Job ad reads: If you are not a misfit do not apply. This was for the faculty. Teachers and professors had to think differently.

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Dave Young:
Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast, Dave Young here with Stephen Semple. Stephen, you told me just a few seconds ago that today we’re going to talk about MIT, the giant business conglomerate headquartered in Boston that’s a school. MIT is a school.

Stephen Semple:
It’s a school. Yes, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Dave Young:
Yes.

Stephen Semple:
But when we think about innovation and technology, it’s hard not to think about MIT.

Dave Young:
Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
This is a bit of a weird one, ’cause MIT’s not actually really a big school. They have 10,000 students in total, but they have a huge influence in the world today. And how they developed that influence in the technology space is really unusual. And when I heard about this, and the more I explored it, I thought there’s a lesson here for all of us to keep in mind, ’cause they took a very unusual approach.

So the university was established on April 10th, 1861, but what I want to talk about happened in the 1970s. And the president of MIT at the time was Jerome Wiesner. And here’s where things get interesting, MIT has always been a science school, that’s its foundation. But Wiesner had an interest in the arts, and he identified that MIT was leading the way, and there was a lot of technologies being developed there, but in his mind, there was a void. And what he wanted to do was create a lab that mixed art, science, and engineering in a deep way. So in 1985, he built what went on to be known as the Media Lab, and they created some amazing things that have come out of the Media Lab, like the first flat panel displays, which people thought was a stupid idea at the time. But here’s how crazy this place is, when they wanted to post ads for hiring faculty, it included the word misfit in the first sentence.

Dave Young:
Oh, man.

Stephen Semple:
They wanted to hire people that felt like they were misfits, went on to say, “If you can get hired at another faculty or university, go there.” And this is MIT. They wanted brilliant people who thought differently. What are those people? Those people are misfits. Those are people who have a hard time getting hired elsewhere. So they basically said, “If you’re brilliant, you’re a misfit, you have a hard time getting hired elsewhere, we have a home for you.” But that’s bold, ’cause MIT had a big reputation at the time. Imagine the boldness of running that type of ad for faculty. But here’s what they went on to discover, great teams have a mix of people. So here’s how they build the teams that the Media Lab, they will build teams where they’ll have two material scientists, two biologists, two product designers, two computational scientists, and two architects. So they have a material scientist, a biologist, a product designer, a computer scientist, and an architect together on a team. That’s what they found are the best teams.

Dave Young:
I love that.

Stephen Semple:
And they wanted to give people a license to be weird. And the funny thing is, they actually feel when they’re posting their work, the choice of font is actually really, really important, and they’ll allow big, long arguments in the choice of font. Do you know who would’ve fit right in there?

Dave Young:
Me.

Stephen Semple:
And Steve Jobs.

Dave Young:
Sure, sure.

Stephen Semple:
Steve Jobs is that type of crazy.

Dave Young:
Yeah, yeah.

Stephen Semple:
And look what he developed.

Dave Young:
The cross-pollination, the way they put these teams together, it’s brilliant, because so often, someone that has an idea, man, ends up toiling in the darkness, because they don’t have the knowledge or skillset to fill in the gaps of what they’re trying to do.

Stephen Semple:
Yes, yes.

Dave Young:
And so to include such a disparate group in every project means that those projects are going to be taken as far as they’re able to take them.

Stephen Semple:
And will probably go down weird rabbit holes, which often end up not being the weird rabbit hole, but end up being the innovation.

Dave Young:
Oh yeah, absolutely.

Stephen Semple:
And when I say Steve Jobs will fit right in there I wasn’t kidding about this, a lot of people forget that Steve Jobs dropped out of Stanford to take calligraphy. So when I say argument over font, he would’ve fit right in there.

Dave Young:
When I say I’d fit in it, it’s Because, we’ve talked a little bit about this, in addition to doing the kind of advertising and market consulting you do, I’m the vice chancellor at Wizard Academy, and that was kind of the job description that they posted.

Stephen Semple:
Right.

Dave Young:
We’re looking for a weirdo, they actually had a bugle call. But anyway, I know when you cross-pollinate ideas with other disciplines, it’s when magic starts to happen.

Stephen Semple:
And here’s where the real magic happens, they actually uncovered an idea that needs to be taught to the world. Here’s the underlying reason why they did this, art, science, engineering, and design all have a really important role to play in innovation. And here’s how it works, art is for expression, and this expression often gets us thinking about the possibilities. Science is for the exploration of ideas, making ideas concrete, and expressing them in formulas and hypothesis. Engineering takes these ideas and turns them into inventions. And design is about communication, it communicates the benefits of the invention, and makes it human, accessible, and understandable. So if you really think about it, the output from one domain becomes the input for the other. So basically, art creates the idea, so science converts information and the knowledge, engineering converts knowledge into utility, design converts utility into a cultural behavior and context, and art takes that context, questions our perception into the world, and starts the wheels spinning again. You don’t get the idea for a smartphone without buttons with A/B testing?

