Why the Best Ideas Occur in the Shower

Why the Best Ideas Occur in the Shower

In On War, one of the first books on modern military strategy, Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz explained how Napoleon combined four crucial steps to determine the strategy for his first major military victory, Dugan said. Those steps include storing failed— and especially successful—examples from history, reaching a presence of mind free of all preconceptions, allowing the mind to make its own connections in a flash of insight, and resolving to execute the course of action despite potential resistance, he said. In the late 1970s, Steve Jobs of the fledgling Apple Computers essentially utilized the same process during a visit to Xerox Corporation, when executives demonstrated their “graphical user interface” application, the seed for Apple’s ground-breaking windows operating system, Dugan said. “I thought it was the best thing I had ever seen in my life,” Jobs says during the short business film Great Artists Steal, aired by Dugan during his talk. “Within 10 minutes it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this someday,” Jobs adds. Other examples of such “theft,” or innovative synthesis, of business ideas came when Henry Ford got the idea for the moving assembly line after visiting the Chicago stockyards and when Google’s founders launched their groundbreaking Internet search engine, Dugan said. The latter combined the existing Alta Vista www.altavista.com search engine, data mining algorithms they learned at Stanford University, the common academic ranking of professors by annual journal citings, and the innocuous posting of searchable ads on another Web site to create the for-profit Google, he said. “In a series of flashes of insight, they put together four things, none of which they invented,” Dugan said. “All four had existed before them. The combination was new and made them two very happy young men.”