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    The Myth of the Garage: And Other Minor Surprises
    The Myth of the Garage: And Other Minor Surprises
    The Myth of the Garage: And Other Minor Surprises
    Ebook75 pages56 minutes

    The Myth of the Garage: And Other Minor Surprises

    By Dan Heath and Chip Heath

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    About this ebook

    From Chip and Dan Heath, the bestselling authors of Switch and Made to Stick, comes The Myth of the Garage: And Other Minor Surprises, a collection of the authors’ best columns for Fast Company magazine—16 pieces in all, plus a previously unpublished piece entitled “The Future Fails Again.”
    In Myth, the Heath brothers tackle some of the most (and least) important issues in the modern business world:

    • Why you should never buy another mutual fund (“The Horror of Mutual Funds”)
    • Why your gut may be more ethical than your brain (“In Defense of Feelings”)
    • How to communicate with numbers in a way that changes decisions (“The Gripping Statistic”)
    • Why the “Next Big Thing” often isn’t (“The Future Fails Again”)
    • Why you may someday pay $300 for a pair of socks (“The Inevitability of $300 Socks”)
    • And 12 others . . .

    Punchy, entertaining, and full of unexpected insights, the collection is the perfect companion for a short flight (or a long meeting).
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRandom House Publishing Group
    Release dateNov 8, 2011
    ISBN9780307953599
    The Myth of the Garage: And Other Minor Surprises
    Author

    Dan Heath

    Dan Heath and his brother, Chip, have written four New York Times bestselling books: Made to Stick, Switch, Decisive, and The Power of Moments. Heath is a senior fellow at Duke University’s CASE center, which supports entrepreneurs fighting for social good. He lives in Durham, North Carolina. The Heath brothers’ books have sold more than three million copies worldwide and have been translated into thirty-three languages.

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      Book preview

      The Myth of the Garage - Dan Heath

      Acknowledgments

      THE MYTH OF THE GARAGE

      First published December 19, 2007

      Tales of groundbreaking innovation sound a lot alike. Like action-adventure movies, they have a predictable structure. You know how Die Hard 4 is going to end and you know how YouTube began: Some ordinary guys, without money or power, triumphed via a brilliant insight and scrappy groundwork, just like Hewlett and Packard, who started in a garage. Or Jobs and Woz, who founded Apple in a (different) garage. Or Michael Dell, who lived the same tale but upgraded to a dorm room. Rebels, all of them, who triumphed over Big Business.

      But what if those stories mislead us about what it takes to generate great ideas? Two researchers from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, Pino Audia and Chris Rider, have debunked the Myth of the Garage in a recent paper. The garage, they say, evokes the image of the lone individual who relies primarily on his or her extraordinary efforts and talent to triumph. The reality is that successful founders are usually organizational products. A separate study of VC-backed companies found that 91% were related to the founders’ prior job experience. Audia and Rider say entrepreneurial triumphs aren’t due to lonely, iconoclastic work—they’re eminently social. Wait a minute: Entrepreneurs aren’t rebels, then, so much as recently departed organization men and women.

      Consider two of the founders of YouTube, Steve Chen and Chad Hurley. Both cut their teeth at PayPal; in fact, Hurley was one of PayPal’s first employees and even designed its logo. (He is also the son-in-law of James Clark, who founded Netscape and Silicon Graphics.) Top-tier venture-capital firms were calling them, offering money, counsel, and connections, within months of launch. You have to admit, this tale isn’t quite as uplifting as the more familiar YouTube origin story, in which twentysomething buddies create a cool site to swap videos with friends and then it goes gangbusters.

      As for Jobs and Wozniak, yes, there was a garage, but less discussed is Jobs’s background at Atari (he was employee number 40) and HP (What I learned there was the blueprint we used for Apple, he told a journalist in 2003). Meanwhile, Wozniak was an engineer at HP, and he gave it the first shot at his microcomputer idea. (Bad call, HP.)

      In other words, companies aren’t born in garages. Companies are born in companies.

      This reality shouldn’t diminish these monumental achievements. Yet it feels like it does, because we crave the excitement of these creation myths. Your startup emerged from a systematic discussion of market opportunities, conducted at a networking function at the Marriott? Yawn. Give us the garage. In fact, the Apple story would be even more satisfying if Jobs and Wozniak had actually built the garage first, by hand, out of toothpicks scavenged from local restaurants.

      Because we eat these stories up, ideas tend to evolve to suit our fancies. Christopher Columbus, we all know, wanted to prove he could reach India by sailing west. But no one believed his absurd theory that the earth was round; his own sailors were terrified their ships would fall off the edge. His crew almost mutinied!

      But that version of Columbus is a myth, according to historical sociologist James Loewen. In Columbus’s day, most people knew that the world was round. The evidence was there for them to see: People noticed that, when another ship receded into the horizon, its hull disappeared first, and then the mast later, which suggested that there was some kind of curvature in play. Furthermore, Columbus’s three ships enjoyed lovely sailing, with no record of mutinous talk. And he actually set sail to find gold, not to strike a blow for geography.

      Columbus arguably discovered the New World. Kind of a big deal. But as with garage entrepreneurs, we want more. We like Columbus’s story even more when, en route, he has to fight off a feisty crew.

      As stories are told and retold, they evolve. They come to emphasize individuals, not organizations; to celebrate a flash of insight over stepwise improvements; and to exaggerate obstacles while downplaying institutional support. In years to come, expect YouTube’s triumphant story to grow even grander than it is today. But if you’re starting a company or launching a product, don’t get lured into scouting out a garage. Learn from your predecessors: First, get a job.

      THE BIRTH OF A STICKY IDEA

      First published April 1, 2010

      If you were on a New York subway last fall, you might have noticed a provocative ad that showed soda being poured from a plastic bottle into a glass tumbler. By the time the soda hit the tumbler, it had transformed

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