Read an Excerpt
The Change Makers
From Carnegie to Gates, How the Great Entrepreneurs Transformed Ideas into Industries
By Maury Klein Henry Holt and Company
Copyright © 2003 Maury Klein
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7974-4
CHAPTER 1
The Enigma of Creativity
To Ernestine, who understands the likeness of all creative people. — JOHN CHAMBERLAIN
Nothing that human beings do is more important or exciting or produces more momentous results than creativity. It is in many ways the essence of our being, the very wellspring of what defines our uniqueness as creatures, yet it remains a tantalizing mystery to us. Surprisingly little has been written on the subject, even in this age of academic overkill when the most trivial of questions in the forest of knowledge have been chopped and chainsawed into meaningless splinters. The reasons are not hard to find. Every aspect of creativity is an elusive subject, intangible and enigmatic, defying the hammer blows of pedantry, the cage of statistics, and the tortuous vivisection of deconstruction. Moreover, it is a subject that resists the pigeonholes of specialization. Who owns the intellectual property rights to creativity? Philosophers? Psychologists? Sociologists? Artists? Scientists? Delegates from all of these fields have taken a whack at the subject.
Historically, creativity has always been associated with the arts and is usually contrasted to science. The one is portrayed as intuitive and subjective, the other as objective, empirical, and grounded in reasoning. Both of these stereotypes are misleading if not entirely wrong. The creative impulse, however it is defined, finds expression in every area of human endeavor. "The act of creation itself," insisted Arthur Koestler in his seminal book on creativity, "is based on essentially the same underlying pattern in all ranges of the continuous rainbow spectrum." Psychiatrist Albert Rothenberg, who has also probed the subject deeply, agrees that "creativity is manifest in many and diverse types of human endeavor, including all varieties of art, religion, philosophy, engineering, business activities ... and in commonplace activities such as cooking, sports, and interpersonal interaction."
Clearly, creativity is not limited to artists. The scientist displays it in connecting ideas or observations and transforming them into insights or actions; so do inventors, philosophers, mathematicians, businessmen, and athletes. "The equation of science with logic and reason, or art with intuition and emotion, is a blatant popular fallacy," asserted Koestler. "No discovery has ever been made by logical deduction; no work of art produced without calculating craftsmanship." Rothenberg emphasized that "so-called intuitive thinking and other types of leaps of thought analogous to what are commonly designated as artistic intuition and inspiration have played a definite role in scientific discovery." Scientists themselves have traced some of their most important discoveries back to just such experiences. Jules-Henri Poincaré, the great mathematician, recalled that the insight leading to one of his more important discoveries came as he was about to step into a carriage to go for a drive. Albert Einstein described the flash of discovery that revealed how Newton's theory of gravitation could fit into a broader theory of relativity as "the happiest thought of my life."
What, then, is creativity? Opinions vary widely on both its essence and its elements. Rothenberg defined it as "the state or the production of something both new and valuable," and admitted that his approach excluded "everything but the achievements of genius." Robert Grudin agreed that "studies of creativity usually recount the actions of genius," but creativity is hardly limited to geniuses and that term is no less ambiguous and elusive. Psychological explanations have followed two basic approaches. One places emphasis on rationality, the other on "classical associationism," which views thinking as a chain of ideas. Psychiatrists have tended to associate creativity with various types of personality disorders. Alfred Adler posited a "compensatory theory of creativity," which viewed people as producing art, science, and other creations to "compensate for their own inadequacies." Other psychoanalytic theories subordinate creativity to some other process and regard it as an expression of neurotic behavior. After surveying a half century of psychological studies pertaining to creativity, Rollo May admitted to being struck by "the general paucity of the material and the inadequacy of the work." Nevertheless, he conceded, "it is still true that creativity is a stepchild of psychology."
But at bottom psychologists are as baffled as anyone else about the nature of creativity. The mystery also fascinates most creative people themselves, including entrepreneurs, who struggle to explain exactly how they do what they do. For most of them it is an intuitive process. Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid, once said that "every creative act is a sudden cessation of stupidity." Andrew Carnegie doted on the notion of "genius" and was firmly convinced that he could recognize it in anyone, but he was helpless to explain what it was or how it was created. "A man who is liable to rapid thinking very often arrives at conclusions without being able to tell the process," observed Jay Gould, the great railroad and telegraph entrepreneur, "and yet he is satisfied the conclusions are correct. ... If you undertake to give the evidences by which they are reached you could not tell how it was done." As noted earlier, Schumpeter had almost exactly this same notion.
