Joe: You know that famous book about how teamwork created the digital revolution? The one that's super popular, highly-rated, and on every tech entrepreneur's bookshelf? Lewis: I think I do. The one that finally put the 'lone genius' myth to bed? Joe: That's the one. Well, what if its core message is a myth, and it's actually just a slicker, updated version of the same old 'Great Man' theory of history? Lewis: Hold on, that can't be right. We're talking about Walter Isaacson's The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, aren't we? Joe: Exactly. Lewis: But Isaacson is the official biographer of genius! The guy wrote the definitive books on Steve Jobs, Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Elon Musk. And the whole point of The Innovators, the reason it got such widespread acclaim, was that he shifted focus to collaboration and teams. Joe: You're absolutely right. It's highly rated on every platform, and its central theme is supposedly collaboration. And that's precisely what makes the deep academic critiques of it so fascinating. They argue that despite the packaging, the book presents a distorted, incomplete, and ultimately misleading history of innovation. Lewis: Wow. 'Misleading' is a heavy charge to level against an author like Isaacson. Okay, I'm intrigued. Where does this critique even begin?

Joe: It starts with the book's most fundamental promise: to explain innovation. The problem is, Isaacson himself admits on the very first page that innovation is, and I'm quoting here, "a buzzword, drained of clear meaning." Lewis: Okay, a bit of self-aware honesty. I can respect that. He’s acknowledging the difficulty of his subject. Joe: He is, but the critique, particularly from historians like Andrew Russell, argues that after admitting this, Isaacson never actually builds a solid definition or framework. Instead, he ends up offering these very neat, but ultimately empty, conclusions. For example, he concludes that successful innovators were "product people." Lewis: Well, yeah. If you successfully innovate a product... you're a product person. That seems obvious. Joe: That's the point! It's a tautology. It’s a circular argument that doesn't explain anything. It's like saying the secret to winning the marathon is to cross the finish line first. He also says things like, "The most successful endeavors... were those run by leaders who fostered collaboration while also providing a clear vision." Lewis: That sounds like every generic leadership book ever written. It’s describing success after the fact, not providing a predictive model. Joe: Precisely. And this leads him to create what one critic called a simple "recipe for success." Midway through the book, Isaacson states that innovation requires three things: "a great idea, the engineering talent to execute it, and the business savvy (plus deal-making moxie) to turn it into a successful product." Lewis: Okay, that sounds reasonable enough. Idea, talent, business skills. What's wrong with that? Joe: What's wrong is that it completely fails to account for failure. And there's no better example of this than one of Isaacson's own heroes: Steve Jobs. Lewis: I'm listening. How does Jobs break the formula? Joe: After he was forced out of Apple in 1985, Jobs founded a new company, NeXT. He had a brilliant idea: to create the most advanced workstation computer for universities and businesses. He had legendary engineering talent, poaching some of Apple's best. And if anyone had "business savvy and deal-making moxie," it was Steve Jobs. He had all three ingredients from Isaacson's recipe in spades. Lewis: Right. So the NeXT computer was a massive success? Joe: It was a colossal commercial failure. It was too expensive, it was late, and it never found its market. The company burned through cash and eventually had to pivot entirely away from hardware. The project, as envisioned, failed. Lewis: Whoa. So Jobs himself, the poster child for innovation, followed the recipe perfectly and still failed. What does Isaacson's model do with that? Joe: That's the core of the critique. It can't explain it. A framework that only works for successes isn't a framework at all; it's just a flattering description. It’s hero worship disguised as analysis. By focusing only on the wins, Isaacson creates these simple formulas that fall apart the moment you test them against the messy reality of failure. Lewis: That makes so much sense. It’s like you’re only studying the people who won the lottery and concluding the secret is to have a ticket with the winning numbers. It tells you nothing about the millions of people who had tickets with losing numbers, even if they were just one digit off. Joe: That's a perfect analogy. And that habit of only looking at the winning tickets leads directly to the second, even bigger distortion in the book.

