in pieces of the action vaniver Bush engineer inventor educator and public face of government funded science offers an inside account of one of the most Innovative research and development ecosystems of the 20th century as the architect and administrator of an R&D
pipeline that efficiently coordinated the work of Civilian scientists and the military during World War II he was Central to catalyzing the development of radar and the proximity fuse the mass production of penicillin and the initiation of the Manhattan Project pieces of the action offers his hard one
lessons on how to operate and manage effectively within complex organizations build Bridges between people and disciplines and drive ambitious unprecedented programs to fruition originally published in 1970 this updated Edition includes a forward from Ben Reinhardt that contextualizes the
lessons pieces of the action can offer to contemporary readers these these lessons include that change depends both on heroic individuals and effective organizations that a Leader's job is one of coordination and that the path from idea to Innovation is a long and winding
one inextricably bound to those involved those enduring figures who have a piece of the action that is a description of the book that I'm going to talk to you about today which is pieces of the action and it was written by Van ever Bush so stripe the payments company
actually started their own publishing Division and what they're doing is They're bringing back these lesser known and sometimes out of print or hard to find books and they're updating them and then publishing them so I'm going to leave a link to the website that I was just reading off of that came from uh
straight press's product description of the book that I'm holding in my hand it's well worth checking out all the books that they published are on this idea of ideas for progress but they are also some of the most beautiful books that I've ever come across so I have
this book I ordered another book or I have another book called The Dream Machine which eventually will turn into a podcast in the future and then I just ordered another one of uh strap press's books which is the making of the Prince of Persia and I'll leave all those links
down below of course so I this is the second book that I've read about van ibush this is from his perspective he wrote the words when he was 80 years old there have been something like 10 or 15 books over the years that I've read to completion and I never made podcasts on
and one of those books was a biography of vanie bush it's called endless Frontier vanie Bush engineer of the American Century written by G Pascal Zachary that book is excellent the quality is not why I didn't turn it into a podcast is because vaniver bush is such an important and impressive figure
that I didn't feel comfortable making a podcast on because I didn't think I actually understood how impactful he was even though he appears so I've probably read if you read any book on let's say post World War II and for this podcast I probably read you know 50 books on that
because of the giant wealth explosion that occurred after World War II every single one of those books will mention vanie Bush so now that I've spent time reading Bush's own words and and then going back and rereading all of my highlights from endless Frontier I feel
I'll have a way better understanding of who Bush was as a person and why some of his ideas are so important that stripe would feel the need to invest money and reprint his very hard toin autobiography so with that I want to jump into the forward of the book The forward of the
book is written by Ben Reinhardt and so Ben writes the forward of the book from a fantastic perspective he's like this is what I got out of reading this book and so he starts off right away this is why van Bush everybody called him van by the way because I couldn't pronounce his
first name this is why van Bush should be studied anybody who is serious about creating enduring change realizes that it's critical to understand the origins of the institutions that shape our world any exploration of the institutions that shape how we do research generate
discoveries create inventions and turn ideas into Innovations inevitably leads back to Van Bush that is a hell of a statement why does he say that because he was the conceptual architect of what we now call The Innovation pipeline in which basic research leads to applied
research which is then commercialized and that last part is exact there's a ton of Engineers ton of scientists that will read this book but it's why Founders should be studying van Bush and why so many of the founders that you and I have studied on this podcast at least
my guess would be 50 of them their lives interacted with bushes and to illustrate this point I'm going to pull out another quote that comes from the other book called The endless Frontier and it says no American has had greater influence in the growth of Science and Technology
than van ever Bush back to pieces of the action to this day the ideas bearing Bush's fingerprints that emerged in this time exert a massive influence on Research institutions around the world both in science and technology and then Ben repeats his point on why you should
be studying push and really a main thesis behind the entire the existence of this podcast right you need to understand the origins of things that you want to change some digging led me to this book pieces of action which bush had written near the end of his life its subtitle this is a fantastic subtitle I
wonder why stripe doesn't include it in any of the printing of the book because it's it's fantastic so it says uh its subtitle was especially promising the personal record of 60 event filled years by the distinguished scientist who took an active and decisive part in shaping
them and so that's why I'm heavily going to encourage you to order this book because when you pick it up and you read it you're reading the words of an 80 y- old genius one of the most formidable and accomplished people that have ever lived and all he's doing in like 300
pages is laying out what he learned over his six decade career and so let's go back to Ben discovering the book for the first time he says the book was out of print and the internet was devoid of any additional context I felt like I had discovered a secret powerful buried
Relic from another time pieces of the action is well worth reading and rereading it provides an inside view of arguably some of the most effective people and processes in history from someone who played a pivotal role and his next sentence is something I noticed as well after I finished reading the
book all of this is rendered at a level of detail that could only come from someone who was in the room where it happened we'll go into more detail later but like vanever bush is like the force Gump of World War II in science technology he like he said every single
important thing that happens he's there uh so it says Bush packs in Timeless lessons for leaders and technologists and of course for Founders uh Bush's life was defined by change this is wild check this out uh his life was defined by change it neatly bracketed the creation of the world we live in today a
quick list of things that did not exist when he was born in 1890 and which had become mainstream by his death in 1974 it includes diesel engines airplanes he winds up having dinner spends an entire night with Orville Wright from the wri brothers we're going to talk about that later
it's it's so fantastic I absolutely love it uh so it says diesel engines airplanes antibiotic drugs space flight the transistor integrated circuits plumbing and electrical systems for most of the United States email and arpanet the network of Link computers that would
become the internet and this has Ben's punchline and absolutely fantastic the world in which Bush wrote pieces of the action was unimaginable when he was born and then I just have one sentence I'm going to have to sh fit in here that really has nothing to do with the other narrative
other than I try to bring up Claude Shannon whenever I can he advised a number of graduate students who would them who would themselves go on to have illustrious careers including Claude Shannon so I read Claude Shannon's biography written by my friend Jimmy
Sony that's all the way back on Founders number 95 if you have not listened to that episode listen to it after you're done with this one and the reason this is important is because van bush is the first person to see Claude Shannon for who he was which was a near Universal
genius and he picked up on that when Claude was like 21 or 22 years old absolutely incredible so then he continues all the people that bush inspired this guy dog Douglas engelbart I have a book on him coming very soon um it's actually sitting underneath my feet right now he read bushes bushes has a