Dave Young:
No, not at all.

Stephen Semple:
I don’t know you realize this, you know where the inspiration for the cell phone came from, right?

Dave Young:
Star Trek.

Stephen Semple:
Right, the arts.

Dave Young:
Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
Star Trek saw this idea, turned it into a hypothesis, right?

Dave Young:
Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
Then engineered it, and then Steve Jobs does a design to it, and the world explodes around cell phones and smartphones.

Dave Young:
Yeah. So there’s something else that happened, about the time the Media Lab got started, and that was TED organization, TED Talks the TED Conference, you’ve heard of that.

Stephen Semple:
Yes.

Dave Young:
And this stumps people, I used to be a speaker coach and on a curation team for a local TEDx group in Tucson, what do the letters T-E-D stand for?

Stephen Semple:
I have no idea.

Dave Young:
What would you guess?

Stephen Semple:
So I’m going to guess E is education, D is design, and T is, I don’t know.

Dave Young:
T is technology.

Stephen Semple:
Okay.

Dave Young:
D is design.

Stephen Semple:
Okay.

Dave Young:
And the E is the one that everybody gets wrong.

Stephen Semple:
Okay. What’s the E?

Dave Young:
Entertainment.

Stephen Semple:
Entertainment? Interesting. Okay.

Dave Young:
I think people think that it’s education because Robinson, one of the very first really famous TED Talks was about education, but the E is for entertainment, and it’s about how those three things interact. Same as the Media Lab, right?

Stephen Semple:
Right.

Dave Young:
It’s almost the same mission, only TED is just about communicating things. I’m sorry to take you off on a rabbit hole.

Stephen Semple:
Well, no, no, it’s a great rabbit hole, ’cause if you think about part of what gets missed with many organizations, they understand, “Okay, we need engineering.” And they understand that we need innovation, but the part that is often lacking is the design component. Once you have an idea, design is so important ’cause it’s how you humanize the idea. The proof’s the cell phone. Look, smartphones were around, especially the smartphone, the smartphone was around before the iPhone came, and the design was crappy. I had some of the early smartphones, and when the iPhone came, I was like, “Oh my God, this is so much easier to use.” And we expressed it as easier to use, but it’s easier to use ’cause the design had humanized the functions. And maybe I’m so passionate about this in terms of the role of the arts because my oldest daughter, Crystal, is in an arts program, she’s learning illustration, and I really feel like design is really underappreciated.

Great ideas in innovation do not come from study, they’re inspired. And those great ideas in innovation do not make it into the world until those ideas are humanized, and design humanizes it. The thing that I think many businesses can learn from is, be open to the arts, be open to the arts, discount the arts, read books about design. Not so that you can become a good designer, but because you can understand and appreciate good design when you see it.

Dave Young:
Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
Because so often great design is missed because it’s simply not understood. It’s interesting ’cause I was talking to Crystal about this, and we were talking about this podcast, and she was saying, “The thing about what designers have is they have a whole lexicon of language that we don’t have. They understand communication in terms of colors, and shape, and symbolism, and texture, and location, and size, and weight, and scale.” They have this whole visual lexicon language that we don’t have. And when you free them up and let them do it, it’s amazing what you can create.

When you start taking the human element into things, and I’ve actually seen this happen in client businesses as boring as HVAC, and we do a lot of work with home service companies in terms of sales. If you have your technicians start talking to people about what they want in their home, as opposed to, “Hey, well, we’ll just replace that unit with the same size as before.” But if you start talking about what it is that people wish their AC… There’s so many air conditioning systems that are so loud, you have to turn the TV up when the air conditioner comes on-

Stephen Semple:
Right.

Dave Young:
Turn it down when it’s off. Well, that’s a problem that’s easily solved with the right kind of air conditioner unit, but if the technicians don’t speak the language of design, and comfort, and what comfort means… So it’s not just, “Oh, cold air, that’s comfort.” But noise, clean air, let’s go down the path of thermostats, the cheapest system, just on and off, it roars on like a jet engine. And if you have the thermometer set to 72 Fahrenheit, what would it be in Celsius, Stephen? 20 something? 21? 22? 21 and a half? I don’t know. But what happens is, it’ll either cool your room until freezing, and then shut off and wait until it gets a little too warm. So it always waivers from too warm to a little bit too cold and back. In a modern variable speed, you said it on 72, it’ll never vary. It can actually do that, it can do it quietly.

Stephen Semple:

Right.

