Capítulo 4
Pull Over Push: Harnessing Networks Instead of Stockpiling Resources
When the Pacific Plate collided with the Okhotsk Plate on March 11, 2011, it triggered a 9.0 earthquake that shifted Earth's axis and moved Japan eight feet closer to America. The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant lost power and faced tsunami waves twice the height of its seawall. Beyond TEPCO's failure to heed geologists' warnings about historical tsunamis, the disaster revealed a deeper problem: outdated command-and-control decision-making. While TEPCO pushed resources according to management's beliefs, the network era demands a pull strategy - using resources precisely when and where needed, with transparency and two-way information flow.
Within days of the disaster, volunteers formed what would become Safecast. They scrambled to obtain Geiger counters, which had become nearly impossible to find. The team built their own devices with help from Tokyo Hacker-Space, Chris "Akiba" Wang, and Andrew "bunnie" Huang. By mid-April, they reached Fukushima and discovered radiation readings varied dramatically even across short distances, revealing that government data from helicopter flyovers was dangerously inaccurate.
With Kickstarter funding and support from tech leaders, Safecast deployed citizen scientists across Japan, collecting over fifty million radiation data points by 2016, all released to the public domain. This exemplifies a radically efficient way to organize intellectual and physical capital. "Pull" draws resources from networks as needed, rather than stockpiling materials. For managers, this reduces costs and increases flexibility; for entrepreneurs, it's the difference between success and failure.
Originally from logistics, the pull concept was expanded by John Hagel and John Seely Brown in 2005 to transform entire supply chains. In the Internet age, traditional assets become liabilities that limit agility. Services like Amazon's cloud allow resources to be used just-in-time, scaling automatically with demand. The Internet thrives on "small pieces loosely joined," enabling niche organizations to fulfill specific needs within a complex ecosystem built on open standards rather than central control - explaining Wikipedia's triumph over Microsoft's Encarta.
The pull strategy extends beyond parts and labor to financial capital through platforms like Kickstarter and Experiment.com, which fund products and scientific research. Crowdsourcing provides independent creators access to global freelancers, lowering innovation costs. Safecast demonstrated how volunteers guided by open software principles could build more accurate tools than government agencies, providing actionable data that empowered affected communities.
Bitcoin emerged in this context on November 1, 2008, when the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto published a paper describing "a new electronic cash system that's fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party." This innovation could potentially lift billions from poverty and transform banking by creating money that functions without central authority. The blockchain - Bitcoin's public transaction ledger - represents a revolutionary shift in the relationship between individuals and institutions.
Unlike AOL's push model, companies like Twitter allow users to gather information and build relationships that benefit them across networks. These relationships grow from diverse networks enabling engagement with broad ranges of people and knowledge sources. Networks include both weak ties (casual acquaintances who provide new ideas) and strong ties (close connections that impact performance in complex problem-solving).
Capítulo 5
Compasses Over Maps: Finding Direction in Uncertainty
Using a compass is more valuable than following a map in our rapidly changing world. While maps imply detailed knowledge of terrain and optimal routes, compasses provide flexibility, allowing for creativity and autonomy in discovering one's path. The principle doesn't mean starting without direction, but understanding that the path to your goal may not be straight. Compasses enable exploration of alternate paths, productive detours, and unexpected discoveries - all hallmarks of the Media Lab's undirected research approach that "dances in the white spaces between disciplines."
America's educational performance lags behind many countries despite increased spending, with U.S. students scoring poorly in international math assessments. While programs like KIPP schools have shown progress through discipline and traditional academics, experts like former KIPP CEO Scott Hamilton believe we're "solving the wrong crisis." When a student questioned why she needed algebra for her fashion design aspirations, cognitive scientist Dan Willingham explained that algebra teaches abstract thinking - a crucial bridge between idealized concepts and practical application. The challenge is finding engaging, student-driven methods to teach these essential thinking skills.
