Get Your Ambition On

Pull and Bear, the Spanish Retailer, claims the ‘spirit of youth’ as their inspiration; while the success of Gap is based on the youthful rebellion of the ‘summer of ’69’ personified by a master creative, until it grew up, grew old and stopped inspiring anyone.

The way they describe themselves is instructive. Pull & Bear are part of a ‘global youth culture’, designing spaces and clothes customers love. Gap is an ‘iconic retail brand’ continuing to build its brand presence around the world. Gap listens to the ghosts of retail past, Pull & Bear follows the voice of potential; the future gives it direction and unlimited energy.

The direction of a human group matters. Limit human aspiration to feeding an idea that is no longer worth the effort and human ability to sustain the system is constrained. Ambition is how we plug into discretionary creative potential. It is more powerful to engage human interest to create something better than to maintain what already exists.

Ambition is how we plug into discretionary creative potential.

Individual ambition may find it difficult to survive in a system limited by the past.

After 24 years with the company, Marka Hansen, president of Gap’s North American division, probably thought her work on launching a redesigned logo was certain of success. Or at least that support from her colleagues would be forthcoming. But that’s not what happened.

The change from traditional white-on-navy was greeted with aggressive disdain, particularly among tweeters and bloggers.

Only a few days later the new logo was abandoned and the online community of khaki-loving brand stalwarts were able to rest easy. Hansen denied, and then 'confessed 'her guilt of not making the ‘change the right way’. But the real damage was done in the seven years of falling sales before the logo debacle. Customers abandoned Gap long before any threatened redesign.

In 2008, Inditex, the owner of Pull & Bear, became the world’s biggest clothing retailer ahead of Gap. Just three years earlier it claimed the top spot in Europe from H&M. By 2011, Inditex had more than 5,000 stores, over 100,000 employees, revenues of nearly $17 billion and profits of more than $2 billion. When Inditex grabbed their crown in 2008, Gap had experienced negative growth in 30 of 38 quarters. Twenty of those negative quarters happened in a row from 2004 onwards.

That is the sign of an organization that cannot adapt even when the problem is too big, too obvious to be missed. Recognition is not sufficient to adapt - particularly when that recognition is laced with denial and complacency.

The leadership announcement to go with the 2009 results said they were proud to deliver higher earnings per share. The leadership announcement said they were improving their economic model. The leadership model spoke of 'trajectory of top-line performance' and 'targeted investments'.

This is not the plain-speaking recognition required to understand and make the necessary adaptations. Beware the language of confusion. This kind of corporate speak is a clear indication that the culture has lost the ability to speak the truth. There is no acknowledgement of the 10 years of poor performance or the 20 years of missed opportunities.

Instead of encouraging them to rise to new heights, their competition became they-who-must-not-be-named.

As the Inditex spokesman explained: ‘The success of the model is less in being able to adapt what you’re offering in the shortest time possible [so that] time is the principal factor to take into account, more so than the costs of production.’

Hiding behind excuses and fake success, the people at Gap were unable to learn from the speed of adaptation shown by their chief rival.

At this point, they had competed for over 30 years and all they tried to adapt was the logo. It’s the culture that needs to change.

Back in 1969, Donald Fisher and his brother Bob decided to open a retail outlet in San Francisco. The story goes that when Donald couldn’t find a pair of jeans to fit him, it prompted him to open a store. He picked Levi’s because he figured it would always enjoy great margins. His strength was finding undervalued property to provide great retail locations. Merchandising was left to his wife, Doris Fisher, and her team.

This worked until 1976, when Levi’s were investigated for price fixing. Margins and stock price crashed. Fisher tried lower-margin Gap-branded clothing which was dissatisfied with scraping along at the bottom of the market. Gap tried partnering with Ralph Lauren but was unable to manufacture with high enough quality to keep the young fashion star happy. The products were late and the jeans didn’t fit well. The partnership didn’t last long.

In 1983, Fisher found an answer by hiring Mickey Drexler who had successfully turned around Anne Taylor, a woman’s clothing retailer based in New York. Drexler wanted to throw out the low-margin clothes and start again with high quality, high fashion.