E. H. Harriman, another major railroad entrepreneur, was renowned for the speed and originality of his thinking, which left mere mortals scrambling to keep up with him. Robert S. Lovett, a close friend and associate, marveled that "his mental processes were unlike any that I have ever seen. He never arrived at conclusions by reason, or argument, or any deliberate process that I could observe. His judgments seemed to be formed intuitively. The proposition was presented to him and he saw it. It was much like turning a flashlight on a subject. If interested, he saw it, and did not care and probably did not know how it was revealed. And his vision and measure of it was almost unfailingly clear and correct."
Lovett was not alone in his fascination with Harriman's gift. The great banker James Stillman, another close ally, once said that his friend's brain was "a thing to marvel at. And yet it was that kind of brain which, if you could take it apart as you would a clock, and put it on a shelf to look at, would be distinguished by the incredible simplicity of its mechanism, and its ability to make the most complex problems solvable." The man himself had no explanation. Asked by a reporter how he did it, Harriman puzzled over the question for a while, then replied, "I think that the mind is like these — what d'ye call 'em on this desk? — these pigeon holes. A man comes to me. I listen and decide on what to do; and then — it goes into a pigeon hole."
"And it's always there?" asked the reporter. "No trouble in finding it again at any time?"
"It's always there," Harriman replied. He thought about it some more, then could only reiterate, "It's always there. Whenever I need it again I find it there."
"And you don't know how you do it?"
"I don't know how I do it."
Inventors who became entrepreneurs as well were no less curious about the process of discovery. The greatest of them all, Thomas A. Edison, agreed that "the first step is an intuition, and comes with a burst. ... It has been just so in all of my inventions." Land was fascinated by what he called the "hunting process," which he described this way:
There may be many abortive first approaches at the verbal levels to fields which are then rejected as being either not significant enough or not feasible — and then, quite suddenly a field will emerge conceptually so full blown in the creator's mind that the words can scarcely come from his mouth fast enough to describe the new field in its full implication and elaborateness.
This arrival at sudden insights extends to many fields. "I have the result," the celebrated German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss once exclaimed, "but I do not yet know how to get it." The gap (often chasm) between understanding and explanation plagues creative people of all stripes. "As artists are not necessarily the best interpreters of their own work," noted Michael Novak, "so practitioners in many fields do not need to know the theory of what they are doing and, if asked, state it badly — maybe even in the wrong key."
This notion of intuition — the flash of insight that unravels the mystery — lies at the core of much writing on creativity. It remains elusive precisely because it is rooted in the unconscious and therefore arrives without warning at unexpected times. Artists and scientists alike have stressed its pivotal role in the creative process. In art the notion that discovery consists of revelations from the unconscious has influenced such movements as expressionism, dadaism, and surrealism. Arthur Koestler alluded to the "poet's or the mathematician's trancelike condition while he concentrates on a problem" as one in which he was "exploring the inner environment, and ignoring the input from the senses."
However, Eugene K. von Fange, cautioned that "the sudden 'flash' is more often incomplete or inaccurate than it is correct."
As a leader of courses in creative engineering at General Electric, which instituted its Creative Engineering Program in 1937, Fange viewed a creation as something "useful ... of benefit to mankind," but added that "all thinking is mentally directed creativeness. We think only when we wish to achieve a conclusion that, by implication, did not exist before." One factor common to all creations, he argued, was a "new association of existing elements, as far as the creator himself is concerned." But that breakthrough did not come easily or quickly. "It is not far wrong," Fange observed, "to say that creative work is the successive isolation of 'what is not.'" In the professions, the entire process of discovery and development often did not belong to one person alone. Who then was the source of creativity, he asked: "the one who conceived the initial idea, the one who first made a model function properly, or the one who actually designed it for production?"
One obvious answer might well be all of the above.
Jacob W. Getzels and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described artistic creativity as a process that begins when a person "experiences a conflict in perception, emotion, or thought." The artist then formulates a problem that articulates the hitherto unarticulated conflict, finds a way to express the problem in visual form, manages to resolve the conflict through symbolic means, and thus achieves a new "emotional and cognitive balance." Rothenberg concluded that creativity in any field did not consist of an isolated or single act but resulted from "a long series of circumstances, sometimes occurring in an unbroken chain or sequence but often interrupted, reconstructed, and repeated over a period of time." During that process it moved from "disguise and disorder to illumination and order ... from personal preoccupation to generic and universal concerns."
