What if all of the big intitatives — both public and private — put into place over the past decade to computerize learning were trumped by a smart, funny, personable guy who, acting largely alone and on a shoestring budget, used a human-centered approach to creating a simple, cost-effective way to reach thousands and thousands of students over the web? And what if it all happened simply because he started teaching kids?
Well, here you go: Salman Khan did all of that, and more. He is a wonderful example of the primacy of doing.
Let's look at some of the innovations brought to market by the Khan Academy. Among others:
free access over the internet
self-paced learning
lecture attendance at home, homework at school
the psychological and emotional safety created by learning in private
helping students achieve true mastery, as opposed to minimum tolerable levels of understanding
liberating "slow" students from the tyrranny of being put on the low achievement track
a more human classroom experience
What do all of these have in common? Well, aside from being truly amazing outcomes for students, teachers, and parents, none of them were captured in a business plan slide deck, nor were they necessarily premediated goals for his venture. In other words, Salman didn't start out with the goal to flip the learning paradigm. He worked his way up to that point by doing something he loved. To push that point even further, Sallman wasn't looking to start a venture at all, just to tutor his cousins more effectively. He designed for them, saw the value he created, and then went from there.
Embracing the primacy of doing, getting started, saying "what the hell, why don't I try this!" is a way to open yourself up to powerful forces of serendipity, luck, and good fortune. In technical terms, doing gives you access to a real option, which is defined as:
the right — but not the obligation — to undertake some business decision; typically the option to make, abandon, expand, or contract a capital investment.
Think about it: if you could create the right to give yourself an expanded range of opportunities in the future, wouldn't you give that gift to yourself? Of course you would. So what Salman teaches us is that we need to act — we have to act — because inside of that action is a gift of a better future, both for ourselves and for others. Accessing the gift requires some courage, so tell yourself you can do it, and help your friends and family to embrace their own potential to get out there and make it happen. For me, that's the ultimate lesson of the Khan Academy.
For those of us who make things for a living, we live a daily pardox in that most of our making actually involves subtracting. That gorgeous MacBook Air you covet? It was made subtractively: lots of perfectly good aluminum was machined away to achieve its seductive form. Unfortunately, many of the miraculous fixes surgeons create actually involve taking out living material, and either setting up a workaround using existing components, or placing in a replacement part — like an artificial hip — which was probably made subtractively, too. Even a quotidien net-shape process like thermoplastic injection molding requires the creation of complex metal molds, which are also usually made via subtractive processes, all of which are quite laborious and time consuming.
We're on the cusp of a significant shift in manufacturing techniques which has been several decades in the making. As a newly minted engineer back in the early 90's, I started using 3D CAD software to drive stereolithography machines which gave me rough samples of the parts I was designing for ink jet printers. Stereolithography was an early form of "additive" manufacturing, where you build up the thing you desire layer by layer, drip by drip, or atom by atom. Though the parts weren't very functional, they were a great alternative to asking someone to machine out your impossible shape (I was very good then at creating impossible shapes…). What's cool today is that variants of the same ink jet technology I was developing then can now be used to print out… kidneys. Or bikes. And urethras. Or even plastic injection molds. And going forward, potentially just about anything we can dream up. For me, I think this shift in manufacturing paradigm will be driven by three major developments in the art and science of making stuff:
1. Cost-effective production of complex composite forms and structures
Save for their motors and wheels, modern Formula 1 cars are made almost completely out of a variety of composite materials. As you can see from the crash sequence above (which the driver Mark Webber walked away from), composite materials combine light weight with very high strength. The composite tub which Webber sits in stayed intact throughout this accident. He is also wearing an advanced, lightweight helmet made out of composites. And his head is kept attached to his torso by a composite yoke sitting on his shoulders. However, the manufacturing techniques used to create all of these parts are slow and expensive. To date, the use of composite materials in mass consumer offerings has been limited to things like tennis raquets and golf clubs, where the forms and structures were fairly simple and the market was willing to pay a premium for performance. Boeing is about to ship the Dreamliner, whose fuselage and wings are made out of composites. Cost-effective, lightweight composites would be a boon to the automotive world, enabling us to create much more energy efficient cars which maintain or increase levels of active and passive safety over today's metallic structures. The good news here is that several organizations are pioneering manufacturing techniques which radically lower the price of composite structures. Gordon Murray's design firm has created the iStream manufacturing process, which combines steel structures with a fast composite manufacturing techniques to create a cheap, lightweight stucture for vehicles. And McLaren, ever an innovator, is just about to ship its amazing MP4-12C road car, which uses a cost-effective molded carbon fiber tub as its main structural element. Here is a technical analysis of that car, and here is an overview of the state of the art in structural composites by Gordon Murray himself. As more of these manufacturing techniques come into the mainstream, we'll see composites in more and more products. Significantly, these processes also have the potential to significantly reduce the physical footprint required to make things, and they can also skinny down the capital structure required to be a manufacturer. More on that in the next section.