Lewis: Okay, what's the second major distortion? Joe: It's the tendency to write "history by the winners." This creates what historians call a teleological bias. Lewis: 'Teleological.' You're going to have to break that one down for me. Joe: It just means writing history as if the outcome was always inevitable. You look at the result—say, Microsoft's dominance—and you tell the story backward from there, making every step seem logical, planned, and necessary. It smooths out all the randomness, the lucky breaks, the stupid mistakes, and the messy human motivations that were actually driving events in the moment. Lewis: Can you give me an example of where Isaacson does this? Joe: The best one is the birth of Microsoft's empire. In 1981, the giant of the computing world was IBM. They decided to enter the new personal computer market and needed an operating system. They ended up licensing one from a tiny, unknown company called Microsoft. Isaacson presents this as IBM "anointing Gates as king of PC software." He even quotes Bill Gates looking back, saying he knew that "one operating system, most likely the one chosen by IBM, would become the standard." Lewis: Right, it sounds like a brilliant, strategic move from both sides. IBM picks the winner, and Gates knows he's about to become the king. Joe: That's the clean, "winner's history" version. But the historical reality, as dug up by other scholars, is much messier and far more interesting. Inside IBM, the powerful mainframe and minicomputer divisions saw the new PC as a "toy computer." It was a side project, a potential fad. Their main goal was to protect their incredibly profitable proprietary systems. Lewis: So they weren't trying to build the future of computing? Joe: They were trying to protect their present! They didn't want to divert their best engineers to write a new operating system for this "toy," because that might take resources away from their real money-makers. So, they made a quick, pragmatic decision: just license one from some outside kid. It was a low-risk, low-priority move designed to get a product out the door without disrupting their core business. Lewis: Wow. So the decision that made Bill Gates a billionaire and created the PC standard wasn't some grand coronation. It was a bureaucratic compromise driven by IBM's fear of cannibalizing its own products. Joe: Exactly. It was a "messy, provisional, and highly random inflection point," not a logical step on a pre-ordained path. But by telling the story from the winner's perspective, you lose all that crucial context. You lose the real lesson, which is that world-changing events are often the accidental byproducts of powerful institutions trying to maintain the status quo. Lewis: That is a much better story. And it makes you realize what gets lost. What's another example of this kind of historical blindness? Joe: There's a fantastic one that Isaacson's critics say he missed by not engaging with the work of a key historian named Paul Ceruzzi. The story is about Howard Aiken, a celebrated pioneer of mainframe computers in the 1950s. Lewis: A big name in the early days. Joe: A huge name. His machines were marvels of engineering, designed to solve complex mathematical problems. And because he was so successful in that paradigm, he became, in the words of the critique, "hampered by his own successes." He was so focused on computers as giant calculators that he made a now-infamous prediction: that only a few computers would ever be needed in the entire United States. Lewis: Oh, that's one of those classic forecasting blunders. Like the guy who said the telephone was a toy. Joe: Precisely. And Ceruzzi's work explains why he was so wrong. Aiken, and the entire computer establishment of his time, was "blind to the possibilities" of a different kind of computing. They couldn't imagine a computer being a "tool for thought," or for entertainment, or for creating graphics and games. As Ceruzzi puts it, Aiken "probably never fully understood that a computer could... do problems having little to do with mathematics." Lewis: So his own success created a blind spot that prevented him from seeing the next revolution. Joe: Exactly. The personal computer revolution was an "insurgent revolution" driven by a younger generation, people like Alan Kay, who had a completely different vision. They saw computers as tools for media, culture, and amusing individuals. It was a paradigm the establishment literally could not see. Lewis: That's fascinating. So the real lesson isn't just in studying the winners like Bill Gates, but in understanding why the previous winners, like Howard Aiken, became losers. You have to study the blind spots. Joe: You have to. Because as Ceruzzi wrote, "Whenever a new technology is born, few see its ultimate place in society." The most important lessons often come from the people who got it wrong, not just the ones who, through skill and a lot of luck, got it right.

Lewis: Okay, I'm convinced. Isaacson is a phenomenal storyteller, a master at weaving together these grand narratives. But maybe he's more of a myth-maker than a historian. Why does this distinction matter so much? So what if he tells a cleaner, more heroic story? Joe: It matters because the stories we tell about the past become the maps we use for the future. If we believe the myth that innovation comes from singular heroes following a simple three-step recipe, then that's what we'll look for. We'll fund the charismatic "product person" with the great idea and the deal-making moxie. Lewis: And we'll be completely blindsided when they fail, like NeXT did, because the recipe was wrong. Joe: Exactly. And if we believe the myth that history is a clean, logical progression, we'll assume the next big thing will look like a better version of the last big thing. We'll become like Howard Aiken, so successful in our own paradigm that we're completely blind to the "toy computer" being built in a garage somewhere that's about to change the world. Lewis: So the messy, random, failure-ridden reality is where the actual, useful lessons are hidden. Joe: That's the heart of it. The real story of the digital revolution isn't a neat collection of heroic biographies. It's a chaotic ecosystem of collaboration, yes, but also of accidents, of bureaucratic inertia, of lucky timing, and of spectacular failures. By cleaning up the story to make it more inspiring, we strip out the most valuable, actionable insights. We get a great story, but we lose the truth. Lewis: It makes you wonder, what "obvious" revolutions are the successful giants of today completely blind to, just like Howard Aiken was? What's the thing they're dismissing as a "toy"? Joe: That is the billion-dollar question, isn't it? It’s probably not what we think it is. It's likely something that doesn't look like a computer, doesn't solve a math problem, and is currently being used for something that seems utterly frivolous. Lewis: That's a great thought to end on. We'd love to hear what you all think. What's the modern-day equivalent of the 'toy computer' that the establishment is underestimating right now? Let us know your thoughts on our social channels. We're always curious to see what our listeners come up with. Joe: This is Aibrary, signing off.