The Problem With Geniuses

Jeff Bezos

With this week’s announcement that the Segway corporation will discontinue its namesake vehicle, I find myself struck by something important. Those of us old enough to remember the Segway’s launch in 1999, will remember the massive fanfare. Its backers, including Jeff Bezos, withheld what it actually did, spurring massive speculation. They told us it would revolutionize whatever it did. Then it came out, and it was… a scooter.

Capitalists, or more accurately “Capitalists,” want to ballyhoo the insights of business geniuses. We love celebrating Bezos, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, or Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who supposedly reinvented their particular industries by pioneering something that should’ve transformed our lives. But we celebrate them retrospectively, highlighting the good they’ve already accomplished. We call them geniuses, but in so doing, we predict the past.

We even have a name for that: “Disruptive Innovation.” Coined by Harvard business professor Clayton M. Christensen, Disruptive Innovation claims that true commercial revolution, like revolution in science, completely upturns anything which came before. The geniuses who create something truly new, who coincidentally always have massive bankrolls and teams of engineers supporting them, are to capitalism what Robespierre was to democracy

The Segway was touted as innovative, even subversive. My fellow science fiction aficionados got excited, wondering what Ray Bradbury whizz-bang we could expect. What we received, however, was slower than a car, more cumbersome than walking, harder to park than a bicycle, and almost as expensive as a down payment on a house. It took multiple functions and made them all more unpleasant. And for that, we got publicity comparable to another Star Wars film.

Steve Jobs

Contrast this brouhaha with the introduction of the iPhone. Its functions were never secret; Apple wanted to put the functionality of a computer onto a cellular phone. It seems pretty obvious now. While I admit having dragged my heels on smartphones, looking back, their success seems inevitable. It combines two activities people already do: calling their friends and dicking around on the Internet. It also made texting convenient for fat-fingered typists like me.

But notice two terms I used above: “looking back” and “seems inevitable.” This is a straightforward case of what I previously called predicting the past. We look at something which appears successful in hindsight, describe its success as obvious, and draw generalizations from the particular example. These generalizations seldom carry. As sociologist Duncan J. Watts writes, we don’t explain the success, we only describe it.

In my favorite example, American historian Jill Lepore writes that Clayton Christensen, the theorist behind Disruptive Innovation, asserted that the iPhone would tank, because it didn’t fill any existing market. We already had phones and computers, Christensen asserted; why combine them in an uncomfortable pocket brick? But by 2015, the Harvard Business Review, house magazine of Christensen’s school, called the iPhone “a sustaining innovation in the smartphone market.”

Rather than making reliable predictions from evidence, this model simply rewards the already well-rewarded. Steve Jobs, or more accurately his Apple engineering team, gambled on their slightly innovative technology, and won. Rather than calling them fortunate, business theorists call them geniuses, and assert how their success was inevitable. These engineers weren’t just industrious and lucky; they were insightful, even prophetic.

What about failed innovations, though? Consider technologies that stunk up the joint, including Google Glass, Microsoft Zune, and Solyndra. That’s saying nothing of technologies that were initially successful, but failed to stay relevant, like MySpace, BlackBerry, and AOL. Were the engineers and PR professionals behind these technologies inherently stupid? Or did they just guess wrong, where others guessed right? Duncan J. Watts and I have our theory.

Duncan J. Watts

These supposed geniuses, propped up by the multi-million-dollar rollout events which Steve Jobs and others made famous, and furthered by the hype machine that includes Bloomberg and CNBC, sell themselves as an ultimate product. If you’ll recall, when it came out that Steve Jobs was dying, market specialists wondered whether the company could continue without him. Because ultimately, Apple didn’t sell products; it sold the perception of bottled genius.

The engineers behind Segway failed to sell themselves. I couldn’t name any individual behind the Segway besides Bezos, and, twenty years later, it’s impossible to sort the Internet morass to find contemporary information. The Segway’s problem was never the Segway itself, proven by the fact that the company will persevere without its founding product. Its producers just never managed to sell themselves as portable geniuses like Bezos or Jobs.

It’s almost like being a genius has no relation to being smart.