us “know that just ain't so” about innovation and creativity. One is that creative ideas come to us in the way a famous one came to Archimedes, in a eureka moment when everything suddenly becomes clear. It makes sense that we believe this, because history as we learn it in school is filled with such stories. Often they're unforgettable. Archimedes running through the streets naked, having just settled into his bath and realizing he could measure the volume of an irregular object by water displacement, is an image no schoolchild will forget. Similarly, we see Abraham Lincoln on the train to Gettysburg, writing in a burst of inspiration one of the most eloquent speeches in American history. Or we picture Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who by his own account awoke from an opium-induced sleep to find “two to three hundred lines” of
Kubla Khan
standing fully formed before him in his mind. Great creators seem time and again to be struck by lightning bolts that reveal what no one else had seen or thought or imagined before.

The other thing we all think we know about creativity is that it can be inhibited by too much knowledge. We often say that someone is “too close to the problem” to see a solution. The broader principle is that if you know too much about a situation, a business, a field of study, then you can't have the flash of insight that is available only to someone unburdened by a lifetime of immersion in the domain. Edward de Bono, the best known business consultant on creative thinking, has stated this view explicitly: “Too much experience within a field may restrict creativity because you know so well how things
should be done
that you are unable to escape to come up with new ideas.”

Again, we have good reasons for believing this. We've seen it confirmed at the organizational level countless times. Why didn't Western Union invent the telephone? Why didn't U.S. Steel invent the minimill? Why didn't IBM invent the personal computer? Over and over, the organizations that knew all there was to know about a technology or an industry failed to make the creative breakthroughs that would transform the business.

At the individual level the story is similar. Dean Keith Simonton, a professor at the University of California at Davis, conducted a large-scale study of more than three hundred creative high achievers born between 1450 and 1850—Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Beethoven, Rembrandt, for example. He determined the amount of formal education each had received and measured each one's level of eminence by the spaces devoted to them in an array of reference works. He found that the relation between education and eminence, when plotted on a graph, looked like an inverted
U:
The most eminent creators were those who had received a moderate amount of education, equal to about the middle of college. Less education than that—or more—corresponded to reduced eminence for creativity.

Other research seems to confirm de Bono's view. In a famous series of experiments first conducted more than sixty years ago, Abraham and Edith Luchins gave their subjects the task of measuring certain amounts of water using a set of different-sized jugs; for example, the jugs might hold 127 units, 21 units, and 3 units, and the task might be to measure out 100 units precisely. The subjects learned a set routine that worked for solving the first several measurement tasks they were given. When they were then given a measurement task that could be done using their learned routine or a much simpler one, they consistently failed to see the simpler one. And when they were given a task that could be done only with a simple but new routine, they failed to see it, and instead just kept trying to apply their known routine. Subjects who had never learned the original routine, however, saw the simple solution easily.

These concepts have permeated our views on creativity and in most of us have helped form those two core beliefs: Inspiration will strike when it's good and ready, whenever that may be; and if you want a creative solution to a problem, you'd better find someone who knows a little about the situation but not too much. Those beliefs, though they seem to be supported by evidence, will steer us wrong. They direct us away from the creating and innovating that we're capable of. The evidence underlying the principles of deliberate practice and great performance shows that in finding creative solutions to problems, knowledge—the more the better—is your friend, not your enemy. And it shows that creativity isn't a lightning bolt.

The greatest innovators in a wide range of fields—business, science, painting, music—all have at least one characteristic in common: They spent many years in intensive preparation before making any kind of creative breakthrough. Creative achievement never came suddenly, even in those cases in which the creator later claimed that it did. Whether it was the transistor or the Beatles'
Sgt. Pepper
album or the cell phone or Picasso's
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon,
it always followed a long earlier period of extremely hard work, and in most cases the creative products themselves were developed over a significant period. Great innovations are roses that bloom after long and careful cultivation.

The evidence is strikingly consistent. A study of seventy-six composers from many historical periods looked at when they produced their first notable works or masterworks, designations that were based on the number of recordings available. The researcher, Professor John R. Hayes of Carnegie Mellon University, identified more than five hundred works. As Professor Robert W. Weisberg of Temple University summarized the findings: “Of these works, only three were composed before year ten of the composer's career, and those three works were composed in years eight and nine.” During those first ten or so years, these creators weren't creating much of anything that the outside world noticed. Professor Hayes termed the long and absolutely typical preparatory period “ten years of silence,” which seemed to be required before anything worthwhile could be produced.

In a similar study of 131 painters, he found the same pattern. The preparation period was shorter—six years—but still substantial and seemingly impossible to defy, even for supposed prodigies like Picasso. A study of sixty-six poets found a few who produced notable works in less than ten years, but none who managed it in less than five; fifty-five of the sixty-six needed ten years or more.