2. Additive manufacturing of technical nutrients
By this title, I refer to the process of building up structures by depositing incremental bits of "man-made" materials until a whole is formed. This is in contrast to traditional manufacturing techniques, where material is slowly stripped away, Michelangelo-like, until the desired form is achieved. For more information on this, rather than attempt to duplicate a wonderful piece of journalism, I'd like to point you to 3D printing: The printed world, an article from The Economist. For both both noobie and expert alike, this article provides a great survey of techniques and applications being developed all over the world. If you're an engineer like me, the prospect of being able to additively manufacturing a titanium spar inside of a fully-formed carbon fiber wing is truly inspiring. On the other hand, if you are a business model hacker like me, you'll also find the following Economist observation pretty mind-blowing:
Perhaps the most exciting aspect of additive manufacturing is that it lowers the cost of entry into the business of making things. Instead of finding the money to set up a factory or asking a mass-producer at home (or in another country) to make something for you, 3D printers will offer a cheaper, less risky route to the market. An entrepreneur could run off one or two samples with a 3D printer to see if his idea works. He could make a few more to see if they sell, and take in design changes that buyers ask for. If things go really well, he could scale up—with conventional mass production or an enormous 3D print run.
This suggests that success in manufacturing will depend less on scale and more on the quality of ideas. Brilliance alone, though, will not be enough. Good ideas can be copied even more rapidly with 3D printing, so battles over intellectual property may become even more intense. It will be easier for imitators as well as innovators to get goods to market fast. Competitive advantages may thus be shorter-lived than ever before. As with past industrial revolutions, the greatest beneficiaries may not be companies but their customers. But whoever gains most, revolution may not be too strong a word.
If you could make world-class titanium parts in your backyard studio, would you? I might. If you are GM, and you can start replacing huge buildings built to house humongous steel panel stamping presses with robotic cells which build up parts additively, would you? I believe the capital efficiencies offered by these new technologies will be irresistable, and will transform the notion of "factory" to be something much smaller, more nimble, and more similar to the low mass organization we've seen develop to support many of the leading Web 2.0 brands. I saw an inkling of this eight years ago, when I visited the Pagani factory in Italy. At that point in time, they were not using additive manufacturing, but they were building all of their parts (save for the engine and some assorted metallic suspension pieces) inhouse using carbon composite manufacturing techniques. Here's what I wrote about that visit:
Located a short drive outside of Bologna, Pagani sits but a stone's throw from the headquarters of Ferrari and Lamborghini — part of the high performance internal combustion industry cluster that's existed in Emilia-Romagna since the 1920's. The factory is very compact and sits, almost invisible, in a quiet suburban neighborhood. It is divided into three main areas, each sitting side-by-side: a carbon fiber fabrication area with several autoclaves, an assembly area (big enough to fit three cars on jack stands) and an entrance lobby/museum. The design offices sit above the museum, and the entire facility oozes quality and attention to detail, as do the fabulous cars that roll out the front door.
