Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently (25 page)

Like Richardson, Homans pushes big ideas, and the idea of a spaceport in New Mexico fit the bill. The weather was hard to beat. The open spaces meant relatively little chance of incidental injury to people on the ground. And the proximity of White Sands, with its protected airspace, made for a compelling case. Homans, though, is first and foremost a businessman, and his title reflects the mission of economic development, not economic folly. The time wasn’t right in 2002. As Homans says, “Don’t follow the, ‘Build it and they will come philosophy.’ Wait until technology calls.”
¹³

The call came in October 2004. After Burt Rutan won the X PRIZE competition and joined forces with Richard Branson, Homans and Richardson starting pushing hard to woo Virgin Galactic to New Mexico.
They were not the only ones. The state of California already had a spaceport of sorts—Vandenberg Air Force Base—and Rutan was based in Mojave, California. Oklahoma also had a spaceport built on the site of a decommissioned B-52 base, and, as the state is proud to point out, it already had FAA approval to launch suborbital rockets, a fact that has drawn George French and Rocketplane Global to base their operation in Oklahoma. New Mexico carried the day with Branson, but the price was steep. Branson agreed to locate Virgin Galactic’s operations there if the state of New Mexico financed the building of the spaceport itself.

A spaceport needn’t be as complex as an airport. Passengers take no luggage, for example. But a spaceport must have launch facilities, a passenger preparation area, a runway for landing, and capacity to handle explosives and potentially hazardous waste materials. The price tag of Spaceport America was pegged at $250 million. Although not a huge sum of money for many state governments, it was a significant outlay for New Mexico, whose annual budget in 2006 was only $5.1 billion. Richardson and Homans believe that the expenditure will return a significant piece of the economic pie for commercial spaceflight. Pushing a $250 million item on the New Mexicans may be a different story. Although the state’s official nickname is the “land of enchantment,” the locals still refer to New Mexico as the “land of mañana.” Citing the fact that New Mexico has had a long history with the space program, Homans is banking on New Mexicans’ familiarity with space. It is a great example of using familiarity to sell an idea to the public, and it wouldn’t be possible in most other states.

A Team of Iconoclasts

The privatization of spaceflight is a great example of how a group of iconoclasts can work together. Normally, we think of iconoclasts as rugged individuals who have bucked conventional wisdom to walk their
own paths. Of course, this is true, but ultimately, for the iconoclast to become successful, he has to work with others, including other iconoclasts. This is not always an easy proposition for people not known for playing nice with others. But as we’ve seen in the spaceflight industry, it can be done with the help of other people who smooth over the rough spots.

You still need iconoclasts who exemplify the three principles of perception, freedom from fear, and social intelligence. Fortunately, you don’t need iconoclasts who exemplify all three traits if you have a team of people who can exemplify some of them. The implications for management are clear. You need iconoclasts on a team, and if one iconoclast is good at seeing things differently than other people but is socially inept, then you also need a person who has the right social skills. For example, Burt Rutan is widely known as an iconoclastic engineer. His emphasis on materials engineering, which was inspired by surfboards, is legendary in aeronautics. He is not known, however, for his love affair with the media. But his newfound business partner, Richard Branson, is another story. Although Branson is no engineer, it is hard to argue with his charisma and public appeal. He is a master of the media. Of all the players in the spaceflight industry, he is perhaps the one most likely to pull off private launches.

If we take a view of iconoclasm that extends beyond the individual, we can see how to assemble a team that collectively exemplifies iconoclastic traits. In the case of the spaceflight industry, the individuals found each other. Certainly, catalysts help. People like Peter Diamandis serve as connectors for iconoclasts. They help rally support and temper the inevitable fear of the unknown. And then there are people like Rick Homans, who can grease the wheels of government and help connect people with each other so they can actually make complex endeavors happen. You need all these people. Few people possess all three traits, but through diversification, teams can.

W
HETHER NATURALLY BORN OR MADE
, iconoclasts pride themselves on their nonconformity and ability to see things differently than other people. Some, however, go beyond mere iconoclasm. Through either luck or hard work, a select few go on to make the transition from iconoclast to icon. They, or their ideas, become objects of worship. Although it is not a strict requirement for success, the transformation from an outsider with crazy ideas to an object of worship is a lesson in how to get ideas that are initially strange to most people accepted by the masses.

Arthur Jones and the Nautilus Machine

In chapter 6, the example of Arnold Schwarzenegger becoming governor of California provided a lesson in the use of familiarity to gain public acceptance. But even before his movie stardom, Schwarzenegger was a superstar of bodybuilding. Like all bodybuilders of the 1970s, Schwarzenegger relied upon free weights to build up muscle mass. Interestingly, another, far lesser-known iconoclast, named Arthur Jones, would revolutionize the exercise industry through a different approach. Jones invented the Nautilus machine. Even by iconoclast standards, Jones was odd, and so it is particularly interesting how his invention became an icon of the modern gym.

