Jobs, Sculley, Land

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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/opinion/sunday/steve-jobss-genius.html?pagewanted=2&_r=2
John Sculley On Steve Jobs, The Full Interview Transcript | Cult of Mac

Sculley: Yeah, I remember when Steve and I went to meet Dr Land.

Dr Land had been kicked out of Polaroid. He had his own lab on the Charles River in Cambridge. It was a fascinating afternoon because we were sitting in this big conference room with an empty table. Dr Land and Steve were both looking at the center of the table the whole time they were talking. Dr Land was saying: “I could see what the Polaroid camera should be. It was just as real to me as if it was sitting in front of me before I had ever built one.”

And Steve said: “Yeah, that’s exactly the way I saw the Macintosh.” He said if I asked someone who had only used a personal calculator what a Macintosh should be like they couldn’t have told me. There was no way to do consumer research on it so I had to go and create it and then show it to people and say now what do you think?

Both of them had this ability to not invent products, but discover products. Both of them said these products have always existed – it’s just that no one has ever seen them before. We were the ones who discovered them. The Polaroid camera always existed and the Macintosh always existed — it’s a matter of discovery. Steve had huge admiration for Dr. Land. He was fascinated by that trip.

Edwin H. Land

In New York City, he invented the first inexpensive filters capable of polarizing light, Polaroid film. Because he was not associated with an educational institution, he lacked the tools of a proper laboratory, making this a difficult endeavor. Instead, he would sneak into a laboratory at Columbia University late at night to use their equipment.[1] He also availed himself of the New York City Public Library to scour the scientific literature for prior work on polarizing substances. His breakthrough came when he realized that instead of attempting to grow a large single crystal of a polarizing substance, he could manufacture a film with millions of micrometer-sized polarizing crystals that were coaxed into perfect alignment with each other.

After developing a polarizing film, Edwin Land returned to Harvard. However, he still did not finish his studies or receive a degree. Once Land could see the solution to a problem in his head, he lost all motivation to write it down or prove his vision to others.[2] Often his wife, at the prodding of his instructor, would extract from him the answers to homework problems. She would then write up the homework and hand it in so he could receive credit and not fail the course
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A little more than three years later, on February 21, 1947, Edwin Land demonstrated an instant camera and associated film. Called the Land Camera, it was in commercial sale less than two years later. Polaroid originally manufactured sixty units of this first camera. Fifty-seven were put up for sale at Boston’s Jordan Marsh department store before the 1948 Christmas holiday. Polaroid marketers incorrectly guessed that the camera and film would remain in stock long enough to manufacture a second run based on customer demand. All fifty-seven cameras and all of the film were sold on the first day of demonstrations.

During his time at Polaroid, Land was notorious for his marathon research sessions. When Land conceived of an idea, he would experiment and brainstorm until the problem was solved with no breaks of any kind. He needed to have food brought to him and to be reminded to eat.[2] He once wore the same clothes for eighteen days straight while solving problems with the commercial production of polarizing film.[2] As the Polaroid company grew, Land had teams of assistants working in shifts at his side. As one team wore out, the next team was brought in to continue the work.
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In some ways, Mr. Jobs’s ingenuity reminds me of that of Benjamin Franklin, one of my other biography subjects. Among the founders, Franklin was not the most profound thinker — that distinction goes to Jefferson or Madison or Hamilton. But he was ingenious.
This depended, in part, on his ability to intuit the relationships between different things. When he invented the battery, he experimented with it to produce sparks that he and his friends used to kill a turkey for their end of season feast. In his journal, he recorded all the similarities between such sparks and lightning during a thunderstorm, then declared “Let the experiment be made.” So he flew a kite in the rain, drew electricity from the heavens, and ended up inventing the lightning rod. Like Mr. Jobs, Franklin enjoyed the concept of applied creativity — taking clever ideas and smart designs and applying them to useful devices.

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/opinion/the-man-who-inspired-jobs.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

At Polaroid, Land used to hire Smith College’s smartest art-history majors and send them off for a few science classes, in order to create chemists who could keep up when his conversation turned from Maxwell’s equations to Renoir’s brush strokes.

Most of all, Land believed in the power of the scientific demonstration. Starting in the 60s, he began to turn Polaroid’s shareholders’ meetings into dramatic showcases for whatever line the company was about to introduce. In a perfectly art-directed setting, sometimes with live music between segments, he would take the stage, slides projected behind him, the new product in hand, and instead of deploying snake-oil salesmanship would draw you into Land’s World. By the end of the afternoon, you probably wanted to stay there.
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The worldview he was describing perfectly echoed Land’s: “Market research is what you do when your product isn’t any good.” And his sense of innovation: “Every significant invention,” Land once said, “must be startling, unexpected, and must come into a world that is not prepared for it. If the world were prepared for it, it would not be much of an invention.” Thirty years later, when a reporter asked Jobs how much market research Apple had done before introducing the iPad, he responded, “None. It isn’t the consumers’ job to know what they want.”

Polaroid’s Edwin Land and Apple’s Steve Jobs | Guest Columnists - Advertising Age

The second tenet I learned from Dr. Land was that “the ideal business is composed of managers and dreamers, and it is the responsibility of the former to protect the latter.” The dreamers, of course, are the innovators who disrupt the established order and in fact provide the fuel for capitalism and value creation in a free enterprise environment. Land himself sometimes had to be the dreamer (as did Jobs), but he recognized (as did Jobs) that it often took multiple dreamers to bring about a great invention. He also knew that a leader has to protect those dreamers and ensure that his managers do so also, especially in established companies where the foundational principle is usually one of continuity, not one of discontinuity, which is the hallmark of an innovator. At the time of our meeting, I did not fully appreciate the importance of what he was saying, but over the years I have come to learn how crucially important it is to have dreamers on your team and to protect them.

The third tenet I learned from Dr. Land was “when the facts come home to roost and they are not what you expected, reach out and embrace them anyway.” This was the scientist in him speaking. He did not expect everything to work all the time. This is the nature of experimentation. You fail, you learn why and then you try again. You do not hide your failures or mistakes. You embrace them so you can move forward smarter next time and raise the success odds. Not every Apple product was a success and Jobs made mistakes, but he acknowledged the misses and, more importantly, learned from them. He did not dwell on them and was always moving forward, and in the last 10-15 years of his life had so honed his approach that his success rate was just about perfect.

Biography sees Jobs as crossroad of humanities and science

The story of Jobs is replete with tales of his rudeness toward family members, competitors, waitresses or anyone else who didn’t live up to his exacting standards.

“At one point the pulmonologist tried to put a mask over his face when he was heavily sedated,” Isaacson says of one hospital stay while Jobs was battling cancer.

“Jobs ripped it off and mumbled that he hated the design and refused to wear it … He ordered them to bring five different options for the mask and he would pick a design he liked.”

Isaacson says Jobs called Comcast CEO Brian Roberts after signing up for the cable firm’s high-definition service while recuperating from cancer treatment.

“I thought he was calling to say something nice about it,” Roberts told Isaacson. “Instead, he told me, ‘It sucks.’”