Did this process involve mystical or magical elements unique to genius? D. N. Perkins thought not. He dismissed the standard notion of creativity as "one of those 'high mysteries' ... stubbornly inscrutable, essentially ineffable," and argued instead that "the processes underlying creation are commonplace." Rejecting the idea that "the business of creation is the business of the unconscious mind," Perkins suggested instead that "creating occurs when ordinary mental processes in an able person are marshaled by creative ... intentions." What seemed to be intuition or insight could be explained in terms of "recognizing, realizing, and reasoning to a considerable extent." He found no evidence that creativity derived chiefly from "specifically creative abilities," and argued that it probably depended more on "traits other than abilities." Creative people were not blessed with unique abilities but rather did more — often much more — with ordinary ones. For Perkins these "connections between the marvelous and the mundane" did much to explain the mystery of creation.
Even insight fell into this category. Perkins described it as "doing more with less ... the person's own mind provides what in more ordinary circumstances would be supplied from without." But this involved no special processes. Where Koestler, Rothenberg, and others viewed insight as something beyond reasoning, Perkins argued that "very often insight can come about just exactly through reasoning." The same held true for the creative capacity to transcend existing frames of reference. "Reasoning, remembering," he insisted, "... often break boundaries." Invention, too, could be explained apart from the usual resort to the mystical or ineffable. "The essence of invention isn't process but purpose," Perkins wrote. "Purpose is what organizes the diverse means of the mind to creative ends." Moreover, invention often occurred "not because a person tries to be original, but because the person attempts to do something difficult."
Perkins's argument is intriguing but unconvincing. It contains some internal contradictions and inconsistencies, and fails to account for the ultimate source of inspiration. Having stressed the primary role of ordinary processes carried to extraordinary lengths, he conceded that "the great creators tend to have talent. They reveal a natural knack for thinking and doing in their specialties ... those gifts support their creative endeavors. ... A talent is an extraordinary and inborn ability for doing something — remembering music, say. A specifically creative ability, inborn or not, would be an ability that in itself made a person more creative." But this amounts to a circular argument and does not get at whatever the ingredients are that translate such a talent into creativity. What separates an ordinary composer with a gift for remembering music from a Mozart or Beethoven? Is this distance between talent and genius merely one of degree?
No one has examined the mystery of creativity more thoroughly and deeply than Arthur Koestler, a writer best known for his political works — most notably Darkness at Noon. His thick book The Act of Creation (1964), the second work in a monumental trilogy dealing with the mind, remains the most erudite, painstaking, and provocative study of the subject. Koestler found that "verbal thinking, and conscious thinking in general, plays only a subordinate part in the decisive phase of the creative act." As noted earlier, Schumpeter shared the view that intuition lay at the heart of creative action, but Koestler carried the point to its farthest shore by stressing the dichotomy between language and creativity. Language served as the strongest, most complex, and most flexible form of human communication, yet it could also become "a screen between the thinker and reality. This is the reason why true creativity often starts where language ends."
Perhaps that explains why, when a revelation hits home, a typical response is to say, "I see it now." Koestler found evidence that some people possess the faculty of "so-called eidetic imagery — that is, of really seeing mental images with dream-like hallucinatory vividness." This gift turned out to be common in children but rare in adults. In this way, creative people are visionaries in the most literal sense, able to grasp visually what they often cannot convey in language. However, this does not address the main issue, which is the source of the image. What elements are involved in the process of seeing things in new and unexpected ways?
The key function in the creative process seems to be an ability to connect seemingly unrelated ideas and derive hitherto unsuspected meaning or significance from that connection. The occurrence of such insights is never predictable. "The history of discovery," noted Koestler, "is full of such arrivals at unexpected destinations, and arrivals at the right destination by the wrong boat." But it is neither a random nor an accidental event in the sense that it might happen to anyone. As Louis Pasteur observed, "Chance favors the prepared mind." Koestler called this ability the process of "bisociation," as opposed to "association," the most common form of thinking, which he characterized as merely "the exercise of a habit." Learning, by contrast, he defined as "the acquisition of a new skill" and bisociation the "combination, re-shuffling and re-structuring of skills."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Change Makers by Maury Klein. Copyright © 2003 Maury Klein. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