David Siegel, seeking a programming tool for his son Zach, discovered Scratch after finding other options inadequate. Unlike Logo, the programming language he had used as a child, Scratch offers a colorful, friendly interface with commands written in simple English and represented as blocks that snap together like LEGO bricks. Designed for 8-14 year-olds, Scratch maintains Logo's philosophy of being easy to learn while offering unlimited creative possibilities.
In 1864, William Sellers proposed standardizing screw threads, a seemingly modest innovation that helped spark the second Industrial Revolution. Similarly, Tom Knight, Drew Endy, and Ron Weiss faced resistance to their synthetic biology work until they developed BioBricks - standardized, LEGO-like genetic components that could be assembled to create new biological systems. This modularization of biology emerged from computer scientists entering biological fields, not from traditional biologists. As Knight says, "Everything interesting happens because one field has crashed into another."
When business students attempted to map MIT's Media Lab's organization, they abandoned the project because everyone had different views of how it functioned. The Lab defies traditional mapping - it's a complex, self-adapting system where individuals run their own "algorithms" that interact with each other while maintaining a shared compass heading. The Lab's consensus vision centers on "Uniqueness, Impact, and Magic" - working on things no one else is pursuing, focusing on real-world impact rather than pure knowledge, and creating wonder.
After studying physics at Princeton, Mitch Resnick became a technology journalist at BusinessWeek, where he could interview figures like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Despite this access, he grew restless reporting on technical challenges rather than solving them. In 1982, hearing Seymour Papert speak about computers as tools for creative expression rather than just productivity changed his perspective completely.
Papert's approach was influenced by Jean Piaget, who studied how children develop understanding through building mental models that adapt with experience. Papert saw computers as perfect vehicles for this model-building play, creating Logo to help children learn programming through experimentation. After joining MIT's faculty in 1992, Resnick founded the Lifelong Kindergarten group and Computer Clubhouse program, continuing Papert's vision. By 2003, seeking to combine programming with community, Resnick began developing Scratch - a programming language that would build on Logo's foundation while adding social elements.
Capítulo 6
Risk Over Safety: The Changing Economics of Innovation
Julia Hu's journey illustrates how small entities now compete with larger organizations in our complex world. Despite having a promising sleep-tracking wristband idea and initial funding, Hu faced the $5 million barrier to retail distribution with less than $1 million in seed money. Her breakthrough came through meeting Liam Casey, CEO of PCH International, who offered something more valuable than capital: access to his supply chain.
Casey's approach represents "capitalism without capital" - businesses no longer need factories, warehouses, or offices, just ideas and marketing ability. This democratization allowed Julia Hu to bring her Lark wristband from concept to Apple Stores in just six months, with Casey handling everything from design to marketing.
This transformation is turning the consumer electronics industry from a place where Big Things dominated into something more like the software business, where individuals and small companies drive innovation. The hardware business now follows software's rules - when bringing ideas to market no longer threatens bankruptcy, the dynamic shifts from privileging safety to embracing risk.
Implementing risk over safety doesn't mean ignoring risk - it means understanding that as innovation costs decline, risk's nature changes. The Internet forced software companies to abandon bureaucratic protocols for agile, permissionless innovation. Many failed, but successful ones beat competitors to market.
Investors adapted by betting on great people and ideas rather than business plans and feasibility studies. Making numerous small, risky investments meant accepting most would fail, but the asymmetric returns from successes justified this approach. This requires willingness to walk away from failing investments rather than pouring more resources into them.
Even mature companies like Google embrace risk to remain agile. As Larry Page noted, incremental improvements become obsolete over time, especially in technology where non-incremental change is inevitable. Organizations allowing employees to pursue risk foster greater creativity, as demonstrated by Neri Oxman's risky but successful Silk Pavilion project at the Media Lab.
While America has Silicon Valley, China's manufacturing hub Shenzhen demonstrates risk-embracing innovation through shanzhai - originally cheap knockoffs that evolved into quality products that now improve upon originals. Freed from patent restrictions, shanzhai manufacturers produce small batches of products with innovative features, gauge demand, then scale production on successful items.
