Managing Creative People: Lessons in Leadership for the Ideas Economy

Chapter 3. Two guys in a garage

One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothin' can beat teamwork.

—Edward Abbey

Creativity is the production of novel and appropriate ideas by individuals or small groups.

—Teresa Amabile

The history of ideas teaches a very simple lesson: that two guys in a garage will beat a multi-million dollar corporation ninety-nine times out of a hundred.

Wozniak and Jobs, Hewlett and Packard, Brin and Page, Zennstrom and Friis, Lennon and MacCartney, Wieden + Kennedy, Smith and Wesson, Watson and Crick: these are the ones that spring instantly to mind. There are the loners, of course, the countless artists, writers, composers, programmers, philosophers and mathematicians pursuing their solitary dreams. And then the visionaries who attracted extraordinary disciples and galvanized them to share their purpose: architects, engineers, entrepreneurs – Brunelleschi, Brunel, Benjamin Franklin, Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Robert Oppenheimer, Tim Berners-Lee.

In just six years, between 1876 and 1882, Thomas Edison's Menlo Park Laboratory in New Jersey managed to invent the phonograph, the telephone carbon transmitter, improvements to the telegraph and, of course, electric lighting. Thousands of other mechanical and electrical patents came out of the same workshop in the same period.

There's a replica of the laboratory at the Henry Ford Museum in Greenfield Village, Detroit, which gives a good idea of how Edison and his colleagues ...