Chris Anderson doesn’t like it when things fit together smoothly. Indeed, while most employers hire for “fit,” bringing on board like-minded people who can get along with the rest of the team, Anderson argues that this is the last thing organizations should be doing. Anderson, the chairman and host of the Technology, Entertainment, and Design conference (TED) held annually in Monterey, California, says a homogeneous workforce can be a hindrance when it comes to finding breakthrough ideas. If you want innovation, try going in the opposite direction, he says. Hire for diversity and then look for the connections between the divergences. In this edited conversation with HBR senior editor Bronwyn Fryer, Anderson notes that the kind of intellectual cross-fertilization, innovation, and creativity that occurs at TED should be taking place in companies, too. What kinds of new ideas and inventions have sprung from TED? There have been many, going back to the first gathering in 1984, when the Macintosh computer and the Sony compact disc made their U.S. public debuts. I think most people who attend TED could point to moments of inspiration or connection that have been significant for them. Wired magazine was funded there. The name for my then-new magazine, Business 2.0, sprang from a conversation I had with Jeff Bezos one year. The very diverse people who make presentations at TED—for instance, Bill Gates, Frank Gehry, Jane Goodall, Billy Graham, Herbie Hancock, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Jared Diamond—have the opportunity to introduce their newest brainchildren, or talk about their passions, in front of an attentive audience. When inventors like Bill Gross and Dean Kamen show off their latest inventions, they can get feedback and see whether a market exists for their ideas. The conference has always been about the melding of ideas from different disciplines. Why do you think this kind of convergence is particularly important? TED initially was based on the notion that there is important common ground between technology, entertainment, and design. Today the conference draws its inspiration even more broadly, encompassing science, media, and the arts. Everywhere you look you see convergence and cross-fertilization. Biology is transformed by computing power, while software is transformed by ideas from biology. New insights into human psychology rewrite the ground rules for product designers and marketers. The same strange science that explains the synchronization of cells in a beating heart turns out to be linked to how the Internet self-organizes. Agents for social change model their organizations on business star-ups, while entrepreneurs infuse their businesses with idealism. And so on. Creativity and insight aren’t things that happen to an individual only in a lab or in an artist’s loft. They are often sparked by ideas out of left field. The prevailing view has been that knowledge has to become more specialized; we were all told that to achieve something, we needed to dig narrowly and deeply into our subject matter, to become experts. Most people go to conferences of like-minded people to deepen their specific knowledge. But that kind of knowledge furrowing may not deliver the real “aha” moments that can transform our understanding. People digging in their own tunnels may just end up stuck at a dead end. People digging in their own tunnels may just end up stuck at a dead end. By contrast, the people who attend TED love to step into the intellectual unknown, to see what else is happening out there in art, physics, the environment, biology, computing, philosophy, and so forth. Four days of that, and suddenly you start to feel the fireworks going off inside your head. So you think it’s more important for executives to accrue broad knowledge than deep knowledge? Both matter, but it’s the former that we’re starved of. True innovation and strategic value are going to be found more and more in the synthesizers—the people who draw together stuff from multiple fields and use that to create an understanding of what the company should do. Consider technology companies. Many got bogged down creating cool technologies without paying attention to whether those technologies satisfied a need. Technology for technology’s sake is not interesting. How do you make it meaningful to people? By combining divergent areas of inquiry. For example, at one of our conferences, Bill Gross married ideas from psychology and technology with a clever business model and came up with GoTo.com, which became Overture, one of the Web’s big success stories. When disciplines are intermarried and placed in their larger, universal context, they gain greater meaning. The biggest innovations will spring not from pushing the boundaries of what you already know but from figuring out where you fit in the vast web of knowledge that you don’t have. At the last conference, there was a beautiful example of what can be achieved by entrepreneurs who fuse ideas from software and biology. Torsten Reil showed how his start-up NaturalMotion has overcome one of the biggest roadblocks in computer animation. By creating a software model that simulates human figures complete with skeletons, muscles, and nervous systems, the company has bypassed the need for expensive motion capture, in which stuntmen or athletes are hired to obtain the realistic body movements animators need. This opens the door to a new generation of scarily lifelike computer games and movies. This all sounds nice, but companies in a downturn are just trying to survive. Why should they pay particular attention to convergent thinkers and bigger pictures now? Once the economy takes off again, it will be too late to start thinking about what to create. Now is the time to do that. Look at Steelcase. The office furniture industry has had a brutal few years, but during that period Steelcase continued to dream, design, and innovate. Now that the clouds are lifting, they’re positioned in the market with a raft of award-winning new products. For example, the company codeveloped with IDEO the RoomWizard, an on-line room-scheduling device, which treats physical rooms as nodes on the Internet, allows users to book rooms from anywhere, and recalls their meeting preferences. Another example is IBM, which has already reinvented itself. The company is digging deeply into developments in life sciences; it sees an opportunity in the nascent marriage between biology and computing. Another reason to pay attention to the broad canvas is that today’s employees are on a quest for meaning. Since the tech bust and the wake-up call of September 11, a lot of people spent a couple years deeply turned off by the business world. They are searching for something more creative than merely executing on a business model. Everyone from the CEO down wants to work on stuff that is special, cool, satisfying, rich, and nuanced. Businesses that don’t offer meaning to their employees will not succeed in the long term.
