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The Virtues of Having Strange People Close By

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This article is more than 10 years old.

Let's clarify: smart strange people, and only if you're interested in new ideas and innovation.  But, who isn't these days? It's new ideas that are changing the world, and the people behind them are, more often than not, a bit strange. That's an advantage, but only if they are strange together, rather than strange alone.

It's as true for strippers as it is for physicists and poets.  At least when it comes to needing conversations as the basic building block of their next great work! Gypsy Rose Lee, renowned for putting the tease into striptease, shared a house in Brooklyn Heights  [7 Middagh St.] in the 1940s with other tenants including the poet W.H. Auden, author Carson McCullers,  and the composer Benjamin Britten; all creative geniuses in their own right. Out of this house, as the new musical February House explores, came not only Gypsy Rose's best-selling novel The G-String Murders, but a whole slew of new ideas that bounced off of multiple art forms. Add in George Davis, the fiction editor of Harper's Bazaar, who has been portrayed by February House's director Davis McCallum as: “'...a collector'” adding that it wouldn’t be a stretch to say he “curated” his [bohemian]  big shots.' and what you have is the perfect conversational conditions for incubating great ideas! The name February House, incidentally, was bestowed by the author Anaïs Nin, who also used to be a habitué there.

We've seen this sort of "mashed-up" collaboration before: in le Bateau Lavoir, for example, which was the run-down Parisian building, fancied to look like a washing-boat from the Seine,  where Picasso, Modigliani, Matisse, Jean Cocteau, Juan Gris, Maurice Utrillo, Max Jacob, Guillaume Apollinaire and  Gertrude Stein had workshops in the early heydays of the 20th century. Or, Gil Evans' rented basement room, next to a Chinese laundry, on 55th St. in Manhattan, where an entire generation of soon-to-be jazz all-stars, including: Gerry Mulligan, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, George Russell, John Lewis, Max Roach, J.J. Johnson, Lee Konitz and Blossom Dearie, would hang out and contemplate the future of their art. Exactly the same thing was going on in Los Alamos, on a much bigger scale, where the Manhattan Project had assembled one of the greatest collections of physicists (not to mention Nobel Laureates) that the world has ever seen. And, on a much smaller scale, we know that the friendship of Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and Harvey Firestone led to a number of new ideas, including a collaboration involving Luther Burbank in the pursuit of a wartime substitute for natural rubber.

When it comes to innovation, conversations are the essential building blocks that make things happen. Ideas are the raw materials with which we'll create the future, and an idea at rest adds no value. Conversations, be they face-to-face, virtual, paper-based, interactive/non-interactive are the basis by which ideas move from concept to realization. February House, le Bateau-Lavoir, Gil Evans' apartment, the Manhattan Project, the Edison-Ford-Firestone holiday excursions, even the recent revelation of Facebook's "Timeline" project having Saturday morning meetings at the Piccino Cafe in San Francisco's Dog Patch neighborhood are all great illustrations of how conversational space can accelerate [or not] the movement of ideas towards innovation. And, what all of these conversations have in common is that:

  • they involved industries at inflection points [painting, poetry, popular music, atomic energy, resource (rubber) scarcities]
  • a concentration of exceptional talent -- if you're going to have a conversation, it's a good recommendation to include smart people
  • young ambitious participants, acting entrepreneurially
  • incredible diversity -- poets, painters, writers, physicists, inventors -- strange people, all, and more complimentary than competitive in their skill-sets and world-views
  • physical intimacy -- in every case, the spaces were crowded, intimate, open, inviting of conversations and inclusiveness
  • and, the presence of impresarios -- don't forget the suits: the George Davis and Gertrude Stein types of people;  they can get things done!

Innovation is an art, but it is an art where "managerial" interventions can accelerate or retard the rate of progress. Much of this concerns the sources from which ideas originate, the speed by which ideas move through an organization, the invitations to participate, the attitudes of the key decision-makers and the sources of inspiration that they draw from. The spontaneity that we see in the examples above is a gift that it would be wise for many more traditional organizations to borrow from. Just because we are not all bohemian artists  or physicists doesn't mean that we can't learn from them when it comes to creating the future.