bunch of these seminal like essays he wrote one of them is called as we may think so it says I would call as we may think a resounding success Douglas engelbart explicitly cited it as the inspiration for the work that led to his mother of all demos which you can
actually watch on YouTube which in turn laid out the agenda for almost every aspect of the personal Computing environments that now pervade our lives that is not hyperbolic it's saying hey Bush inspired engelbart engelbart inspired us all what do I mean on that so all the way back on 157 I read Walter
rixon's book The innovators how a group of hackers Geniuses and Geeks created the digital Revolution okay so that's that's episode 157 if you Haven listen to it there was a entire section on these people that played uh really important roles in the foundation of the
modern technology industry as we think of it okay Douglas is in there and they have a hell of a statement about Douglas and I'll go into more detail when I actually do the biography of Douglas I just want to read you this quote that comes from the innovators it's by Alan K
and it's why you and I have to study this guy says I don't know what Silicon Valley will do when it runs out of Doug's ideas some of these ideas include onscreen Graphics multiple windows on a screen digital publishing blog likee journals Wiki like collabor ations document sharing email instant messaging
hypertext linking Skype like video conferencing and the formatting of documents in other words the world that you and I live in today it is incredible and it will never cease to amaze me how generations of humans Inspire the Next Generation and this chain of inspiration
literally changes and forms the world that future Generations inhabit this incredible okay let's go back to this this is again I'm I'm skipping over I'm only pulling out a couple highlights from the forward obviously because I want to get into into as much of Bush's own words as
possible and you'll see why wait till we get into his personality it's wild uh the reason to study bush is because he was effective so it says the research organizations that he led were shockingly effective explanation point we continue to site so many World War II
era anecdotes about what effective research and development looks like from radar to the Manhattan Project to penicillin for a reason and then Ben picks up on this phenomenon that you and I have seen over and over again that you can lo like you can use the past success
as inspiration so you know there's some things that are relevant to the day that the book was written in where you have where like bush is Bush and the people in the the world at that time were deeply concerned with like the same chronic problems that you see a lot of people like crime and waste and oh my
God is the world going to be overpopulated but the lesson that Ben took that that Ben saw that van took from history was a powerful one he says the fact that old threats had been declawed encourages me to share Bush's optimism that we can defeat them especially consider considering that he
in turn based his optimism on his Vantage Point looking at Old threats and another way to think about what he's saying there is like van understood that people in history had these worries they were concerned they were like insurmountable problems they Ed their
intelligence and their technological advancements to solve these problems we can do so we can do the exact same thing for the problems that we are facing and then bush is an advocate so he's going to wind up being very close friends with Edwin land who I refuse to and will
never shut up about and I think my constant I always say reputation is persuasive it's working because I get a ton of messages now saying hey I didn't know who Edwin L was thank you so much I got a text actually from another founder the other day who said you have
completely pilled me on Edwin Land by the way I cannot stop researching the guy but what Bush and L had in in common is that they believed in the power of the individual and so Bush points out the Tipping points often rest with far seeing being energetic individuals we
can be those individuals and then just a few more things before we get into Bush's own words this I really like because one thing I understand about reading all these biographies that we don't see things as they are we see them as we are and so he says a beautiful thing about the book not having a
precise thesis is that we will each notice different things one of the elements I especially appreciated was how Bush's personality comes through relentlessly curious shockingly cheeky and quietly humble two things jump out to me about that sentence Ben may be the only person
to ever describe van Bush as humble and the second part is shockingly cheeky that's certainly one way to put it you're going to notice his personality he he has a bite to him he likes to fight and he is super smart and he knows that he's super smart Bush's aggressive
nature shines through in the words that he uses another thing that's cool about the book is that he references 237 historical figures and then in the book there's first of all there's footnotes so when he mentioned somebody he'll number it and then you can go to the back because he has you know I don't
know 40 pages actually 27 pages with like paragraph descriptions of who this person was and why they're important and so it says he devotes over two dozen pages of the book not to himself but to biographical notes on some 200 plus people who played important roles and
whom he worried might be lost to history and then this is the last part and maybe the most important part of the forward because this is exactly how I feel like books are a way to gain mentors and historical context and he says I went into this book with little more than a
name and came out with the closest thing to a mentor someone you've never met can be this book hints at powerful artifacts of the past that we can use to build the World of Tomorrow and with that we'll go to Van Bush's own words he has a very short preface that he wrote In the book
it's three paragraphs I'm going to pull out the last sentence because it's absolutely Fant fantastic we are not the first to face problems and as we Face them we can hold our heads high in such Spirit was this book written and so his first chapter is titled 60 years which
is how long his career has lasted and he says a lot has happened in the last 60 years today as I write I find people are worried what do we worry about well just about everything and so to me what he's really saying in this section is that history doesn't repeat human nature does
I remind myself uh the no life myself is I remind myself of this all the time why are you worrying David this is not unique to your life experience youth has always been in rebellion and should be if Society is not to become Static and then he says something that was true in
1970 that you see still here today respect for us as a country has overseas has dwindled uh yet as I look back we have always been worried about something and often about the same things that we worry about now that is so important such an important observation from studying history let's let's read it
again as I look back we have always been worried about something and often about the same things that we worry about now and then he's going to repeat things that you hear people say today that they told him when he was young and he was young in like the 1940s this I think
1945 is when he wrote uh this first essay and this is going to sound again a lot like his friend Edwin land so it says I remember when I was told that the frontier had been occupied that all of man's wants and needs have been met I was also told that all industry was now
in the hands of a few great companies meaning great big companies Monopoly right and that no innovator could break their grip so that's what they're telling a young van Bush and but he's saying he like in my own lifetime I've it's been proven that this is not true just like it's not true today today
there are thousands of small companies making money on new things right in the shadow of the Giants some of them make the same sort of stir as Xerox or Polaroid or IBM all of which are making products that were unheard of when I was young and then he has a line that's
really important that I've already mentioned one time and he says there will be no ordered account of my life in this book this is considered his autobiography but it leaves out a ton about his personal life he's going to talk about his dad and in many ways his dad was a hero to him but the way I
think about the book and the way I want to talk to you about is like listen we're just getting together right now and we're going to have this 80-year-old genius that's had one of the most unique life experiences of any human that ever lived and he's going to sit here and say
