Drucker to Sophocles – Inspiration from Great Quotes
By Jack Lander
The late, great Peter Drucker
The best patent claims writers, poets and advertisement copy writers have in common the ability to reduce an otherwise long and confusing sentence to its essence.
Most of us have to use a lot of words to convey the same meaning. Yet we can enjoy the wit and wisdom of genius writers for a few dollars and have them for a lifetime.
Just yesterday I popped into my local Borders bookstore for a fix and a display in the checkout line grabbed me like the candy bars at the supermarket checkout grabs a child. My eyes settled on Random House’s new book, Quotationary.
But you’ve already got Bartlett’s, Encarta Quotations, Bloomsbury’s Treasury and two or three lesser works. (I’m thinking to myself here.) You don’t need this one, I thought to myself. Don’t buy it. You don’t have anymore shelf space. These thoughts were persuasive, but what the heck, for only $10 . . .
What’s this got to do with inventing? Quite a bit. For example, I came across this quote from Thomas Edison:
“If there is such a thing as luck, then I must be the most unlucky fellow in the world. I’ve never once made a lucky strike in all my life. When I get after something that I need, I start finding everything in the world that I don’t need – one damn thing after another. I find 99 things that I don’t need, and then it comes to 100, and that – at the very last – turns out to be what I had been looking for.”
The late, great Sophocles
Asked about the lab’s rules by a new employee, Edison also said:
“Hell, there ain’t no rules around here! We’re trying to accomplish somthin’.”
How about this from Thucydides, around 400 B.C. Great advice for a licensing agreement:
“The only sure basis for an alliance is for each party to be equally afraid of the
other.”
And George Bernard Shaw, who “invented” great plays, came up with this brief gem:
“Success covers a multitude of blunders.”
Rochefoucauld, in the 1600s, defined inventing when he said:
“It often happens that things come into the mind in a more finished form than
could have been achieved after much study.”
Many inventors experience this “coming into mind in finished form” in a reverie or even a dream. Elias Howe struggled to make a practical sewing machine, but all of his attempts failed until, in a dream, he saw the needle with its hole in the pointed tip. That, of course, was the secret to the lockstitch.
The German chemist Kekule saw the elusive benzene ring in a dream. And in an example of much less consequence, I saw the locking segments of my bike transmission patent in a kind of meditative state as I was driving leisurely along a Vermont road one autumn.
Of course, our dreams and reveries don’t occur in a vacuum. We must define the problem if our minds are to solve it. Which brings us to Erich Fromm, the psychologist and humanistic philosopher, who said:
“The capacity to be puzzled is . . . the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science.”
Is the “puzzle” implanted in words, or images or some other elusive form that we don’t yet understand – maybe all three?
How about this advice for those of us who develop an invention with the intent of producing it, and taking it to market. It’s from Mark Twain:
“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear.”
Along the same line is this from Euripides, the prolific Greek playwright, around 400 B.C.:
“To persevere, trusting in what hopes he has, is courage in the man. The coward
despairs.”
One of my favorites dates way back to my high-school days. I have never been able to trace its origins. If anyone knows, please tell me.
“I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say. Then, I have to say it over
again.”
That quote sums up prototyping. We’ve usually got to see the first physical model and play with it, like a child plays with her teddy bear, before we know what we really want.
My all-time favorite is from Peter Drucker, who, in my opinion, was the best philosopher and teacher of business who ever lived:
“It is better to do the right thing than to do things right.”
Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway, paraphrases Drucker with this:
“Management is doing things right, whereas leadership is doing the right thing.”
How many of us have patents on inventions that never made it to market? We did things right, but most likely we didn’t do the right thing. In our infatuation phase of inventing, we often shortcut market research. We put our heart, soul and treasure into the wrong invention.
Well, that was then and this is now. The Internet makes market research easy. It’s not foolproof, of course. But it’s much better than a swag (scientific wild-ass guess). For example, if you just came up with an invention for a new form of hair dryer, you’ll find 171 of them by keying in “hair dryer” on Amazon.com. Is your great idea among them?
But the only true test of our invention’s worth is selling it. That reminds me. Sophocles had something to say on the matter way back when:
“Knowledge must come through action; you can have no test which is not fanciful save by trial.”
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Editor’s note: This article appears in the January 2011 print edition.
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