The Future of Success (8 page)

The geek draws on his endless fascination with a medium—a technology, a science, a visual art, a literary form, a system of symbols, with its own rules and internal logic. The shrink, by contrast, draws on her fascination with people—their aspirations and fears, their yearnings and needs, their unexamined assumptions. The shrink is empathic where the geek is analytic. The geek understands
it
—the possibilities for novelty within a given medium. The shrink understands
them
—what they could possibly want or need.

THE ENTREPRENEURIAL WHOLE

You may have noticed that just now, when I referred to geeks, I used the male pronoun, and for shrinks I used the female. Mainly, I simply wanted to avoid the awkward convention in these liberated times of saying “he or she” at every juncture. I didn’t mean to presume that one gender predominates in either category. There surely are female geeks and male shrinks. But the choice of pronoun was not entirely accidental. Whether it’s hardwired into our genes or conditioned by our upbringing, men do tend to be more focused on things, and women on relationships.

Every great entrepreneur is both geek and shrink. Entrepreneurial vision depends on combining the geek’s insights into what’s possible with the shrink’s intuitions about what’s desired. The entrepreneurial genius has near-perfect vision through both eyes. Thomas Alva Edison was a brilliant geek. He could see possibilities in electric currents that eluded most other inventors of the time. But he was also a brilliant shrink. He had a profound sense of what would delight the consuming public—reproducing music from a disk, or illuminating an area with a bright bulb. We now take these innovations for granted; in hindsight, it is easy to assume that people were clamoring for these innovations at the time, and that the market was already well established. But that was not the case. Think back a few years ago before you used e-mail, or the Internet, or cellular telephones, or even knew of the possible existence of such things. They were beyond your imagination, and they had not worked their way into your life. Now, although you may not like every aspect of them (you may even resent the fact that you need them), you are nevertheless dependent. And in all likelihood your children will take them for granted when they become adults, and perhaps even assume that the market for them was already well established before these innovations first appeared. Edison had no way of knowing for sure that there was a market for his inventions. He only imagined there would be. His genius lay in combining his technological insights with his marketing imagination.

Throughout history there have been other entrepreneurial geniuses who combined great scientific or artistic imagination with great marketing imagination. You may not think of them as marketers as well as artists, but their great artistry was combined with a powerful instinct for what would move the public. My list would include William Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, Claude Monet, and Henry Ford. History has not yet passed judgment on more recent candidates, but my bets are on the technological impresarios Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, and Jim Clark, founder of Netscape and Silicon Graphics; producer and film director Steven Spielberg; the late fashion mogul Gianni Versace; the Argentine-born pianist Martha Argerich; the composer Leonard Bernstein; novelists Toni Morrison and Stephen King; and the great marketers Oprah Winfrey and Martha Stewart. Even if they don’t rank up there with Shakespeare and Newton, all have an uncanny ability to invent things that people will want.

Few of us are brilliant geeks or shrinks, yet most of us are inclined in one direction or the other, gender notwithstanding. A highly simplified test: If you can labor alone on a problem for hours without being aware that time has passed, or if you take delight in solving puzzles, or enjoy “out of the box” or “lateral” thinking (by which I mean that you derive pleasure out of discovering a new way to accomplish a familiar task, and even greater joy in discovering new ways to do tasks you didn’t know could be accomplished), you have the tendencies of a geek. If, on the other hand, you would rather spend the time discussing something with someone, or arguing with them (even if you lose the argument), or if you derive great satisfaction from advising and counseling others, or pleasing them, or negotiating with and striking deals with them, you have the inclinations, and perhaps even the talents, of a shrink.

Job recruiters who fail to note the differences between these two tendencies can make grave mistakes. I have hired brilliant geeks who I wrongly assumed at the time were talented shrinks. By the time I discovered my errors, I had a lot of mending to do with people who had been inadvertently ignored or insulted. Geeks can produce wonderful ideas and analyses, but they are not always gifted at interpersonal relations. I have also committed the opposite error. Shrinks, for their part, can “read” the subtlest of interpersonal cues, but are not always the most insightful when it comes to the substance of things. Great managers (among whom I do not count myself) intuitively know the difference, and place talented people where they can add the most value.

The charming 1996 movie
Big Night
depicted the combination exactly, if not in the extreme. Primo and Secondo, you may remember, are brothers who have emigrated to America to open an Italian restaurant. Primo is a gifted but moody and irascible chef who is determined not to squander his genius by making the standard dishes that customers always want and expect. Secondo is a smooth-talking front man who tries to keep the restaurant solvent and persuade its few patrons that they are getting what they desire. The central event of the film springs from an agreement between the brothers to have a special benefit dinner at the restaurant for which Primo will cook his masterpieces and Secondo will use his formidable marketing talents to draw a large crowd. The effort is doomed from the start because neither brother has listened to or learned from the other.

Geek and shrink—artist and agent, inventor and hustler, engineer and marketer, fashion designer and merchandiser, director and producer, provider of Internet content and of Internet traffic, politician and political consultant, talent and “suit,” and so on—each of these couplets represents the two halves of the entrepreneurial whole. They exist symbiotically. They must learn from each other in order for innovation to occur. Without each other’s contribution, the team would have no true entrepreneurial insight. The geek alone might create “cool” technologies, but they would have no economic value. They would not be informed by knowledge of what people want, and thus would risk being commercially irrelevant. The shrink alone might imagine ways of delighting customers, of responding to their deepest needs and yearnings, but her musings would be technologically irrelevant. They would not be shaped by knowledge of what was possible, and thus would risk being mindlessly conventional or wildly impractical.