Dave Young:
And so that is the intersection, and I’m only using that particular industry to illustrate that until you take how people utilize your product or service into account, you think you’re selling a commodity, and you’re not.

Stephen Semple:
And on the thermostat side, when you suddenly apply good design to it, you’ve got nest, which is suddenly worth billions of dollars. So I had a really interesting experience with design, and I really want everyone to listen to this, ’cause this is really where the learning is. So I worked with this amazing designer, the guy’s name is Paul Garbertt. Unfortunately he doesn’t do design any longer, he’s now a very successful artist, which was his passion anyway. But this was before I was in the marketing business, I had a business consulting company, and I wanted him to design a business card. And so he designed a logo for me that was this butterfly, and he designed this business card. This business card was really thick, had rounded corners, and it had a hole in the middle, and it had this embossed butterfly on the back of the card. And the front of the card was very plainly designed, and the back of the card was where all the fanciness was, and had this hole in it.

And I’m looking at this card design he’s presenting to me, and there’s this hole. And I’ll tell you, the hole was really expensive ’cause the hole had to be done in exactly the right spot for this design. I’m talking to Paul, and I go, “Okay, so what’s up with the hole?” And he goes, “Well, it signifies breaking through barriers.” And all this other stuff. And I say to him, “You’ve got to do better than that.” He goes, “Okay, well, here’s what really happens.” He says, “Somebody’s going to pick up the card, and because it’s rounded edges, they’re going to touch it this way, and because of this, they’re going to hold the card like this. Because there’s a hole, they’re going to hold it up to the light. They’re going to peer through the hole, and then because as soon as they peer through the hole, they’re going to get curious what’s on the other side, then they’re going to flip it over. And because of the embossing, they’re going to touch it this way, and…”

And he went through the whole thing, he said, “And basically, what’s going to happen is, between visible and physical impressions, there’ll be 18 impressions, and by the time they’re done, they’ll never forget your card.” And I looked at them, and I said, “What a pile of f****** bullshit. But a hole in the card’s cool, and I’ve never seen a card with a hole in it, so let’s do it.” First time I give somebody the damn business card, do they not do exactly what he predicted? I mean, exactly what he predicted. I got so curious that when I gave people a business card, I would shut up, and I’d hand them the card, and I would stand there and watch them do exactly, exactly what he predicted.

Dave Young:
That’s terrific.

Stephen Semple:
I haven’t had that company for over a decade, and to this day, I still get people commenting about the business card.

Dave Young:
That’s pretty cool.

Stephen Semple:
That’s design.

Dave Young:
But that’s designed, that’s bringing someone with a design sense into the equation.

Stephen Semple:
And giving them the freedom to do it, and go, “okay, let’s do this thing. Let’s do this thing.” And I was blown away. I was blown away. And ever since that day, I started to look at design very differently, ’cause what I recognized is, “Wow, there’s a power here that I don’t actually fully understand.” I’ve read a bunch of books about design just so that when I look at something, I can go, “That’s well-designed. I don’t know how they did it, but I understand that this is great for these sets of reasons.” And MIT, MIT recognizes the importance of it. What they’ve learned is, the arts leads to the inspiration, the scientists turn it into an hypothesis, the engineering converts that knowledge into something that we can use, and the designers take that idea, and make it mainstream. And that’s why all of those things are so important.

Dave Young:
I think this has been an interesting discussion on, in essence about the MIT Media Lab, but what they’ve able to do, I shouldn’t talk about them in the past sense, because they’re still doing this stuff-

Stephen Semple:
Oh, yeah.

Dave Young:
But to involve more than just whatever it is that you do, get people, get designers, get your innovations cross-pollinated, or cross-pollinate what you’re doing now, and you’ll find innovation.

Stephen Semple:
Correct. Absolutely.

Dave Young:
Bring some biologists in, bring some designers in, and just have another look at what you’re doing through some eyes that aren’t yours. But we’ve always told business owners, it’s hard to read the label when you’re inside the bottle. And this is a great example of, you get some people that are outside the bottle, and then you find some people that are way outside the bottle, and talk about, let’s even consider building a new bottle.

Stephen Semple:
Yep. Often, you can’t do that for your business on an ongoing basis, but this is a great thing to do for business retreats. Do something really, really different. But when you’re implementing things, put an eye to design. Pay the money for design. Work with a good designer. Let them do what they do.

Dave Young:
Yeah, great conversation, Stephen. I really enjoyed this one.

Stephen Semple:
All right, awesome.

Dave Young:
Appreciate it.

Stephen Semple:
Awesome. Thanks, David.

Dave Young:
Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please share us, subscribe on your favorite podcast app, and leave us a big, fat juicy five star rating and review. And if you have any questions about this, or any other podcast episode, email to questions@theempirebuilderspodcast.com.

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