Fisher fought him but eventually relented. It was to be one of Ron’s three claims to fame: starting Gap, hiring Drexler and firing Drexler. It was Mickey who transformed the discount-jeans chain into a global mega-brand. It was Mickey who redesigned every inch of the stores. It was Mickey who overcame the contradiction between inexpensive and good taste. It was Millard ‘Mickey’ S Drexler, born 1944 in the Bronx, who brought in stars to make the brand shine. And it was his decisions that helped increase sales from $400 million to $14.5 billion by 2002. The year he was fired.

There were over 100,000 employees who worked at Gap during the Drexler years. Not one of them was selected to lead the company forward after Drexler left. Instead, Paul Pressler was appointed, fresh from 15 years working for the Walt Disney Company. He had run their theme parks, the Disney stores and even the licensing division. Before Disney, Pressler worked for Kenner-Parker who popularised 3.75-inch action figures including the famous range of Star Wars toys.

There are lessons to be learned here about individual ambition and ability to adapt. Before he left, Drexler, who knew everything about retail fashion, had made some mistakes. After he joined, Pressler, who knew nothing about retail fashion, would make more mistakes. The difference is that without an understanding of the adaptations that were necessary, it was near impossible for Pressler to learn from his mistakes.

When the next quarter results rose by 12 per cent, polished Pressler was praised. Yet it was too early to give him the credit. The decisions leading to those results were either short-term boosts to sales or came from his predecessor. Products sold today are decided on many months before. The growth was most likely to be successful adaptation by Mickey and his team to the lessons learned from previous disappointments.

Pressler didn’t want to work with Drexler’s team. Despite their talent having created the clothing that was selling so well, he wanted familiar faces around him. He yearned for people who made him feel comfortable, so he hired ex-Disney colleagues to positions in operations, finance and human resources.

Posters were posted. Values were valued.

He rejected the corporate motto of ‘Own it, do it, get it done’ and replaced it with ‘Explore, create and exceed together.’ Posters were posted. Values were valued. The number of meetings to explain the new culture increased. Meetings stole time from the job of turning around the company. Processes robbed the company of energy, spontaneity and the kind of magical, focused creativity that drives results in a fashion retailer.

Instead of looking a year ahead to conjure up the future in time to design it, Gap people were looking at weeks packed full of training and financial reporting. There was no room for the future. The joy had left the building.

It is very tempting to try to remake a new situation to match an old situation. Instead of admitting ignorance, Pressler insisted on doing what he could control. He cut costs by restricting all Gap brands to one supplier of fabric. He cut costs by having all samples made in Asia, not the USA. He did the exact opposite of Inditex. He focused on finance ahead of fashion. He focused on costs instead of growth. He set up blocks to adaptation.

This kind of wrong-headed maladaptation was supported by Gap’s owner because Fisher didn’t want to admit his error in kicking out Drexler. It was particularly difficult to recognize the mistake because Mickey was already transforming J-Crew from safe national mail-order service to international fashion powerhouse.

The more obvious the mistake the less likely an average leader is to confess, and without the rocket fuel of confession, adaptation can never be rapid.

Pressler was out by 2007, thanked by Fisher for being a ‘great partner’ and replaced by Glenn Murphy, ex-CEO of a drug retailer. Drexler had already taken J-Crew into public ownership and turned $609 million in debt into $1 billion revenues.

At Gap, Murphy, who knew nothing about fashion, spent 2008 cutting costs while revenues continued to fall. Inditex had just become the biggest clothes retailer in the world.

‘I look at running a store like playing a game. You want to win,’ said Don Fisher to an employee question. The problem is that he has restricted his definition of winning to staying in control.

It’s not impossible. It's not the fault of the wider global economy. Don has stopped himself from finding a creative successor to Drexler because he is unwilling to adapt to win. Fisher appears to lack the ambitious humility sufficient to let the magic back into Gap.

Why would he sabotage himself? Recent experiments by researchers at the University of Southern California suggest that someone with power may use that power to punish someone who has higher status. They created four groups from 213 volunteers. Each volunteer was randomly assigned to either a high-status or low-status role and asked to work as a partner in a business game. There was a bonus prize of $50 from a draw available for one volunteer.

Volunteers decided what tasks their partner had to do to qualify for the lottery. Both could choose what their partner had to do from a range of 10 tasks, half simple and half demeaning. They could choose to force their partner to complete all tasks or allow their partner to get away with just one task from the list. The difference was that half of the volunteers could decide that they could remove their partner’s name from the lottery if they didn’t like the tasks they had to complete. As a result they had high power while their partners had low power in the situation.