hey this is what I went through this is what I learned about it this may be helpful in your Journey cuz he's at the end of his life he dies four years from now and he's unfortunately in very poor health and kind of lost his Spirit shortly after that he he published this
book and so way I think about it's like these are the ideas that were useful for my life my life is at the end I'm documenting them so future Generations it may help you with your journey as you progress through your life and so some of this is just random highlights that I
thought hey this is really smart I want to remember it and if I want to remember it I might as well tell you and one of the main themes that he talks about over and over again is the important of education and how he defines it is fantastic so he said Learned Hand and
that's the guy's actual name he's actually a judge he was a US circuit court judge so van bush is about to to quote from him so he said Learned Hand remarked that while both men and monkeys are curious and monkey around man remembers and transmits his experiences to the Next Generation which is exactly
what bush is doing right and the monkey does not so in the end man keeps the monkey in a cage the writing in this book is so crisp like I I hope you buy it this is an act a fantastic paragraph the essence and to me this is the end of the paragraph to me he is really
defining what he like his definition of Education right the essence of civilization is the transmission of the findings of each generation to the next and then he's going to talk about this process you and I are going to fit into this group Cent you and I fit into this
group currently one day we will be the older generation transmitting all that we learned to the Next Generation but right now we're the many young people so he says many young men like to get the oldsters talking provided the talk helps them pick up a better grasp of human
nature to discern neat ways around obstacles and to realize how the formal relations of men are intertwined with personal relations I'm not done with the paragraph I want to pause there so he saying why are young people learning from old people because they're hoping to learn something that helps them
through life we mean you just covered that right but this idea is something he repeats over and over again he thinks of him primarily himself primarily as an engineer and so something he's also going to repeat is that it's not good enough just to have great uh to build
Great Inventions to grow great products great research organizations you have to understand the ways of men and that is the first hint that he gives us that hey you need to realize that formal relations of men what we think as professional relationships are actually
intertwined with the personal relationships behind the professional relationships and he'll Mark time and time again how malleable the world is when you have a personal relationship with somebody in power and that learning how to cultivate these relationships is fundamental to having to to actually
achieving the goal that you have and so somebody that he wind up having a professional relationship and then had to learn how to build a fundamentally profound personal relationship was FDR and he says listen I didn't like FDR's political theories or his policies but
that was irrelevant I had to build a personal relationship with him because we were working together and he was the person in charge he could make me just on the basis of our personal leip he could make me effective or ineffective so given those that series of choices
what do you do you build that personal relationship that is a main theme that I picked up on in the book so let's go back to this paragraph because the second half of the paragraph is really exactly why Founders exists and why you and I get together and go over these books right it may well be worthwhile to
recite a few events here and there with with the thought that through them meaning his experiences some chap I love that he calls everybody a chap by the way some chap coming along a similar Road May learn something not be taught but learn something that will ease his
journey and then I have to include one sentence because you might get to the end of this podcast like David why didn't you talk about the manhatt project why didn't you talk about the development of radar which is what van bush is you know he's tied to these things and his point is like listen
nothing in this book I'm going to cover if it had if it's been covered exhaustively and extensively elsewhere so he says I do not review in any detail the drive towards control of the Adam or the birth of radar for those have been described many times and then from here
we just have like random sentences or thoughts and in some cases they might turn in aphorisms into your brain that are just going to be helpful that I thought were interesting this is just a great line we cannot help the weak unless we are strong therefore much of this book will be devoted to how we can
keep our business rolling in the right direction he wants you to be on an individual basis and on a country level rich and strong and smart so he's con conly talking about using technology to grow the size of the economy another random piece of advice humans are always
going to claim to know things that they can't or they don't know and so at this point in history they're saying Hey by the year 2000 there's going to be so many people we're not going to be able to feed them and this is what van said about that I hear that by the year 2000
there will be so many people on Earth that they can't possibly be fed I don't believe it and he uses the basis of not believing that is the fact that this these predicted disasters throughout human history have been over come through intelligence and Innovation and then we get to a point where he has
explicit advice for us really think about this next paragraph is like this is what van Bush wants us to do and this is why if you're going to pick a mentor if you're going to pick up a book in hopes of getting a mentor he's one of the best people you can actually use to
serve that function in your life because he holds you to a very high standard we need a Revival of the essence of the old Pioneer spirit that conquered the forests and the plains that looked at its difficulties with a steady eye labored and fought and left its thinking
and its Philosophy for later and quieter times this is not a call for optimism it is a call for determination a lot of the book has to do with what's taking place in World War II he's seeing the what what what is an effective organization what is an Effective Government what is an
effective leadership and what is not and this he's about to talk about on a country level or maybe even on organization level I think it applies for your the purposes of you and I on a company level there are two primary ways in which to lose a battle or a campaign
assuming nearly equal antagonists one is to have confused lines of authority and so he repeats that over and over again you have to have one person in charge and everybody else has to know that they're in charge I think he uses an example of like uh Truman President Truman doing this effectively
later where they're having like a cabinet meeting and and one of the cabinet members like Hey we're going to you know we're seeking consensus it's like no The Truman Truman's like no no no that's not what we're doing at all you guys are here to give me advice but I get to make the decision and I will
make the decision this is not oh there's 10 of us and we have to get to six of us to agree and so bush is going to use examples over and over again in that he's like you cannot have confused lines of authority and says the other is to have a top this is how you lose is to
have a top Commander with poor judgment history is full of examples and so he used the example a few times in the book even if you assume the Germans and the Americans were equal military might the Germans were going to lose because they had Hitler in charge you had a top
Commander with extremely poor judgment and most likely High out of his mind by the way and one example of his poor judgment that bush uses and that you and I have talked about in the past podcast is the fact that a lot of the the scientific achievements in the world
happening at this time came from Jewish scientists and physicists and they and Hitler expelled them out of the country and many of their ideas flowed to the Allies so let's go over that real quick you need the two ways you can that you're going to lose is you have
confused lines of authority that's number one and the other is you have the top Commander with poor judgment and so then he talks about telling a story about how organizations kind of get bureaucratic and they move really slow and even during times of War you had overcome this where you had better