Born in Oklahoma in 1929, Jones had little patience for formal education and playing by the rules. After dropping out of high school, Jones traveled for several years throughout North and South America before serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II. After the war, he returned to the United States and started a business hunting big game for zoos and private collectors. He became known for his wild adventures and ended up producing a series of television shows for ABC in the 1950s with titles like
Wild Cargo
and
Professional Hunter
. His personal motto was “Younger women, faster airplanes, and bigger crocodiles,” a credo that he unabashedly lived (Jones was married and divorced six times, all to women under age twenty-one). Always suspicious of competitors, he frequently packed a Colt .45, telling reporters, “I’ve shot 630 elephants and 63 men, and I regret the elephants more.”
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Jones’s main interest besides big game hunting was exercise. While working out at a YMCA in Tulsa in 1948, Jones became increasingly frustrated with his inability to develop big muscles. Gyms of that era were dreary rooms filled with archaic equipment: dumbbells, free weights, jump ropes, and medicine balls. Rather than continuing to work out with heavier and heavier weights, which was the conventional wisdom of bodybuilding, Jones decided to cut his regimen in half, giving his
muscles time to recover between workouts. In his downtime he began to experiment with contraptions that would give his muscles a more even workout. Presciently, Jones realized that muscles cannot develop the same amount of force throughout their range of motion. In order to efficiently strengthen muscles, he reasoned that you needed a device that varied its resistance as a muscle went through its range of motion. It took thirty years of tinkering, but the end result was the Nautilus machine. Using a series of cams and levers, the machine was named for its resemblance to the nautilus seashell. As Jones stated in Nautilus’s promotional materials, “Instead of trying to fit human muscles to an imperfect tool, the barbell—Nautilus was an attempt to design perfect tools that would exactly fit the requirements of muscles.”

As we all know, just because something is a superior technology, doesn’t mean that it will be readily adopted. Jones unveiled the prototype for Nautilus, dubbed “The Blue Monster,” at the Mr. America contest in 1970, where he sold his first machine. But it was Casey Viator, who came in in third place, who caught Jones’s attention. Impressed with his bodybuilding potential, Jones hired Viator to work for his new company and promote the Nautilus machine. Viator won the next year, and sales of Nautilus took off.

The story of Arthur Jones and Nautilus show how even the most iconoclastic and socially gruff individual can change from an outsider to an icon. It is not even conceivable today to imagine a gym without exercise equipment based on Nautilus. Several elements go into the transition from iconoclast to icon, including luck and timing, but one element is well defined, and that is how new ideas spread through society. Ideas and products that iconoclasts bring to market follow well-defined patterns of adoption. An entire field has grown up around the study of how new ideas diffuse through society. Although it was previously thought that the method depended primarily on social factors, new evidence suggests that the underlying way in which new ideas are adopted may have as much to do with biology as sociology.

Birds Do It, Too

The verdant hills around Southampton creep toward the sea in great undulations that, on foggy days, lap at the southernmost edges of England. A small stream, later known as Monks Brook, flows through the tiny village of Swaythling and joins up with the River Itchen on its way to Southampton. By the turn of the twentieth century, Swaythling had grown up from a quiet village whose inhabitants had farmed the hills and sold their dairy products to their neighbors in the bustling port city of Southampton. The Industrial Revolution had transformed much of England, especially London to the north. The locals, however, remained largely wedded to an agricultural life. The climate was perfect for dairy farming. Thanks to milk bottles, another product of the Industrial Revolution, farmers no longer needed to cart around gigantic vats of milk to dispense to their customers. Instead, they simply filled the bottles at the dairy. A small piece of tin foil capped each bottle. The bottles were loaded onto the delivery carts every morning, and the milkmen distributed their cargo, either by horse-drawn carriage or by motorized truck. The Swaythling residents had long taken it for granted that their daily milk would be sitting securely by their door every morning.

We don’t know who the first victim was or exactly when the villagers realized that a serial criminal was living among them. But by late 1921, most people had been victimized, some repeatedly. It was always the same. The victim, still rubbing the sleep from his eyes, would open his door in the morning to pick up the bottles filled with fresh milk. Then he would see it: the foil caps opened with surgical precision. And to make matters even worse, the most prized part—the sweet cream—had been skimmed off.

Nothing was more sacred than the morning milk. Except, of course, afternoon tea. And you needed cream for that. Even though the sealed milk bottle had been a great technological advance that allowed for centralized filling and pasteurization of the milk, the spate of thefts led
some to call for a return to the old ways when the milkman filled the bottles right there on the porch.

The constable was stumped. No eyewitnesses, and, to make matters worse, the thefts had begun to spread outside the village. Reports from neighboring towns began filtering in. The milk bandit had even struck in the heart of Southampton.

Of course, such widespread thievery could not remain secret forever. It was probably one of the milkmen who first laid eyes on the perpetrator. It was none other than the common English bird known as the tit. Blue tits, actually. About the size of a chickadee, blue tits are easily identified by their yellow breast feathers and blue head cap. They have a white face with a distinctive black mask running across their eyes, which gives them the somewhat beguiling appearance of a raccoon. Late in 1921, someone had finally noticed the birds following the milkmen on their rounds every morning. Within minutes of the bottles’ being left on a doorstep, the birds would swoop in and pry open the foil tops. The whole process took but a few seconds, and since the milkman’s attention was focused on his next delivery, he rarely turned back to see what was happening.

Under normal circumstances, this episode of bird behavior might be relegated to the annals of ornithology, but what makes it particularly interesting is that the behavior spread throughout England. Birds, of course, had not evolved to open milk bottles, but they had somehow learned this neat trick of pilfering. The ethologists James Fisher and Robert Hinde documented this remarkable spread in a landmark paper in 1949.
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Like modern forensic scientists, Fisher and Hinde tracked the reports of milk bottle opening back to Swaythling in 1921. It was like the spread of a virus, and Swaythling was the site of the initial outbreak.

Why care about the birds? Because Fisher and Hinde’s analysis pointed to something astounding about how new ideas diffuse through groups. Fisher and Hinde called it
cultural learning
. This was surprising because birds were not generally given much credit for having
culture. But there it was—birds had taught each other how to skim milk. A learning mechanism that even birds use means that the way in which new ideas are adopted in humans has a very deep-seated biological mechanism behind it.