These nimble operators captured 20% of the global cell phone market by 2009 by introducing features like dual SIM cards and counterfeit money detectors before major brands could respond. The global black-market goods economy ranks second worldwide at $10 trillion, proving it pays to take risks.
Shenzhen exemplifies risk-embracing innovation through its manufacturing ecosystem. Media Lab students, joined by Reid Hoffman and MIT Provost Marty Schmidt, toured this ecosystem with Bunnie Huang. They visited AQS, a factory working with start-ups on unconventional manufacturing requests, where hardworking teams design processes for never-before-manufactured items.
The tour included King Credie's sophisticated PCB manufacturing, an injection molding plant with expertise unavailable in America, and markets where recycled phone parts sell by the pound, feeding both repair shops and production lines. In Shenzhen, tradecraft and secrets are shared selectively among trusted networks, creating an ecosystem impossible to reproduce elsewhere.
Capítulo 7
Creative Disobedience: Breaking Rules to Make Breakthroughs
In today's innovation landscape, disobedience often yields greater dividends than compliance. Charles Stine at DuPont funded "pure science" research despite its radical nature. Wallace Carothers, working at DuPont's "Purity Hall," pursued polymer research that eventually led to nylon's development, even when new management pushed for commercially-focused work. Similarly, 3M's Dick Drew ignored his boss's orders to stop developing masking tape, secretly purchasing equipment in $99 increments to avoid approval requirements. His disobedience led to Scotch tape and transformed 3M's business trajectory.
Austin Hill exemplifies the disobedient entrepreneur who evolved from questionable ethics to principled innovation. After dropping out in tenth grade, Hill founded his first company at sixteen - a scam that made $100,000 selling fake TV-watching jobs. Following a friend's confrontation about wasting his talents, Hill committed to more meaningful ventures. With his brother Hamnett, he founded one of Montreal's first ISPs, which they later sold at a substantial profit.
This funded Zero-Knowledge Systems, their ahead-of-its-time online privacy company whose Freedom product used cryptography to create secure pseudonymous digital identities. Despite controversy over potential misuse, Hill designed the system to discourage abuse through monetary cost and pseudonymous (rather than anonymous) identities, recognizing that communities degenerate when participants feel free from responsibility for their actions.
Cryptography evolved alongside human communication systems. Ancient Greeks used two primary methods to conceal messages: steganography (hiding messages within other containers, like tattooing a slave's scalp) and cryptography (encoding information). Early encryption methods included the Spartan scytale (a wooden cylinder with wound parchment), Polybius' grid for torch telegraphy, and Caesar's simple substitution cipher.
Cryptographic sophistication increased when 9th-century philosopher Al-Kindi developed frequency analysis in Baghdad. The Renaissance brought polyalphabetic ciphers from Alberti, Trithemius and Bellasso, while Cardano and Vigenere pioneered autokey ciphers. This cryptographic arms race continued through WWII with the German Enigma machine and British Colossus computer.
The 1970s democratized cryptography through three innovations: the Data Encryption Standard, Diffie and Hellman's public key cryptography concept, and the RSA algorithm implementation - laying groundwork for the cypherpunk movement and eventually Bitcoin.
After 9/11, Zero-Knowledge Systems removed Freedom's pseudonymous features to focus on corporate security. Hill explained it was "ahead of its time in terms of market acceptance" - a "Rolls-Royce design" without enough premium customers. The company survived the tech bubble crash, rebranding as Radialpoint in 2005. Hill moved into venture capital with Brudder Ventures and developed Akoha, a pay-it-forward game combining technology and social change. In 2013, he joined Adam Back at Blockstream, building side chains onto Bitcoin's blockchain to enable stock trades and smart contracts without trusted middlemen.
The Media Lab thrives on being "disobedience robust" - a quality essential for democracy and innovation. When MIT's general counsel questioned the "Disobedience over Compliance" principle, Joi explained that Nobel Prizes aren't won by following orders, and movements from civil rights to Indian independence succeeded through principled disobedience. There's a fine line between helpful and harmful disobedience, often clear only in retrospect.