Those with high status and high power felt it unnecessary to humiliate their partners. Feeling good about themselves, they chose easier and fewer tasks for their co-workers. In complete contrast, those with low status and high power forced their partners through demeaning tasks.

They didn’t have to, and they gained nothing monetary through their decision to demean their high-status partner. For most, the power to do something about their feelings of low status was too much to resist. It’s important to note that low status was not about power or reward, it was about how the role was perceived by the individual and the group.

Fisher, the owner of the company, often complained about Drexler getting all the credit, praise and attention. As soon as Fisher had the opportunity, he had attempted to humiliate his rival.

He hired someone who could manage what existed rather than creating anything to challenge his status as founder. He punished Drexler by not letting him put his mistakes right even though the personal price he paid for his pettiness was high.

Sometimes, perhaps often, the first people to recognize something, or gain an insight, are not appreciated. The more extreme, or different, or unpleasant, or radical the insight is, the more extreme or unpleasant can be the reaction from those who do not share the view.

Very often those who receive the Nobel Prize have seen something first and have adapted their work to fit what they have seen. On 8 April 1982, Danny Shechtman, a scientist at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, saw something that was impossible. As he looked at photos of a rapidly cooled alloy, there were atoms arranged in a pattern that did not repeat itself.

They were crystals, yet not crystals. He saw something that should have not existed according to scientific knowledge at the time.

The head of his research group asked him to leave because he was bringing disgrace to them all. It broke so many basic rules that people would not accept that he could be right about what he observed.

There was even opposition from Linus Pauling, ‘father of molecular biology’ and double Noble Prize winner. Pauling famously rejected the notion saying, ‘There is no such thing as quasi-crystals, only quasi-scientists.’ Ouch.

Shechtman persevered. He found one supporter, then a second, then a third. His first paper was rejected, his second accepted but ridiculed by mainstream chemists. He gained increasing belief from mathematicians and physicists outside his direct expertise.

At one point, he received a copy of Thomas Kuhn’s book on the Philosophy of Science and found his experience fighting consensus on its pages.

The quasi-crystal story illustrates the importance of different kinds of adaptability. Pauling could not adapt his position to accept a new discovery in comparison to Shechtman who was unwilling to adapt his position to deny what he had found.

Opponents couldn’t accept the rewriting of orthodoxy, but eventually adapted to new evidence.

Ambition is a way of seeing the future.

Ambition is not equally distributed, nor is the kind of ambition we have equal in its nature. There are different kinds of ambition. Blind ambition is much criticized, while much endured. Narcissistic ambition can be unattractive to those who deal with the self-obsessed. Low ambitions may keep people in self-limiting situations while ambition to overcome constraints can be an act of imagination that changes the world.

Think back to Bill Gates wanting a computer on every desk. In 1981, this was an ambitious statement. In 1981, this seemed excessive because the personal computer was only just emerging from the hobbyist’s workbench and inventor’s garage. Ambition is a way of seeing the future. The way we see different futures shapes our actions in the present. We can only change anything in time going forward; ambition is what gets us started.

When Ponoko announces the world’s easiest making system, they are demonstrating revolutionary ambition. When they shout about the personal factory movement, they have introduced an idea that will not die even if they failed. Ponoko is a clever idea woven together with long-term human trends. We like to build. We like to find products that enhance our lives and solve our problems. Ponoko fulfils both needs.

It’s hard to overstate their ambition. They want to make it possible for someone to turn their idea into a real-life product as easy as buying a book on amazon.com. You are invited to upload your idea, buy or modify existing design templates. You can then add your products to an online showroom where they are made to order and delivered to customers.

Pull and Bear, the Spanish Retailer, claims the ‘spirit of youth’ as their inspiration; while the success of Gap is based on the youthful rebellion of the ‘summer of ’69’ personified by a master creative, until it grew up, grew old and stopped inspiring anyone.

The way they describe themselves is instructive. Pull & Bear are part of a ‘global youth culture’, designing spaces and clothes customers love. Gap is an ‘iconic retail brand’ continuing to build its brand presence around the world. Gap listens to the ghosts of retail past, Pull & Bear follows the voice of potential; the future gives it direction and unlimited energy.

The direction of a human group matters. Limit human aspiration to feeding an idea that is no longer worth the effort and human ability to sustain the system is constrained. Ambition is how we plug into discretionary creative potential. It is more powerful to engage human interest to create something better than to maintain what already exists.

