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What Constitutes “Vision”?

One of the consequences of my over-filled life, these days, is that while I subscribe to several publications filled with thought-provoking material, I often don’t get around to reading that material until several weeks (or months) after it’s originally published. This reduces my ability to contribute to the instant-media “buzz” of any given article or issue, of course. On the other hand, it often saves me some time, because by the time I get around to reading about some supposedly “hot” topics or predictions of doom, they’ve already proven irrelevant, untrue, or have been overtaken by events, as they say. Reading magazines six months after the fact certainly does pare down the number of articles you actually have to pay attention to.
So on a recent trip, I found myself reading through the November 14th issue of the New Yorker. (And yes, that would be November, 2011.) I found I could skim right past the articles on Herman Cain and Jon Huntsman’s primary prospects, but I found one on Steve Jobs and innovation that was still fresh–even if I disagreed with the author’s conclusion.
The article, called “The Tweaker,” was written by Malcolm Gladwell–a man I consider a good writer but a somewhat more flawed, and often more shallow, thinker. The article’s point was that Steve Jobs, especially as portrayed by his biographer, Walter Isaacson, was skilled not at coming up with entirely new ideas, but at “tweaking” existing products and technologies to make them better.
Not that Gladwell was dissing the value of tweakers. The article listed a whole string of tweakers throughout history who, among other things, made the industrial revolution possible. And nobody would argue that Jobs was a perfect man or visionary. But in comparing Jobs with Bill Gates, Gladwell concluded that “Philanthropy on the scale that Gates practices it represents imagination at its grandest. In contrast, Jobs’ vision, brilliant and perfect as it was, was narrow. He was a tweaker to the last, endlessly refining the same territory he had claimed as a young man.”
That made me think. Is it really so much “grander” to imagine contributing your money to world causes than to imagine and build a brilliant desktop publishing system, or an iPhone instead of just a better iPod or MP3 player? What makes one vision “grand” or somehow greater than another? Is Bill Gates the greater visionary simply because his philanthropy was on a grand scale? And how DO we judge the quality or grandness of a person’s vision?  Is it on the scope of its impact? The size of the challenge?
If what makes a vision “grand” is scale–in terms of how many people it will impact, or how much it will transform their lives–then it’s hard to argue that the vision of transforming personal computing and using computer technology to transform how people work, publish, communicate and receive entertainment is anything but grand. If the standard of great vision is boldly exploring or conquering completely unimagined and unexplored territory, Gates’ philanthropy wouldn’t qualify, either. Bill and Melinda Gates are not, after all, not the first people to imagine eradiating malaria or improving education in third-world countries. They’re just trying to do it more effectively, with a lot more firepower, and potentially in different ways, than has been attempted before. Which is, essentially, the same “tweaking” that Gladwell accused Jobs of doing.
It’s probably true that eradiating malaria is more important, in life and death terms, than transforming how people communicate on the go. Anyone who purchases an Apple product is not on the edge of poverty or survival. And a vision of how to cure cancer would be far more significant than a vision of how to keep staplers from jamming. So one could argue that one person’s successful vision is more “significant” than another’s. But to label Jobs a “tweaker” vs. a visionary is, I think, a bit of an artificial distinction.
Visionaries, to my way of thinking, are people who can imagine something that does not yet exist, and has never existed before … and can also envision a successful path forward to make those things real. Maybe there was a computer before Jobs and Wozniak invented the first Apple computer, and there were MP3 players before the iPod and the iPhone. But nobody “saw” what Steve Jobs saw–either in terms of the machines’ possibilities, or the impact those machines could have on people. By the same token, if Bill and Melinda Gates “see” a way to solve the problems of malaria and education in third world countries, or a way to leverage rich people’s money to accomplish those goals that works differently and more effectively than existing methods … that, too, is vision.
But the challenging piece of vision is imagining an innovative solution or idea that doesn’t yet exist. And that’s equally challenging whether that solution or idea is a new way of bringing food to the homeless, of bringing clean water to the world’s poor, figuring out a new way of making artificial joints last longer, or developing communication or data devices so streamlined, beautiful and easy to use that suddenly millions of people change their behavior to incorporate them. And it takes no less vision to imagine a transformative change on a local scale than it does something global. The details, number of people involved, and complications may go up the broader your scale is, but the vision can be equally brilliant.
Indeed, in some ways, being continually innovative and transformative in a single industry is far more difficult than making a splash in several. Think of writers who write one great book but whose later books don’t measure up to the first. That’s because it’s hard to come up with something new in the same ground you’ve already mined for gold. Believe me, I know.
What’s more, even “revolutionary” technology, like the personal computer itself, is generally an evolution from what was known, even if there’s one discovery or evolutionary advancement that suddenly changes all the rules. Spacecraft evolved from rockets used in WWII. The internal combustion engine evolved from the steam engine. Even Richard Whitcomb, the Collier Trophy-winning engineer who was the first to “see” how airplanes had to be designed to make them slip smoothly through supersonic shock waves was building on existing aeronautical knowledge, and existing airplane designs. For that matter, even Wilbur and Orville Wright were building their glider and airplane designs on the shoulders of other’s ideas and inventions before them.
One can argue how significant an impact Apple products have had, but it would be hard to argue that they weren’t transformative. And while it’s easy, in hindsight, to see the path that led from previous advancements or innovations, the genius is in seeing that particular path forward when it doesn’t yet exist; when all that lies ahead is a brambled forest of the unknown future, with a million possible directions to take.
Was Steve Jobs a better visionary than anyone else? No. He was just better known than some. But the effort it takes anyone to envision an alternate future and a way to make that goal possible to attain is the same, regardless of what the vision is. If I have any beef with the press given to Steve Jobs, or visionaries in the high-tech field in general, it’s only that I wish all the other important visionaries–passionate people charting unmapped trails into a better future around the world, in ways local and global, simple and complex–could get a little more press and recognition in the mix.

{ 3 comments… add one }
  • Michael A August 1, 2012, 12:31 pm

    For an example of visionary, have a look at John McGinnis of Synergy Aircraft. He may be charting new ground and challenging the known bounds of aviation. To your discussion of “tweakers” vs “entirely new ideas”, this is McGinnis’ second time down the innovation path. He was also the genius that designed Identity Snowboards with parabolic sidecut years in advance of the billion dollar ski companies coming up with their “innovation” of same.

  • Reid August 7, 2012, 12:20 pm

    Good stuff…
    Gladwell pulls macro thoughts out of micro data and casts it upon the common folks, me.
    So many lead a life of quiet desparation because they and me haven’t figured out how or have grasped the “guts” to move from vision to action on that vision.

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