Capítulo 8
Practice Over Theory: Learning by Doing in a Complex World
In our accelerating world, the cost of waiting often exceeds the cost of doing and adapting. While planning was once essential to avoid costly failures, today's network era has dramatically reduced innovation costs, making "failure" an affordable learning opportunity. This shift enables organizations to act without waiting for permission or extensive explanation, adapting as circumstances change.
At Quest to Learn, a NYC public school housed in the old Textile High School building, video games form the core of every subject. Students take "The Way Things Work" instead of science, and "Codeworlds" instead of English. The curriculum features "quests" and "missions" culminating in "boss levels." Beyond gaming, the school emphasizes collaboration - students participate in "crits" where they provide constructive feedback on peers' projects. While standardized test scores are just above average, the school excels at collaborative competitions like the Math Olympiad, preparing students for real-world workplace demands.
Putting practice over theory enables faster innovation with lower risk. Agile software development exemplifies this approach through adaptive planning and early client delivery - contrasting with traditional product development requiring extensive planning before production. Even Enrico Fermi suggested building nuclear reactors through rapid iteration rather than perfect planning, though resource constraints prevented this approach.
At the Media Lab, students regularly build prototypes within hours of conceiving ideas, thanks to advanced fabrication methods and open-source software that make trying cheaper than talking. This approach enables cross-disciplinary experimentation without long-term commitments, as seen in Google's 20% time policy that generates valuable innovations despite seeming inefficient to traditional management.
In December 2013, teenagers from underrepresented backgrounds gathered at hedge fund Two Sigma to learn coding from professional programmers. While Code.org's "Hour of Code Challenge" engaged twenty million people writing six hundred million lines of code, advocates face challenges integrating coding into national curricula. Despite studies showing visual programming languages like Scratch effectively teach basics and inspire STEM interest, computational thinking remains difficult to measure on standardized tests.
Beyond mathematics, students like Luka find Scratch helps with storytelling in English class. Mitch Resnick distinguishes his mission from Code.org's job preparation focus, arguing coding should be taught like writing - not just for career preparation but to help people think. This creates a troubling divide as wealthy schools embrace programming while disadvantaged schools focus on test preparation, potentially widening the achievement gap in what James Gee calls "the latest battleground for civil rights."
When discussing learning versus education, we're replacing top-down knowledge transmission with active, connected systems that empower self-directed discovery. While education is imposed externally, learning is self-generated. Effective learning systems value student interests, provide tools for discovery, and emphasize social connections - something John Dewey advocated nearly a century ago.
Research shows people learn best when connecting material to personal interests and relationships, yet traditional education still emphasizes isolated test-taking and rote memorization. This outdated model fails to prepare students for a world where success depends on tapping networks for just-in-time knowledge.
Capítulo 9
Diversity Over Ability: Why Different Perspectives Outperform Expertise
The remarkable story of Foldit demonstrates how conventional management practices often fail to match talent to task. In this game, ordinary people - including middle schoolers with no scientific background - solved a complex protein-folding problem that had stumped professional microbiologists for over a decade. Game designer Zoran Popovic observed that PhD biochemists weren't necessarily the best protein designers; instead, people with natural pattern recognition abilities or social skills for helping others approach problems differently excelled.
In 2006, Jeff coined the term "crowdsourcing" in Wired magazine, describing how companies were tapping into the talent of hobbyists and part-timers at lower costs than traditional employees. The concept quickly spread across industries from advertising to urban planning, with organizations like NASA, LEGO, and Samsung integrating public contributions into their core business practices. When successful, crowdsourcing exhibits an almost magical efficacy by breaking down the traditional boundary between producers and consumers.
The power of crowdsourcing lies in the cognitive diversity that naturally occurs in large groups - a principle demonstrated historically by initiatives like the 1714 Longitude Prize, which was won by self-taught clockmaker John Harrison rather than established scientists.
