From There to Here: Cities, Companies, Creativity and Culture
Last July, I heard Geoffrey West speak at the Long Now seminar series about “Why Cities Keep on Growing, Corporations Always Die, and Life Gets Faster.” His scientific research on “Cities, Scaling and Sustainability” at the Santa Fe Institute reveals that cities are superlinear — meaning that as a city scales, so does its innovation and efficiency (as West measures in gas stations, roads and the socioeconomic behavior of the city). Contrast this with corporations, which — like humans — may experience “hockey stick” growth, but inevitably ossify and die. Just like the human body, the very system that gives you energy wears out by trying to keep you alive. Economies of scale triumph over innovation. Profits decrease systematically per capita as sales remain constant and it can longer be sustained.
What is so different between cities and corporations?, West asks. One answer I loved: cities tolerate crazies, companies do not. Cities also continually bring in new people and new ideas, and with that offer a continuous flow and opening of opportunities.
West asks a question I asked myself as I experimented with ways to nurture the grass-roots innovation culture and ecosystem in Engineering at Google: how can we design companies more like cities? With a previous life as an Urban Studies major — and a dogeared copy of “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” as my Bible — it is no surprise that I was inspired and influenced by Jane Jacobs’ organic, diverse and chaotic approach to the city as I worked on a team to create communities, programs and environments to bring different kinds of people together and give them a laboratory to play, experiment, learn and fail.
But that *same* week as the Geoffrey West talk at Long Now, Google retired Google Labs — an artifact and symbol of our once bottom-up approach to experimentation. (Interesting note: West cautioned that companies that cut R&D often run into trouble… they rely on innovation by acquisition instead of from the inside.) The days of beta Labs launches and a “let a thousand flowers bloom” approach to new product development (not in the Mao Zedong sense, of course) were over and we were now going to focus on focus. Larry declared it time to put “more wood behind fewer arrows” and reorganized the company around a few core product areas led by appointed “decision makers.”
I can’t help but wonder: is Larry Page the Robert Moses to my Jane Jacobs? Is the death of Labs + the birth of Taylor‘ian efficiency the organizational equivalent of a ten-lane highway cutting through Greenwich Village and SoHo?
Yes, we are all moving in the same direction and at a higher velocity (time will tell if the destination lives up to its promise). I will also add that polish + a more human approach to design now prevail in our products over our historic scrappiness + sterile machine-like aesthetic… but how will these changes regarding how we run the company disrupt our environment, distort our perspective and impact our culture? And how will that influence the products we build and the people we hire to build them?
I know companies need to evolve and I embrace — welcome! invite! — change. I don’t mean to glorify the past or be nostalgic for the “belle époque” of what was once Silicon Valley’s darling. I applaud Larry’s courage for not holding onto what was and shepherding Google into what he believes it can be. But I also think there is more to innovation than clear + crazy ambitious goals and the world’s best engineers.
A company is not a machine; it is a living, breathing ecosystem. I think the old Google resembled Jacobs’ Greenwich Village — crowded, colorful, diverse and bottom-up. I wonder if the “cleaning up” of Google into a more efficient grid-like city is going to facilitate the same kinds of serendipitous collisions. As Steven Johnson so eloquently illustrates in Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History Of Innovation (must watch: 4 minute illustrated preview), the biggest ideas seldom come from lone inventors… rather, innovation is born and thrives when diverse groups of people and ideas collide. And the next billion dollar idea rarely starts off as a billion dollar idea. Just as Jacobs noticed the threat of over-designed urban redevelopments, I’m starting to notice a Google segregated into distinct neighborhoods where people no longer play on the sidewalks or hang out on the stoop or bump into weak ties from other neighborhoods and I worry that we are no longer in an environment where small ideas can be born, mature and evolve into big ideas.
I’m currently reading — and loving! — Jonah Lehrer’s newest book, Imagine: How Creativity Works, and I look forward to distilling the lessons and recombining them with the next book in my queue, Tina Seelig’s inGenius: Unleashing Creative Potential.
In the meantime, enjoy this short and sweet interview between Lehrer and Richard Florida (of The Rise and Fall of the Creative Class!). It focuses on the relationship between creativity and cities and not surprisingly celebrates our beloved Jacobs. :)
