FoundersDavid SenraAll episodes
#270: Vannevar Bush (Pieces of the Action)
What I learned from reading Pieces of the Action by Vannevar Bush.
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Outline:
Pieces of the Action offers his hard-won lessons on how to operate and manage effectively within complex organizations and drive ambitious, unprecedented programs to fruition.
Stripe Press Books:
The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop
The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985-1993 by Jordan Mechner.]
Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century by G. Pascal Zachary
- Any exploration of the institutions that shape how we do research, generate discoveries, create inventions, and turn ideas into innovations inevitably leads back to Vannevar Bush.
- No American has had greater influence in the growth of science and technology than Vannevar Bush.
- That’s why I'm going to encourage you to order this book —because when you pick it up and you read it —you're reading the words of an 80 year old genius. One of the most formidable and accomplished people that has ever lived— laying out what he learned over his six decade long career.
- A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman (Founders #95)
- Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing by Thierry Bardini
- I don’t know what Silicon Valley will do when it runs out of Doug Engelbart’s ideas. — The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson. (Founders #157)
- Bush points out that tipping points often rest with far-seeing, energetic individuals. We can be those individuals.
- I went into this book with little more than a name and came out with the closest thing to a mentor someone you've never met can be.
- We are not the first to face problems, and as we face them we can hold our heads high. In such spirit was this book written.
The essence of civilization is the transmission of the findings of each generation to the next.
This is not a call for optimism, it is a call for determination.
It is pleasant to turn to situations where conservatism or lethargy were overcome by farseeing, energetic individuals.
People are really a power law and that the best ones can change everything. —Sam Hinkie
There should never be, throughout an organization, any doubt as to where authority for making decisions resides, or any doubt that they will be promptly made.
You can drive great people by making the speed of decision making really slow. Why would great people stay in an organization where they can't get things done? They look around after a while, and they're, like, "Look, I love the mission, but I can't get my job done because our speed of decision making is too slow." — Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos by Jeff Bezos and Walter Isaacson.(Founders #155)
Rigid lines of authority do not produce the best innovations.
Research projects flowered in pockets all around the company, many of them without Steve's blessing or even awareness.
They'd come to Steve's attention only if one of his key managers decided that the project or technology showed real potential.
In that case, Steve would check it out, and the information he'd glean would go into the learning machine that was his brain. Sometimes that's where it would sit, and nothing would happen. Sometimes, on the other hand, he'd concoct a way to combine it with something else he'd seen, or perhaps to twist it in a way to benefit an entirely different project altogether.
This was one of his great talen