technology so he tells the story of something called like the oron gun and the different countries adopted this Superior technology different times and that the difference was the individual and so I'm just going to give you the punchline here because the story goes on
for a long time but it says it is Pleasant to turn to situations where conservatism or lethargy was overcome by farseeing energetic individuals amen the way I think about what he's talking about there is like listen can this roadblock right was overcome by a person
one person a farseeing and energetic in individual this reminds me of what my friend Sam hinky says one of the best lines I've ever heard him say is that people are really a power law and that the best ones can change everything and so then bush is describing what the
State of Affairs was pre before America jumps into the war and really you could think about this is the problem you know he's working hand inand he's coordinating private engineering and science with the government right so the way you think about this paragraph is this is the problem that he had to solve
we were agreed that the war was bound to break out into an intense struggle that America was sure to get into it one way or another sooner or later and that it would be highly technical struggle and that we were by no means prepared in this regard and most importantly that
the military system had it existed and as it had operated during World War I would never fully produce the new instruments that we would certainly need so other words how do we win a highly technical War we do it with engineering Innovation and science so then looking
back after the war he's like okay well who actually made the technical contributions during World War II and you can think about it like who makes the actual innovations that turn into products today and so he says I had plenty to do second I made no technical contribution whatsoever to the war
effort not a single technical idea of mine ever amounted to Shucks at times I have been called an atomic scientist this is Hil this is hilarious this is the first indication of this cheeky you know that's one way to put it irreverent personality that bush had it would be
fully as accurate to call me a child psychologist the key now he's going to tell us where the actual technical ideas came from the key ideas arose in the special groups that were working for months and years with the problems and they arose from nowhere else so you can
think of half the book as hey how do you make yourself into a formidable individual and then formidable IND individuals to be truly effective they have to know how to build organizations that can actually function and so he's going to go back and forth between those two messages this is the first example I
wrote companies are benevolent dictatorships and then Jeff bezos's idea that slow decision-making can actually push away good people which I'll get to there this is now Bush talking there should never be throughout an organization any doubt as to where Authority for making decisions resides
or any doubt that they will be promptly made and then he gives us an example and then you'll see his personality I remember one time when a section walked into my office and resigned as a body so a group of people okay so I just told them one does not resign in a time of
War you chaps get the hell out of here and get back to work and I will look into it they did and I did and so his point being they knew that he was the one in charge Jeff Bezos has this idea so he says okay first of all you have there can be no doubt they have to know
where the Authority for making decision lies right and then not only that if you once you have the decision you cannot make decisions slowly this is something that Jeff basos realized in building Amazon and he has this this uh this comes from the book inent and wander
it's uh number 155 episode 155 of Founders which is all of Jeff Basil's shareholder letters but also transcripts of his speeches it's a fantastic book if you don't have it already it ordered it right away and then of course listen to episode 155 but this is Jeff Bezos on
why slow decision-making repels a players and Jeff says you can drive great people by you can drive away great people by making the speed of decision- making really slow why would great people stay in an organization where they can't get things done they look around after a while and they're like
look I love the mission but I can't get my job done because our speed of decision making is too slow and then another piece of advice has demonstrated through his interaction with FDR and he thought that FDR was one of the best bosses you could ever have even if he
didn't like his politics and he said I told FDR that he had handed me a hot potato and I might have to go bump some heads together he said you go ahead and bump them and I'm going to back you up I had been appalled he's talking about previously before I had a personal relationship with FDR I had been
appalled at some of FDR's political theory and practice but when war came I took the attitude that loyalty to the chief must be absolute and untarnished that is the get rid of anyone that is not loyal to you and your company Mission at part of the advice and he talks about why he thought FDR
was a great leader he gave me a tough job to do never interfere with me and always back me up in a pinch what more more could one ask so the idea is you give your team a tough job to do you don't interfere with them you actually allow them to do the job you hir them to
do and then you always back them up when need be and the end result is bush had Fierce loyalty to FDR then he talks about how do you deal with personal biases and personal quirks of humanity and in so one case like you have this older generation that had come from
World War I now they're they're still around during World War II and they had a mistaken view in in Bush's eyes of what an engineer actually does so the way he gets around that is he renames his engineers he is leading a group of Engineers and he just calls him scientists to get around this personal
human bias among older military men the engineer was at first regarded as a thinly disguised salesman and hence they kept them at arms length in this mistaken view the engineer was a kind of second class citizen compared to the scientist this is this is the way things
were at first in our relations with the military in our war effort so all of my Personnel were promptly renamed scientists and the result was now now the military man is like oh okay I may the same exact person goes to present to the the the people in charge of the military and they say hey I'm an
engineer and they're dismissed that same person is now a scientist and they're listen to so then he has an entire chapter on dedicated to getting around stumbling blocks right so anything that gets in the way of what you're trying to achieve on an individual or an
organizational uh level I'm going to read the last sentence of this paragraph uh at the beginning because I think it is actually really important to understand he's telling us how to get around these stumbling blocks and he says the justif a of what you're doing okay is the importance of the work and
the depth of one's commitment to it so that's how this ends this is how it begins when when he knows that stumbling blocks may get in the way of a joint effort in which he is engaged a man who is light on his feet tries to anticipate them to figure out where they may arise
and why and how best to evade them this means that he tries to figure out strategies to get them out of the way so that the work can go ahead planning strategy means taking into account the personal quirks of some individual who almost always is the source of the
blockade so he says usually you could trace these blocks these people that are getting in your way down to a single individual uh it says you take into account the personal quirks of some individual who almost always is the source of the blockade and devise ways to anull his blockade by disarming him
by avoiding him or by necessary knocking him on the head figuratively of course the justification for your actions is the importance of the word work and the depth of your commitment to it few pages later just one line I want to pull out here this is very similar to how Steve
Jobs organized apple and Bush says rigid lines of authority do not produce the best Innovations when I just reread for episode 265 I read becoming Steve Jobs the evolution of a reckless upstart into a Visionary leader uh it's biography of Steve Jobs that I've read now for the
second time I came across this thing I missed the first time and that's Steve the synthesizer and so it says research project projects he's talking inside Apple now right so Bush just told us hey rigid lines of authority don't produce the best Innovations research projects
