This story is exceptionally well told in the book Breakthroughs! by P. Ranganath Nayak and John M. Ketteringham (one of the best casebooks written on innovators who defied the odds), which describes Smith’s culture of mutual commitment as the true breakthrough.

Acknowledgements:

“Lindsay Oishi, Ph.D., and Tim Reilly, Ph.D., who made the huge personal investment of dedicating their doctoral research projects to demonstrating the efficacy of DYL, and in so doing set our work apart and ensured we gave people what they deserved. To Professors Dan Schwartz and Bill Damon, their advisers, for their support and guidance, and Dr. Denise Pope, founder of Challenge Success, for her careful research insights and demonstration that you can change the education system.

It is common, and natural, to tell the history of innovation through the exploits of men of genius, such as Edison and Tesla, and pioneers such as Berners-Lee and the Wright brothers. But if the Wright brothers had not flown in 1903, someone else would have done something very similar in some other location. Collective intelligence develops when the accumulation of collective knowledge reaches a point at which talented people identify problems that this shared knowledge can be employed to solve. And it is also common, and natural, to describe the history of innovation through the introduction of new gadgets, from aeroplanes to iPhones. I have taken running and apples as examples to emphasise that the

growth of collective intelligence has a range and applicability that extends well beyond technology.

I carried my bug book with me all the time, making notes when I’d notice things about the bug named Jim. Then, one day, I had a turning point in discovering my encodings. I was asked to research, learn, and teach the team about networked personal computing and its strategic implications for HP. I became enthralled with researching and trying to understand something big and new. And even more, I found myself entranced with the challenge of how to convert my understanding into digestible concepts. I’d started to discover an encoding that would animate me for the rest of my life: the ability to take a mass of information and make sense of it, to go from “chaos to concept.” Then came the day of epiphany, when I got to share my learnings with our internal team. I discovered that I had a peculiar capability for packaging and teaching concepts to other people in ways that would stick.

As Sutskever rallied researchers to give him their best ideas, Brockman threw himself into the work of developing the right organizational culture. Some years later, Brockman would recount to me his thinking. To prepare, he read every book he could find on ambitious science and technology undertakings in US history: the transcontinental railroad, Thomas Edison’s light bulb, the early network of computers that would lay the groundwork for the modern Web. He absorbed them like religious texts, searching for hints and guidance on how to design his own endeavor.