Three tiny buildings creating complete cars. A factory complex so small I drove by it at least five times, finally resorting to begging two mechanics in a garage fixing an old Fiat 500 to point me in the right direction. That's a big revolution in capital structure, and I believe it will signal the birth of many small, leightweight, easier-to-start-up entrepreneurial manufacturing firms. Our industrial landscape may return to looking much like that of over a century ago, with as many exciting mechanical startups flourishing as we now have software startups. By the way, the illustration above is also from — you guessed it — Gordon Murray.
3. Additive manufacturing of biological nutrients
Here I refer to the process of building up structures by depositing incremental bits of "natural" materials until a whole is formed. Or it may mean creating a scaffolding out of man-made or biomaterials, and then injecting that scaffolding with living cells so that it can grow to become a liver, or a urethra, or a bladder, or a kidney. Since showing is better than telling, please give yourself 17 minutes to watch the following TED video — it will blow your mind and may change the way you approach your work:
If you can't spare the time for the entire video, at least forward to the 10 minute mark in the video, and check it out. Amazing. By the way, this type of manufacturing approach will also change the business structures of many of the organ replacement systems we have in place today. Contrast the complex supply chains we've created to harvest viable organs from donors, find a suitable recipient, and then transport and implant the donation. Aside from reducing the human misery and suffering accrued (which cannot be measured in dollars), imagine what happens when Stanford Hospital has an organ printing center in the basement.
This shift in our manufacturing paradigm will be enabled cheap, lightweight structures, built-up physical products, and custom-printed biologic offerings. In summary, this is just my attempt to synthesize for myself what may be happening across these trends. The technological possibilities are fabulous. The business implications are intriguing and even inspiring. The societal implications are simultaneously energizing and troubling. Let's see where things go, and I'd love to hear what you think.
I returned this morning from the TED conference in Long Beach. This year I found it exceptionally inspiring. And also draining: the content on stage, the people you meet, the people you don't meet,the locale, all of the activites — it's a jam-packed five days that leaves you feeling simultaneously energized yet also a bit like a spent tube of toothpaste. Wow.
I logged on this evening to write a summary of the week, but in the course of seeing what my friends wrote about their experience there, I came across John's amazing story of his experience in Long Beach, and decided that all I'm going to do is quote him here. What he wrote is just beautiful, and it captures the essence of what happens there:
… Every time I go, there are at least a couple of experiences that I have that change the way that I look at the world, the way that I want to be when I go home. TED makes you want to be better, smarter, more present, more thoughtful, more impactful, more human. To be a better citizen and a better professional and a better dad and a better husband and a better friend. That type of inspiration doesn’t happen all that much, and it’s worth the price of admission every time.
And that’s why June Cohen and Tom Rielly, on the TED team are two of my true heroes. They both have chosen to spend their lives working on building up TED outside of just the week of the conference every year. Tom has built the TED Fellows program, which started out pretty damn great and at this point is starting to move into basically ass-kicking-terrifyingly-awesome territory. And June, who put TED Talks online for everyone to see, including subtitling into 80+ languages.
That, my friends, is how you change the world.
That’s how you take this beautiful, wonderful experience for a few people in California each year and turn it into something that anyone — anyone! — can use to make themselves, their community, their world better themselves.
Well said, John. I can't wait to post some of my favorite speaker videos. I had tears streaming down my face in just about every session of the conference.
TED is something different from what it was half a decade ago. If you can ever go in person to one of their events, or to a TEDx event, I heartily recommend you do so, but I do agree with John that the essence of the TED brand experience is by no means limited to those who hear it in person. If you can take the time to watch and absorb the videos which appeal to you — and many of those which won't at first glance — you can have the same kind of transformational experience. Perhaps even better.