InnoCentive, founded in 2000 by Eli Lilly, demonstrates the power of diverse problem-solving by posting difficult scientific challenges online for nearly 400,000 scientists from 200 countries. Remarkably, about 85 percent of these problems - ones that had stumped experts at major companies - are eventually solved. Harvard research revealed that solvers are more likely to succeed when they have "distance from field" - less exposure to the discipline where the problem resides.
While over 60 percent of successful solvers have advanced degrees, nearly 40 percent don't, including a Canadian handyman who dropped out of physics graduate school. This contradicts our assumption that experts are always best qualified to solve problems in their specialty. As Scott Page notes, "Ability matters, but in the aggregate it offers diminishing returns," because similarly trained experts often share the same blind spots and biases.
Diversity isn't just good politics or PR - it's good management in an era of maximum complexity. Recent research confirms this principle: Team Bettencourt found that in synthetic biology, teams with greater gender parity consistently outperformed those with fewer women, despite women representing only 37% of the field. The iGEM competition showed encouraging trends with dramatic increases in women's participation over four years.
These findings align with Scott Page's research demonstrating that cognitive diversity produces measurable advantages in problem solving. Unfortunately, many industries fail to prioritize diversity, as seen in journalism where minority representation peaked at just 14% in 2006 (compared to 37% of the American population) before declining further during recession layoffs. The evidence increasingly shows that diversity benefits everyone at the table - a bigger circle truly benefits us all.
Capítulo 10
Systems Over Objects: Solving Complex Problems Holistically
The Media Lab gathers exceptional artists, thinkers and engineers, but what makes it unique is its emphasis on original thinking, bold experimentation and extreme ambition over mere ability and talent. The Lab proudly calls itself an "island for misfit toys," though it's closer to the Legion of Super-Heroes.
Ed Boyden, a neuroscientist whose work spans multiple disciplines, exemplifies the Lab's approach. At the World Economic Forum's "Nerds Dinner," when introducing himself among celebrated company, he simply stated: "My name is Ed Boyden. I'm solving the brain." This wasn't hyperbole - Boyden approaches the brain not as an object but as a locus of overlapping systems that can only be understood through their interactions with changing stimuli.
His synthetic neurobiology group operates on the premise that the brain will be "solved" in fifty years through new tools they must invent now. His diverse team of over forty researchers includes former concert violinists, venture capitalists, literature scholars, and college dropouts. This approach acknowledges the brain's staggering complexity: 100 billion neurons with trillions of connections, capable of storing 2.5 petabytes of data while using only as much energy as a dim lightbulb.
Boyden's breakthrough came through optogenetics - using light-sensitive proteins to control individual neurons - developed with Karl Deisseroth. This technique revolutionized neuroscience by allowing researchers to stimulate specific neural circuits rather than merely observe them. Since its development, optogenetics has been used to study brain function, control neurons involved in narcolepsy and Parkinson's, cure blindness in mice, and investigate applications like cardiac pacing. With over a billion people suffering from brain disorders, many might eventually be treated using insights from this technology that emerged from a systems-based approach rather than traditional disciplinary boundaries.
In March 2016, the Media Lab launched the Journal of Design and Science to bridge design and science in an antidisciplinary fashion. This initiative explores the vast "white space" between established disciplines - represented metaphorically as dots on paper. While funding and academic prestige concentrate around these disciplinary dots, the white space between them offers less competition and greater potential for breakthrough connections.
Design has evolved from creating objects to designing complex adaptive systems, shifting designers from central planners to participants within systems. This fundamental shift requires new values that extend beyond corporate or governmental efficiency to include underrepresented systems like the microbial world.
The Media Lab exemplifies this systems approach through courses like "Design Across Scales" taught by Neri Oxman and Meejin Yoon, which examines design from microbial to astrophysical scales. Another example is Kevin Esvelt's work as an "evolutionary sculptor," using CRISPR gene drive technology to edit genes of disease-carrying organisms. His focus isn't merely on gene editing but on the entire ecosystem including health systems, the biosphere, and society's capacity to consider such interventions.
This participant-designer mindset focuses on changing ourselves and our approaches to change the world, allowing us to tackle complex problems that don't fit neatly into traditional academic frameworks.