flowered in pockets all around the company many of them without Steve's blessing or even awareness they would come to Steve's attention only if one of his key managers decided that the project or technology showed real potential in that case Steve would check it out and the information he would
glean would go into the learning machine that was was his brain sometimes that's where it would sit and nothing would happen sometimes on the other hand he'd concoct a way to combine it with something else that he'd seen or perhaps to twist it in a way to benefit an
entirely different project allog together this was one of his great talents the ability to synthesize separate developments and Technologies into something previously unimaginable and I think a way to summarize what's taking place in that Steve Jobs biography is using the words of Van Bush
rigid lines of authority do not produce the best Innovations and so then he's got a great story about some of the people that he works with I think this guy actually reports to him and the note I myself on this page is be like putam this guy's fantastic so it says now
putam he was a go-getter in fact so much so much so that I had occasional demands from the more unadventurous individuals in our or organization that putam Be Tamed or suppressed demands which of course never budged me putam had some of the characteristics of the best type of
promoter in Industry he was well-liked by men with lots of drive and often disliked by those with less what a great line he was well-liked by men with lots of drive and often disliked by those with less that brought to mind one of my favorite books I've ever read for the podcast was actually
his biography on Joseph Pitzer uh the guy that the Pitzer prize is named after it's episode 135 if you haven't um listened to yet but in the early days of his career when he's starting out the people that he worked with didn't like him because he outworked him so much and
there's a great line in that book that I have saved on my phone and it's describing a young Joseph Pitzer and it says he was so industrious that he became a positive annoyance to others who felt less inclined to work be like putam be like Pulitzer and then I want
to give you an illustration of his personality in that bush is not backing down he is going to fight you and so he gets into a lot of Rose which he that's the term he uses for fight uh they get he gets into good rose is the way he says it uh so he gets into a fight with
actually the Admiral the head admiral of the Navy and so he's describing a typical typical interaction that he had with Admiral King and he says characteristically our discussion opened as follows king would scowl and say I have agreed to meet with you but this is a military question and it must be
decided on a military basis to which you can hardly contribute so I told him it is a combined military and Technical question and on the latter you are a babe in arms and not entitled to an opinion this was a good start to our discussion and then we see a little bit
of his ego this is why I said I don't think anybody would actually describe him as is humble in fact some of the people that worked with him and fought with him the most why up respecting him said that he was a vain man a very very vain man but he had a right to be Vain
and so bush is talking about the role he was playing he's like listen my rank he didn't say listen that was me he said my rank in the hierarchy of war was never defined but it certainly was not minor and so Alfred Lee Lumis who I read a biography about it was back on Founders
143 Alfred L Lumis is probably the most interesting man that most people don't know about he wind up making a entire fortune on Wall Street and then retiring with a bag full of money right after the Depression and opening this like Palace of science that is called Tuxedo Park so
that's what the entire book is about it's it's episode 143 and he played a role in in developing technology and science that was uh that was used by the Allies in World War II and he also happened to be the cousin of the Secretary of War who had FDR's ear so anyways the reason I bring this up to
you is because I don't think that Bush was just being arrogant when he says listen just because my my role in the war was not my like my hierarchy was never accurately defined doesn't mean it was minor because Alfred Lee Lumis is on record saying hey out of every single
American that if they died their death would cause the greatest setback to the American war effort in World War II number one is FDR and he says van Bush would be second or third and so then he has an entire chapter where he he puts people into categories of this thing
called Tyro an amateur and a professional this is one of the this this is one of the longer highlights actually this is very fascinating I think you'll like this this chapter has to do with tyros amateurs and professionals and it is necessary to Divine Define the terms as I use them
here the Tyro is a freewheeler in an organization he also got this name because the Romans would would call a new recruit a Tyro okay the Tyro is a freewheeler in an organization who gums up the word he hates tyros I should tell you that before he describes them who
gums up the works because of his arrogant ignorance often because he files Authority that does not belong to him he operates because his boss doesn't know what he is doing or knows and doesn't care he can throw any organization into confusion so that is why he hat hates tyros his breed should
be exterminated for the good of society and then he makes the point that if you've worked in a complex organization you've run into this type of person everyone who has ever worked in a complex pyramid organization recognizes that there occasionally appears somewhere on the ladder of authority a
dumb cluck who had to be circumvented if there's to be any progress whatsoever so that is the Tyro then he's going to Define what he feels as an amateur and a professional and obviously you and I I think are striving to be professionals by this definition the amateur is a far
different breed of cat he is operating in a field in which he is at first in ignorance but he can learn and he often does and then he can become a professional and a professional is a master of his craft and then he makes the point to run an effective organization you might have masters of
your craft of their craft working for you you may never Master it to the level they will but if you're a good Jud if one you're doing the the necessary research so so you can actually understand what they're doing even if it's level below theirs you can get
ahead by being an effective judge of the quality of the individual and their level of talent so I'm just going to read this whole paragraph to you because I thought it was fantastic a man of intelligence and only such will fill the need so he's like listen if you're not
smart don't even attempt to do this because you're not going to be able to so a man of intelligence and only such will fit the need can become well acquainted with a subject in a surprisingly short time if he puts his mind to it this is not to master it but to arrive at a point where he speaks the
language and can judge whether a proposal before him has been thought through if a man is a good judge of men he can go far on that skill alone then he's got good advice for leaders that you have to control your emotions you should not be showing your emotions to
the outside I made plenty of mistakes and the worst one was that I got mad it is all right to get mad and is all wrong to show it I showed it so in this book he mentions a bunch of people that I've done past podcast on and I'll leave in the show notes on your podcast player
and also at Founders podcast.com I'll leave anybody he mentions that I've done a podcast on I'll leave the name and the episode number one of them is Jay Robert Oppenheimer and he wanted he actually spoke about him quite a bit because he thought that the way he was treated
after the war was disgraceful and so he describes Oppenheimer he says as an example of an able man's genius and adaptability I turned to Robert Oppenheimer and the reason I select him among a thousand will be clear to all his friends he did a grand job for us and after the war we treated him
shamefully his was a profoundly complex character a character in fact which could be analyzed only by one who knew him well and who was equally profound certainly many of his fellow citizens failed to understand him and then this takes a surprising turn so he says so my
comment will be brief I simply record a poem which he recited to me two nights before Alamo Gordo so he's referencing the first ever explosion of the atomic bomb and this is the poem that Oppenheimer is reading to Bush two days before this happens in battle in the forest at the precipice in the mountains