These findings remind us strongly of the ten-year rule that researchers have found when they study outstanding performers in any domain. Other researchers, who weren't necessarily looking for evidence of this rule, have found it anyway. Professor Howard Gardner of Harvard wrote a book-length study (
Creating Minds
) of seven of the greatest innovators of the early twentieth century: Albert Einstein, T. S. Eliot, Sigmund Freud, Mahatma Gandhi, Martha Graham, Pablo Picasso, and Igor Stravinsky. A more diverse group of subjects would be hard to imagine, and Gardner did not set out to prove or disprove anything about the amount of work required for their achievements. But in summing up, he wrote, “I have been struck throughout this study by the operation of the ten-year rule. . . . Should one begin at age four, like Picasso, one can be a master by the teenage years; composers like Stravinsky and dancers like Graham, who did not begin their creative endeavors until later adolescence, did not hit their stride until their late twenties.”

Not even the Beatles could escape the requirements of deep and broad preparation before producing important innovations. Professor Weisberg of Temple has studied the group's career and found that they spent thousands of hours performing together—sessions that closely matched the description of deliberate practice—before the world ever heard of them. In the early days they performed very few of their own songs, and those songs were undistinguished; we would never have known about them if they hadn't been dug up long after the group became successful. The group's first number 1 hit was “Please Please Me” (1963), written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney after they had been working together for five and a half years. One could certainly debate what kind of creative achievement that song represented; successful as it was, it was by no means a significant innovation in popular music. That had to wait until the group's so-called middle period, when they produced their albums
Rubber Soul, Revolver,
and
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Those albums, consisting entirely of original music, transformed the domain. By the time of
Sgt. Pepper,
Lennon and McCartney had been working together—extremely hard—for ten years.

As for what exactly is going on during those long periods of preparation, it looks a lot like the acquisition of domain knowledge that takes place during deliberate practice. It is certainly intensive and deep immersion in the domain, frequently under the direction of a teacher, but even when not, the innovator seems driven to learn as much as possible about the domain, to improve, to drive himself or herself beyond personal limits and eventually beyond the limits of the field. Gardner looked back on the stories of the seven great innovators he studied and saw so many common themes that he combined them into a story of a composite character, whom he dubbed Exemplary Creator, or E.C. At some point in adolescence or early adult life, “E.C. has already invested a decade of work in the mastery of the domain and is near the forefront; she has little in addition to learn from her family and from local experts, and she feels a quickened impulse to test herself against the other leading young people in the domain.” As a result, “E.C. ventures toward the city that is seen as a center of vital activities for her domain.”

We see some elements of deliberate practice apparent here: the large investment in mastering the domain, the quest for more advanced instruction, the constant pushing past the comfort zone. As that constant pushing continues, eventually “E.C. discovers a problem area or realm of special interest, one that promises to take the domain into uncharted waters.” That journey can never be easy, and so here we see further parallels with great performers in other realms: “E.C. works nearly all the time, making tremendous demands on herself and on others, constantly raising the ante. In William Butler Yeats's formation, she chooses perfection of the work over perfection of the life.” We have seen these extremely demanding regimes before, whenever we have looked at how deliberate practice has produced great performance.

Those examples largely from aesthetic fields are highly relevant for business because many of the most important business innovations in today's world are right-brain, aesthetic creations. Many other vital business innovations are in the realm of science, and here the notion that too much knowledge may interfere with innovation is even harder to support. Consider, for example, one of the most celebrated instances of creative problem solving in all of twentieth-century science, James Watson's and Francis Crick's discovery of the structure of DNA. Professor Weisberg, in a detailed study, has shown that several other distinguished scientists—including one, Linus Pauling, who would go on to win a Nobel Prize for other work—were trying to solve the same problem at the same time, each from a different perspective. If we presume that too much familiarity with a problem is a disadvantage, then we would expect to find that Watson and Crick came at this one unburdened by the excessive data that clouded the thinking of the other researchers. But in reality, the story was just the opposite. In those pre-Internet days (the early 1950s), research findings were not disseminated nearly as easily as they are today, and Weisberg has shown how Watson and Crick came into possession of various papers, X-ray photographs, and raw data, as well as an understanding of X-ray crystallography and physics, that combined into a sum of critically important knowledge that none of the others possessed in total. Specifically, Watson and Crick had information leading them to deduce that the helix consisted of two strands (Pauling thought it was three), and that the strands were on the outside, with the “bases”—the steps in the spiral staircase—on the inside (some researchers thought the bases projected outward from the strands). They were able to calculate the pitch of the helix—the angle at which it spiraled—and how the bases connected to each other.

Watson and Crick were not the first to find each of these pieces of the puzzle. Other scientists realized earlier that the helix must be double, not single or triple, and two other teams beat Watson and Crick to the realization that the strands were on the outside of the molecule. Yet Watson and Crick were the first to solve the overall problem of DNA's structure because they, and they alone, had all the necessary facts. As Weisberg concludes, “one does not have to assume that Watson and Crick were different (or better) thinkers than the others. They simply had available what was needed to develop the correct model of DNA, and the others did not.”