It is so important to have a strong point of view. Let me repeat: it is so important to have a strong point of view. It needn't be as extreme as the one voiced in this ad, but you've got to stand for something.
If you don't have a point of view, you won't know what you don't stand for, and so you'll be tempted to try and do everything, because "no" won't be in your vocabulary. Trying to appeal to everyone by playing in the mushy middle not only will make you less appealing over the long haul (because being boring is not attractive), it also makes it very difficult to get started (because the enormity of the task makes everything too daunting to tackle), and makes it really tough to ship (because you have to do so much in order to meet the needs of so many people).
Having a point of view is incredibly liberating. It takes more energy and more time to get to an honest understanding of what you believe in, what you need to do, and what you won't do, but it is well and truly worth it.
Check these out and see if they don't shift your feelings for Priuseses:
This series is brilliant. The Prius is the new protest car of the intelligentsia, haven taken over that mantle from the Volvo 240 station wagon. One sees more bumper stickers per square inch on the back of Priums than on any other brand of car, I'd wager. As such, having James Lipton play in public with the branding of the car will tickle the fancy of many existing Prius owners. For others, like me, it softens the character of the brand, making it fun in an Ivy League kind of way, a little more accessible.
The series works because it does not engage in spinning up a fake, sugary myth. Rather, it is amplifying meaning which already exists out in the world. The Prius is a car for people who think about cars in a different way, or more precisely, for people who don't think about cars as cars. But it is a car for thinkers who are likely to take delight in these twisted cultural references, and so we have thinkers here being thinkers. James Lipton is James Lipton. Shakespeare loves the letter W. And so forth.
It's also a great example of art imitating life imitating art. The choice of "MC Flossary" and Shakespeare for two of these videos is an inspired one, referencing a much deeper satire created several years ago by Sacha Baron Cohen, with Mr. Lipton as his unwitting victim and dance partner. The Flossary Prius clip works that much better because of this cultural backstory. The fun here starts at the 1:18 mark:
As Grant McCracken argues, we need more "chief culture officers" operating in our midst. Not "culture officers" in the sense of folks who look in and steward our internal organizational cultures, but folks who like to wallow around in all the cultural currents which exist out in the world. Who can parse meaning in a generative way. I have to believe that this Pria campaign was forged by a group which included at least one cultural officer. To be able to amplify meaning, you need first to be aware of it.
Do you remember Wonder Woman's Invisible Jetplane? If you don't, you can read about it over here, and it looked something like this (because it's invisble, there aren't that many images of it floating around):
It strikes me that her Invisible Jetplane is a good metaphor for a well-equipped journey through the world of the possible. As you embrace the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life, you're going to have moments where you are going to have to stare into nothingness. Literally, there will be nothing there, and as a generative creator of future options, it is up to you to create something. If you're floating out above an abyss, it's good to be packing something to help ensure that you can get through the tough spots.
People who make it through the rough parts of a creative journey have an Invisble Jetplane of their own making, and it's called creative confidence. It's a set of tools you build for yourself, a personally tailored version of whatever design process you subscribe to, a way of working which you know will deliver results. It's certainly not about bravado or pumping yourself up. Not at all. Rather, it's about have the confidence to stop when the going is good, to celebrate when things break, to be able to listen and learn and test over and over in order to create a strong point of view about how things should be going forward — at least for now. And, as with Wonder Woman's jet, creative confidence is invisible, but it'll get you places, and people around you will notice what it can do, too. You can't see it, but you certainly can feel it when someone has it.
So where do you go to get your jetplane? If it were as easy as getting a degree or reading a book, everyone could do it. You certainly can't buy it, and it is not about credentials. The good news — at least for those of us who can't help but apply ourselves toward bringing cool stuff to life — is that it builds in strength with practice. As my friend Jon Winsor says, you have to ride a thousand waves before you truly get what it means to surf. It's the same for creative confidence, too: it's about practice and cycles. To grok it, do it. It's about getting miles under your belt.