on the dark great sea in the midst of javelins and arrows in sleep in confusion in the depths of Shame The Good Deeds a man has done before defend him and then he has an entire chapter on inventions and inventors and the way I think about bush is he's an ally and an
evangelist for entrepreneurship and so next to this sentence I just wrote amen we need to Pioneer by creating new things new small companies and new ways of competing into international trade and then he goes into why it's so important and why it's so difficult industrial progress is essential if the
nation is to be strong and Industrial progress in no small measure depends upon the creative Ingenuity of individuals who can generate new ideas the whole history of the United States has been marked by that fact from the days of Benjamin Franklin or Eli Whitney to our own but then Nate here's the
problem but the nature of inventors and inventions is not well understood that is that was the case in 1970 when he's writing this or 1970s when he's writing this to and it's still the case today by the nature of there's really no formula for it if you really think about what
what what the problem is the nature of inventors and inventions is not well understood difficulty is often encountered in bringing an invention into production and use and maybe you could even re that sentence that difficulty is always encountered it's not often it's always encountered in
bringing a new idea into production and use Industries can get bogged down and stagnate and so to ensure that things move that things move forward the rise of small independent companies is essential and on the next page he continues to expound on this idea and I
wrote holy this is good and so Bush writes an invention has some of the characteristics of a poem it is said that a poet May derive real joy out of making a poem even if it's never published even if he does not recite it to his friends even if it is not a very
good poem no no doubt one has to be a poet to understand this and so for our purposes one has to be a founder or at least half founder mentality to understand this in the same way an inventor can derive real satisfaction out of making an invention even if he never expects to make a nickel out of it
even if he knows it's a bit foolish provided he feels it involves Ingenuity and insight an inventor invents because he cannot help it and also because he gets quiet fun out of doing so sometimes he even makes money at it but not by himself one has to be an inventor to
understand this that may be my favorite paragraph in the book and then he goes right into this night that he has with oral rights so he's talking about he starts out he says Hey listen an invention has some of the characteristics of a poem and to understand that you have to be a poet
then he talks then he he ties that idea to why a PO a poem is is similar to an invention and then to understand that you have to be an inventor and then he says hey guess what I'm an inventor and so it was right and we're having dinner and this is what happened one evening in
Dayton I dined alone with oral Wright during a long evening we discussed inventions we had made that had never amounted to anything he took me up to his attic and showed me models of various weird gadgets I had plenty of similar efforts to tell him about neither of us would have thus spilled
things except step to a fellow practitioner one who had enjoyed the Elation of creation and who damn that's another good line one who enjoyed the Elation of creation and who knew that such Elation is to a true devotee independent of practical results so it is also I understand with poets I'm
going to leave that entire two paragraphs in the show notes I think you should copy and keep it though that's fantastic then he spends a lot of time talking about like where where does innovation occur and why do we see it constantly occurring from outside and so he says in
an industry that has become closely standardized where nearly all competing companies are comfortably making profits minor improvements can readily be introduced but major improvements are up against the stone wall the prosperous company sees no need to change the
borderline company cannot afford the cost and so the example I always use for this is think about the incentives when James Dyson this is episode 200 I think I tell the story on uh when James Dyson invents the world's first bagless vacuum cleaner he initially tries to sell his
invention to the companies that are currently making that at the time were making $500 million a year selling vacuum bags and then he couldn't understand he's like why don't you want to buy my new Superior invention it's a better vacuum cleaner and all he had to think about was their incentives because
if they bought your vacuum cleaner then they can't make $500 million a year selling bags and so then Bush continues his point that this trend is pronounced in maturing Industries and he says it is also true that in the young industry there are usually plenty of courageous
Pioneers he loves that word Pioneers there are usually plenty of courageous Pioneers in the old industry tends to go to sleep I mentioned on a past episode a few I don't even remember which one recently in the last like month or so that uh when I was reading Mark Andre's
200 Page blog archive uh all the way back on Founders number 50 that he has this great herisk on deciding on what industry you should work in and he says when picking an industry to enter my favorite rule of thumb is this pick an industry where the founders of the industry which is the
founders of the important companies in the industry are still alive and actively involved bush is saying something similar here that old industry tends to go to sleep there's not the new you're not going to find a lot of courageous young Pioneers in Old Industries and since he's talking about
inventing and inventors he's saying Hey listen being an inventor is not enough and you know we understand this because Founders have to learn this if you're a successful founder you've already learned what he's about to tell tell us here the point is that an invention is
valueless unless it is joined with a number of other accomplishments promotion financing development engineering marketing and so on if the independent inventor believes otherwise his invention will turn out to be a liability so Bush doesn't spend too much
time the fact that he helped co-found Ron which wind up being a giant company that lasted almost 100 years but he does talk about some time like he's working at this thing called amrad amrad was the American radio and research Corporation out of amrad and some of the work that
he was doing at the time comes this invention of these radio tubes that invention and the formation of the company is what makes Bush wealthy later on but I just want to point he doesn't really talk about that too much in the book um but I want to point out something that he discovered when he was
a young researcher at amrat and it's this very unusual way to interview somebody for a job interview and his interview process is like hey I can't figure something out I have a problem if you could solve it you can get hired it's actually pretty smart at amrad I
hired a young physicist from Texas named CG Smith the way I hired him is interesting an interview of that sort like a job interview of that sort is always likely to be on an artificial basis and somewhat embarrassing so I discussed with him a technical point on which then I was genuinely puzzled the
next day he came in with a neat solution and so I hired him at once I think that's actually way better than a normal job interview like I actually like that idea a lot it's like hey I got this problem I can't solve the company that I'm working with or working for needs
this solution you want a job solve the problem I love that idea and then later on he's talking about Alexander gbell and the invention of the telephone he goes into talks about Thomas Edison but he makes the point like you may have one individual that we know everybody knows
Belle's name but for Belle to actually achieve what like to bring his invention to to Market and to make it actually useful so that it could benefit people right you need all these people you never hear of and so he continues this like he's like preaching this Gospel of
hey we need industrial progress and to have industrial progress you need industrial pioneers and some of them you're going to know their name of and some of them you won't but they should be celebrated and so he talks about like why do I keep bringing up it recited
because it would be well if people recognize the debt that Society owes to the quiet workers whom we never hear of especially those who are LED on by their curiosity and their desire to explore with very little thought about a claim or Fortune it would also be well if people in this country generally
