How Generosity Can Be A Competitive Advantage
Every age has its icons. The 60s and 70s had rock stars and beat poets. In the 80s and 90s, Wall Street traders, with Gordon Gekko as their patron saint, adopted “greed is good” as their mantra. More recently, Steve Jobs captured the zeitgeist with his relentless focus on creating products that were “insanely great.”
A common thread running through all of these is the underlying principle that it takes a certain ruthlessness, or at least some kind of creative insanity, to achieve an extraordinary level of achievement. That’s why I was surprised, when researching my book Mapping Innovation, to find exactly the opposite.
Those that I talked to, whose successes include not only building great companies, but also developing new cures for cancer, new computing architectures and even new technologies to store energy, were almost universally warm and low key. I was so struck that I did some further research and found that the stark contrast between myth and reality is no accident.
“OK, Boss, What’s My Assignment”
When Danny Hillis was a graduate student at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab he designed a new kind of parallel computer, which he called the Connection Machine, that had the potential to be far more powerful than traditional architectures. Sensing opportunity…
