Business: If you’re into Innovation, you ought to read The Idea Factory.

The Idea Factory by Jon Gertner is a wonderful book about AT&T Bell Labs … and invention and innovation … at the world’s premier industrial R&D organization.  The book is an easy read.  For those who, like me, enjoy the human angle, there is lots to enjoy.

Full disclosure:  I loved Bell Labs.  My kind of place:  scary smart, hardworking, and interesting people.  I am so proud to say that for about 5 years I had dual citizenship in AT&T and Bell Labs and led (a small) part of it as an Executive Director.

This will almost certainly appeal to true telecom, Bell System, and technology aficionados … but I think many others will also enjoy.  And can learn from it.

If you prefer a podcast interview format, try https://danhesse.com/mentors-radio-episodes/jon-gertner-bell-labs?rq=idea%20factory, where Dan Hesse does a masterful job of discussing the book with Gertner.

My take-aways: 

1. 1. Hire really smart people.
   2. Hire people from a broad array of STEM disciplines (engineering, physics, chemistry, math, etc.)
   3. Connect them to real-world, important, valuable problems and challenges.  (Relatively easy for industrial R&D venues but difficult for others.)
   4. Set up a culture of excellence, collaboration, and serendipitous interaction.
   5. Practice both loose … and ruthlessly disciplined management … as the situation demands.  (By “loose” I mean enabling the freedom to intellectually roam and explore.  By disciplined I mean recognizing ideas that are high risk / low value and having the guts to “kill” them … while also driving high value and must-do ideas across the goal line in the real world.)  

In its heyday, Bell Labs had the resources to do these things at large scale.  But their best practices are transferrable to much smaller scale endeavors.

PS It was nice to see a lot of names I recognized and a lot of people I knew.  Of those I knew, their portrayal is fair, accurate, and fulsome.  And those portrayed are representative of a lot of others.