regarded with more respect the industrial Pioneers who are willing to take a chance and who furnish a very necessary element in commercial progress if these people are not present and active very like very little progress is likely to happen then he has more advice
for inventors or in my opinion company Builders and he says if you wish to invent usefully you must not attempt to do it in isolation or to Shield yourself from criticism criticism is inevitable as I mean you go to the early episodes of Founders and every time I had this section called critics don't know
because you had people telling you know like the famous examples you had uh Sam Walton was working at JC Penney his manager saying saying Sam sorry to tell you this but you're just not cut out for retail he told maybe the greatest retailer of all time that he's not good
enough to do it it's it's silliness so Bush's point and I think the larger point in these stories that you can derive yourself is that this is going it's a constant it should be expected so don't try to run away from it so he says You must not attempt to do to do this in
isolation or Shield yourself from criticism the world is full this is why he's telling us this the world is full of wouldbe inventors who do just that they never invent anything worthwhile and then Bush brings up his friend Edwin Lan he's going to say some
crazy stuff here and this makes me feel good like it it feels like makes me feel like I'm on the right track that I keep like evangelizing hey Founders please study Edwin land you have literally like the guy that Steve Jobs meets when he's in his 20s Steve is in his 20s Edwin
land's in the 70s saying hey this guy's my hero takes a ton of ideas that Edwin L used to build Polaroid and then builds Apple which is one of the most valuable companies that have ever been in existence why aren't if jobs studied them why aren't we and so this is crazy
because van Bush who's one of the most formidable people you can come across is saying to you and I right now in this book hey my friend Edwin Lan he's one of the most ingenious and wisest person I have ever met that's insane and I'm so happy I found this paragraph the background to this paragraph he's
talking about patents so it say certainly if a company operates only under patents that owns and infringes on no others its Monopoly should not be disturbed and the courts should hold should hold that view an excellent example is Polaroid Corporation founded by Edwin Lan one of the most ingenious
men I have ever knew I ever knew and also one of the wisest Polaroid has grown and Pros prospered because of his inventions and those of his team no one will deny that this accomplishment has benefited the country and it demonstrates the operation of the patent
system at its best so again he's saying hey Edwin L is one of the most in think about the people that bush interacted with over his lifetime and for him to say that that Edwin L is the most ingenious man and also one of the wisest people I've ever met if you haven't listened to any of the podcasts I've
made I've read like five or six five books on land mult I've done I think seven podcasts on him just go back to the ones I've did recently and then you can go deeper if you want to it's a 264 and 263 in those podcasts I will mention all the other podcasts I I did on them
as well but again if if jobs is studying land then why aren't you and I promise once you dive in Edwin L you're like oh I should have been reading about this guy the whole time and then he ends this absolutely fantastic chapter even like even if you buy if you buy the book
first of all I paid $24 for this thing come on even if you just read chapter 4 or excuse me it's called chapter 5 of inventions and inventors I think it's worth the price of admission and um in the forward Ben makes the point that you actually don't have to read the book in
chronological order I read the book in chronological order but after I finished I realized that he was correct but even if you just picked it up and to to read and they're rather long chapters it's only like eight chapters entire book I think but my point being is like the
price of admission from the book just to read chapter five of inventions and inventors for Founders makes perfect sense this is the way he ends the chapter is fantastic I just wrote what an incredible paragraph We need an inventor we need invent we need inventors and inventions and we need to
encourage them in particular we need to encourage the entrepreneurs those who Supply Venture Capital those who have the nerve to take inventions over the initial bumps to create new companies to offset our Trend toward industrial Giants incidentally we must discourage
parasites and Wheeler Dealers in this area as well as others but above all we need better understanding of the whole complex affair on the part of legislators the court and the public there will be no lack of inventions genuine inventors just can't help inventing but we want more successful
ones and to get them requires better understanding and then he has an interesting story from when he was teaching a graduate course at MIT as the professor and to me it's a really illustration of as we age and go through life we're going to play different roles
and to make sure that we're helping the Next Generation as possible not setting up blockades for them and so in this field of study van bush had gone from being able to write a textbook on it to realizing that his students have now surpassed their teacher so he says one spring I received
a shock with these two chaps I was putting together a final examination so he's got teaching assistence okay those are the two chaps that he's he's referencing so it says I was putting together the final examination with these chaps suddenly I came to the realization that they knew more about
the subject than I did in some ways this was not strange they were concentrating on it and I was getting involved in other things but it hit me hard and right there I decided that I was not going to get in the way of younger men and that when the time came that I could
not compete genuinely with them I would get out I have acted in accord with that decision many times since and in the process of doing so have found stimulation in trying to learn new things relief in not being in competition with younger men and satisfaction in watching those men
succeed without having me as an obstacle so I've come across that idea before I read uh PT Barnum's biography it's a all the way back on Founders number 137 and I read PT Barnum's uh biography because if you're studying like the history of Entrepreneurship you'd be surprised if
if I could take every single book and have a way to search it I think the name PT Barum pull comes up more frequently than any other name it's almost become like shorthand for somebody good at promotion and Showmanship and so I had heard the name I'm you know I heard
Barnum and Bailey Circus so I'm reading the whole book and I get to the end I'm like where the hell is where's this Bailey guy like when are you guys going to start this circus barnham had all these other businesses that he was world famous from he might have been one of
the most famous people in the world at the time when there was almost no no such thing as a celebrity but anyways he winds up at the very like it's like the last few chapters he winds up meeting and competing with other people that are trying to put on circuses and it's
Barnum and I think he's got two other partners and so Barum initially tries to compete with these younger men they're like a generation or two younger than him and they're kind of kicking his ass and he does something smart first he says something I'm going to read from the book he says Barnum was also
impressed by how well the three younger men had turned the tables on him they were using his own methods against him this is what he said they were foes worthy of my steal so once he realized okay they're worthy competitors I can't be dismissed of just because I'm famous
and Rich and he had like all these ups and downs with his finances but that's really beside the point I guess I'm making here but he dis think sorry like okay they're worthy adversary they're foes worthy of my steal and he's like I'm not going to try to compete with these younger men which is exactly what
bush is saying he's like in baram's like we're going to partner and so they wind up that's where Barnum and Bailey Circus comes from this decision by PT baram is like let's not compete you're my equal in this domain let's partner up and so that's what popped to mind to my mind
when I read this paragraph about him making this decision like okay I was a Pioneer in the the beginning of this field of study so much so that I could write a book on it but now the students have become the teachers they have surpassed me so let me get out of their way so another thing bush is an
