The moral to the stories of Dave, Melanie, and John is this: Don’t make a doable problem into an anchor problem by wedding yourself irretrievably to a solution that just isn’t working. Reframe the solution to some other possibilities, prototype those ideas (take some test hikes), and get yourself unstuck. Anchor problems keep us stuck because we can only see one solution—the one we already have that doesn’t work. Anchor problems are not only about our current, failed approach. They are really about the fear that, no matter what else we try, that won’t work either, and then we’ll have to admit that we’re permanently stuck—meaning we’re screwed—and we’d rather be stuck than screwed. Sometimes it is more comfortable to hold on to our familiar, failed approach to the problem than to risk a worse failure by attempting the big changes that we think will be required to eliminate it. This is a pretty common but paradoxical human behavior. Change is always uncertain, and there is no guarantee of success, no matter how hard you try. It makes sense to be fearful. The way forward is to reduce the risk (and the fear) of failure by designing a series of small prototypes to test the waters. It is okay for prototypes to fail—they are supposed to—but well-designed prototypes teach you something about the future.

Prototypes lower your anxiety, ask interesting questions, and get you data about the potential of the change that you are trying to accomplish. One of the principles of design thinking is that you want to “fail fast and fail forward,” into your next step. When you’re stuck with an anchor problem, try reframing the challenge as an exploration of possibilities (instead of trying to solve your huge problem in one miraculous leap), then decide to try a series of small, safe prototypes of the change you’d like to see happen. It should result in getting unstuck and finding a more creative approach to your problem. We will talk a lot more about prototyping in chapter 6.

It is not easy to hold this kind of quality leadership for three big reasons. First, no one will believe you have the longest-lasting trucks until they have already lasted a long time on the road. It’s a reputation that takes a while to earn and can be lost quickly. Second, designing a very high-quality piece of machinery is not a textbook problem. Designers learn from other designers over time, and the company accumulates these nuggets of wisdom by providing a good, stable place to work for talented engineers. Third, it is usually quite difficult to convince buyers to pay an up-front premium for future savings, even if the numbers are clear. People tend to be more myopic than economic theory would suggest.

Barry’s attack hits home. I had once been an engineer, and I know an engineer doesn’t design a bridge that might hold its load. An engineer starts with complexity and crafts certainty. I knew what it was like to be careful, to balance literally thousands of considerations in making a system work.

TWO: Large-Scale Integration

“When LSI’s customers wanted new functions, most of the designers would simply respond, “There’s no way.” Huang would say, “Let me see what I can do.”

Huang would spend hours fiddling with the simulator, attempting to arrange the list of components to enable what the customer wanted. This was painstaking work, conducted without the assistance of graphical user interfaces or even color monitors. His focus was admirable, but Horstmann knew many engineers who could become similarly absorbed in technical problems; what set Huang apart was his ability to avoid dead ends. “Similar people, they get lost, right?” Horstmann said. “They just get lost in these deep, deep ratholes. He doesn’t. He has a great sense of seeing when a problem has reached a certain level of complexity, and he can’t easily make further progress, and he has to go in a different direction.”

LSI’s most demanding customers were the computer-graphics designers, whose appetite for faster silicon knew no point of satiation. To serve them, Horstmann, with Huang’s encouragement, began signing contracts to deliver products that, internally, the two had no idea if LSI could actually make. Older engineers advised the two to be more cautious. Do you know what you’re doing? they’d say. If this fails, it may be the end of your career. “It was true, but that never troubled us,” Horstmann said. Almost everything Horstmann and Huang promised was eventually delivered.

Disruptive technologies, Christensen had observed, often grew out of hobbyist communities. They were developed using “bootlegged resources” in which “off-the-shelf components” were redeployed for something other than their intended purpose. They started out wonky but rapidly improved along attributes of performance that established players ignored.

But even once you had absorbed this lesson, it wasn’t easy to implement. Pursuing niche markets cost profits, making investors question your sanity. This, too, Christensen had foretold: “One of the reasons managers at established firms find it difficult to serve emerging markets is that their investors and customers tell them not to.”

That was the real secret of The Innovator’s Dilemma, which readers often missed. It was not a book about how to succeed; it was a book about how not to fail. Christensen’s book wasn’t a how-to for start-ups but a counterinsurgency manual for senior managers at stagnating firms. Thirteen years in, Huang felt that Nvidia was at risk of becoming such a firm, and it was as much paranoia as optimism that led him to pursue the mad-science market.