Indeed, the questions “What might be possible?” and “What might consumers desire?” are becoming central to every enterprise. As the terms of competition shift from making and selling large numbers of identical things to innovating quickly and gaining a reputation for trustworthiness, geeks and shrinks are indispensable. Profits depend on knowledge of a certain medium (software, music, law, finance, physics, film, and so on) combined with knowledge of a certain market.

Buyers are paying more for innovation—the output of geeks and shrinks—and paying less for reproducing and distributing the creations. The cost of making a compact disc, transistor, or pain reliever is a few cents. Most of what consumers pay for is the cost of researching, designing, marketing, and advertising a steady stream of new items—the provinces of geeks and shrinks. A growing portion of the sticker price of a new car also goes to its design and marketing, along with the design and marketing of the software and computers used for controlling inventories, production, billing, payrolls, and distribution. The cost of manufacturing the book you’re now reading was a relatively small portion of the price you paid for it. Most of your money went to the publisher, editor, jacket designer, merchandisers, marketers, and advertisers. Your author received a modest cut as well. And in cyberspace, it’s all “content” and “traffic”—almost nobody there but geeks and shrinks.

FROM INFORMATION BROKERING TO KNOWLEDGE BROKERING

You can see the same trend in professional services. A few years back, financial houses invested heavily in research and in information technologies. These generated up-to-the-minute data on stocks and bonds, and efficiently executed trades on behalf of clients. These days, clients can get almost the same data on their home computers, and can trade for themselves over the Internet. So what is Wall Street selling? Increasingly, advice. The advice draws on the same two realms of knowledge I’ve been stressing, of
it
and of
them
—knowledge of how financial markets are likely to perform in the future, and of what portfolios their individual clients are likely to want.

Wall Street “brokers” are being relabeled “financial consultants,” but the change is more than in name only. I no longer need my broker to make trades, but I do need him to advise me about what I should do with my savings. And I count on his learning enough about me and my family, and knowing enough about finance, to give me good advice. The new stars of Wall Street are the research analysts who best combine technical knowledge of financial markets with specific knowledge about investors, enabling them to advise both issuers and institutions. They’re selling a higher-powered version of the advice I’m getting from my own financial consultant.
⁶

It’s coming to be the same for all professionals who once traded in information—real-estate agents, mortgage lenders, insurance brokers, travel agents, media buyers, accountants, even doctors and lawyers who did routine diagnoses and offered standard “boilerplate” remedies. All had been
information
brokers who matched specific data about their clients, patients, or customers with a body of expert information available to people in their profession. Initially, computers enabled them to do the matching more efficiently: Real-estate agents consulted computerized multiple listings; lenders, databases on creditworthiness; insurance agents, tools for assessing risk and pricing various policies; travel agents, databases for flights and accommodations; and accountants, doctors, and lawyers, an expanded array of professional tools to deal with a variety of standard problems. But as their clients, patients, and customers gain access to the same expert information online, they no longer need information brokers.

These information brokers will have to do the equivalent of what stockbrokers have done, and shift to
knowledge
brokering—combining knowledge of what’s possible with knowledge about what their clients might want or need. My family takes one vacation a year, for which I can easily make all the necessary reservations with a few clicks of a computer mouse. But over the years my travel agent has accumulated knowledge about a wide range of travel experiences, and also about us, and I rely on her to suggest where we might like to go and what we might like to do.

But even knowledge brokers won’t be able to relax in their new roles. More and better customized advice will become available online, based on customer responses to online questionnaires. Soon, financial software will spew out advice about the proper allocation of assets between stocks and bonds, and categories of equity—depending on investors’ responses to online questions about their financial circumstances, attitudes toward risk, age, and expected needs. Vacation-planning software will automatically generate advice about where to go and what to see—based on responses to online questions about family interests and previous successful vacations. Software containing advice from lawyers, financiers, engineers, architects, doctors, accountants, tax specialists, or financial planners will also be available online, in response to other online questionnaires. So what will professionals do next? Some will become the geeks and shrinks who design and market such knowledge-brokering software, and continuously improve upon it. Others will turn into specialists who attend to unique cases that the software doesn’t address. Others will be advisers-cum-therapists to clients willing to pay extra for personal reassurance (more on this role later).

We will see something of the same shift, from information brokering to knowledge brokering, in retailing. Some people involved in retail sales will be replaced by the Internet (or, more specifically, by the geeks and shrinks who design and market Web pages and create the software for linking orders with inventories and billing, and by the people who ship and deliver). But there will still be a role for salespeople. Many customers will continue to seek personal assistance in deciding what they want or need. Some of this help will be provided over the Internet or on the telephone by people in customer service centers hundreds or thousands of miles away. Some of it—often, more expensive—will be provided in person. (On this, more later as well.)

MUTUAL LEARNING

Every great organization finds ways to combine the two types of creative worker—to cross-pollinate—so that the geeks understand enough about potential markets to direct their inventiveness toward where it is likely to be wanted, and so the shrinks understand enough about potential technologies and other mediums to direct their customers toward where they are most likely to be served. Movie studios must have their talented actors and directors, but also their producers who know how to put together a film that the public will want to see. Publishing houses combine talented writers with editors and publishers who understand how to market the written words. The best venture capitalists scout for both brilliant geeks and insightful shrinks, and know how to marry them within the same entrepreneurial enterprise. Fashion houses must have their designers and also their stylists who stay close to the market, discover what’s going on in other design rooms, and work with fashion retailers and trend spotters to sense where the market is heading. And so on, throughout the economy.