advocate for is having hobbies in fact he has an entire chapter dedicated on his love of engines and hobbies and all these things but he's also talking about what I'm going to point the section I want to pull out to you on this chapter is on growing old and he thinks Hobbies
become even more important as you grow old he says the essence of hobbies is the fact that one does not have to take things seriously in order to get fun out of it there has been been a lot written about Hobbies they provide release when one is working intensely and they save
lives when men retire there is nothing more pathetic than the man who retires and does not then know what to do adverse aspects of growing old and retiring press heavily upon us the joints Creak the eyes grow dim memory falters and skills become obsolete but there are some bright
compensations one sit in the shade and watch young men sweat under the sun timetables are discarded one can look out at the snow and decide not to go to the office today beauty of nature the beauty of women lose none of their benediction they penetrate deeper into Consciousness when the hot pace is
over and then he has an entire chapter on teachers and teaching and he opens it up with just absolutely incredible writing life on on this Earth is becoming hectic we Marvel at the rockets and spaceships we are fascinated and mystified by computers that run machines
to build more computers we fret about a possible supersonic transport trailing supersonic booms Across the Nation yet are eager for its great speed we are staggered by the immensity of the universe as great telescopes and marvelously intricate space probes display it for us we smile to ourselves
as the cosmologists get the universe all sorted out to their satisfaction and then find quazar that may make them start all over again the physicists build atom Smashers a mile long and discover so many sub particles that they don't know what to do with them the logicians struggle to
pin down their language so that it will finally be precise and then question whether it means anything whatsoever we cure disease and face population explosion we struggle to modify our legal and political systems to cope with the changes all around us and the
changes outpace our cures and leave us still Tangled we make progress lots of progress in nearly every intellectual field only to find that the more we probe the faster our field of ignorance expands and then he goes into why he thinks teaching is a high calling and
then he relates it to a personal experience which he does not really expound on too much in this book considering it's technically an autobiography and he talks about the greatest teacher ever had was his father in writing this chapter I've turned back to the memory of teachers I have known
or suffered under to some who I now recog I as men who had a genuine influence on my life I doubt if how to teach can be taught techniques can be taught but not the art and the art or its absence is what makes the difference between good teaching and bad when I think of teachers who have molded my own
patterns of thought I think at once of my father I acquired much from him although I hardly realized it at the time and a lot of what he's picking up to his father is told through stories and the lesson is not always explicitly stated he expects you to to read between
the lines and so it talks about when his own father was uh his own father was a young man his family were strict methodists and religious Strife at that in this area was intense I remember my grandfather telling me about how one crowd wanted to build a church and
brought the lumber in by ship one of the competing Protestant faiths proceeded to Burn All the lumber they started again brought in new Lumber and this time they sat over the lumber night and day with shotguns until they got the building framed and so the church was built and one of the main lessons he
learned from his father was that even though they picked different professions his father was a clergyman his father knew how to deal with people which is a main theme throughout the book that that van repeats over and over again he had an interest in all the people around him
and he understood them well he had an uncanny sense of how to work with people of all sorts and I saw him do it and then I double underlined this sentence I had pride in my father I was fortunate in having this is how he described his dad this the last he
mentions of him I was fortunate in having right at hand the opportunity to observe a true teacher in action then he tells a story of one of the best professors and teachers he ever had he actually does van does something really smart here that he actually reads the textbook before taking the class so he
says he used the textbook and in the summer before I was to take the course I read it then I went to him in the fall and told him what I had done and asked if I could make some time available for other things I had in Mind by taking the final exam in the course when it
occurred and if I remember the story from the other book The endless Frontier I'm pretty sure that he was he needed to work he didn't have a lot of money early in his life and so he's saying hey I already read the book when the final exam happens can I just get credit for
the course by taking the final exam and so in instead the professor's like I'll just give it to you right now so it says he gave me an examination right there and then I went into the next room and worked on it when I came back he read it then he touched me on the shoulder and
said he would ask the faculty to give me the credit at once which which they did now this made an enormous impression on me think of this this is happening 60 close to 60 years before he's writing this down or in other words he's remembering this 60 years after the fact
think about how big of an impression something has to make has to make on you that you remember it six decades later and so he says now this made an enormous impression on me and he became my idol and the man I wanted to be like and the reason because he took a genuine
personal interest in me and showed it I Revere his memory he was a culture gentleman proud of his profession happy in the exercise of it subtly by an obscure process of osmosis some of his idealism became embedded in my subconscious mentality he taught me pride of scholarly accomplishment and he
never said a word to me on that subject and it's from these experiences and the other life experiences he has that he comes with a very unique way to think about education so this is the way he says the basic function of education is to ensure that the experience of one
generation may be passed on to the next it is the ability to make this transfer that distinguishes man from Beast that ability began when the period of youthful dependence was lengthened and family structure was strengthened for protection it stepped ahead mightily when language developed to include
abstract symbolism and when the written word supplanted speech the expansion is still going on today as we build machines that handle data and communicate with one another and then he goes back to the idea that being a truly great teacher cannot be taught taught it is more art
than anything else here we come to the Criterion of which I spoke earlier the interlined qualities of primary importance in our evaluation of teachers this is the spirit of success the ability the Deep subtle ability to transmit the mysterious characteristic which inspires to
emulation and then I'll end end here with Van's description of what a great teacher does what is true in the college classroom is true in kindergarten as well every teacher no matter the subject needs to remember that he is preparing most of his students for a life marked
by a great Duality one part as a tiny element in a complex social structure the other in informal relations with their fellows as he remembers this and puts it to work in all he does as he leads his student to be useful but also to find joy in life he is a great teacher and that is where I'll leave it
for the full story highly recommend buying the book if you buy the book using the link that's in the show notes in your podcast player you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time I will also leave a link of I will also leave a link to all the books available
for on stripe press check them out if you want they're truly beautiful books and as you buy more books and as you read more if you want to remember more of what you read and you want to use the app that I use to save all my highlights and my notes it's an app called readwise
if you go to readwise doio slf Founders you can actually try readwise for 60 days free it's the best app I use it's the best app that I pay for and you can see if it's right for you 60 days for free that is 270 books down 1,000 to go and I'll talk to you again soon