Ambition is how we plug into discretionary creative potential.

Individual ambition may find it difficult to survive in a system limited by the past.

After 24 years with the company, Marka Hansen, president of Gap’s North American division, probably thought her work on launching a redesigned logo was certain of success. Or at least that support from her colleagues would be forthcoming. But that’s not what happened.

The change from traditional white-on-navy was greeted with aggressive disdain, particularly among tweeters and bloggers.

Only a few days later the new logo was abandoned and the online community of khaki-loving brand stalwarts were able to rest easy. Hansen denied, and then 'confessed 'her guilt of not making the ‘change the right way’. But the real damage was done in the seven years of falling sales before the logo debacle. Customers abandoned Gap long before any threatened redesign.

In 2008, Inditex, the owner of Pull & Bear, became the world’s biggest clothing retailer ahead of Gap. Just three years earlier it claimed the top spot in Europe from H&M. By 2011, Inditex had more than 5,000 stores, over 100,000 employees, revenues of nearly $17 billion and profits of more than $2 billion. When Inditex grabbed their crown in 2008, Gap had experienced negative growth in 30 of 38 quarters. Twenty of those negative quarters happened in a row from 2004 onwards.

That is the sign of an organization that cannot adapt even when the problem is too big, too obvious to be missed. Recognition is not sufficient to adapt - particularly when that recognition is laced with denial and complacency.

The leadership announcement to go with the 2009 results said they were proud to deliver higher earnings per share. The leadership announcement said they were improving their economic model. The leadership model spoke of 'trajectory of top-line performance' and 'targeted investments'.

This is not the plain-speaking recognition required to understand and make the necessary adaptations. Beware the language of confusion. This kind of corporate speak is a clear indication that the culture has lost the ability to speak the truth. There is no acknowledgement of the 10 years of poor performance or the 20 years of missed opportunities.

Instead of encouraging them to rise to new heights, their competition became they-who-must-not-be-named.

As the Inditex spokesman explained: ‘The success of the model is less in being able to adapt what you’re offering in the shortest time possible [so that] time is the principal factor to take into account, more so than the costs of production.’

Hiding behind excuses and fake success, the people at Gap were unable to learn from the speed of adaptation shown by their chief rival.

At this point, they had competed for over 30 years and all they tried to adapt was the logo. It’s the culture that needs to change.

Back in 1969, Donald Fisher and his brother Bob decided to open a retail outlet in San Francisco. The story goes that when Donald couldn’t find a pair of jeans to fit him, it prompted him to open a store. He picked Levi’s because he figured it would always enjoy great margins. His strength was finding undervalued property to provide great retail locations. Merchandising was left to his wife, Doris Fisher, and her team.

This worked until 1976, when Levi’s were investigated for price fixing. Margins and stock price crashed. Fisher tried lower-margin Gap-branded clothing which was dissatisfied with scraping along at the bottom of the market. Gap tried partnering with Ralph Lauren but was unable to manufacture with high enough quality to keep the young fashion star happy. The products were late and the jeans didn’t fit well. The partnership didn’t last long.

In 1983, Fisher found an answer by hiring Mickey Drexler who had successfully turned around Anne Taylor, a woman’s clothing retailer based in New York. Drexler wanted to throw out the low-margin clothes and start again with high quality, high fashion.

Fisher fought him but eventually relented. It was to be one of Ron’s three claims to fame: starting Gap, hiring Drexler and firing Drexler. It was Mickey who transformed the discount-jeans chain into a global mega-brand. It was Mickey who redesigned every inch of the stores. It was Mickey who overcame the contradiction between inexpensive and good taste. It was Millard ‘Mickey’ S Drexler, born 1944 in the Bronx, who brought in stars to make the brand shine. And it was his decisions that helped increase sales from $400 million to $14.5 billion by 2002. The year he was fired.

There were over 100,000 employees who worked at Gap during the Drexler years. Not one of them was selected to lead the company forward after Drexler left. Instead, Paul Pressler was appointed, fresh from 15 years working for the Walt Disney Company. He had run their theme parks, the Disney stores and even the licensing division. Before Disney, Pressler worked for Kenner-Parker who popularised 3.75-inch action figures including the famous range of Star Wars toys.

There are lessons to be learned here about individual ambition and ability to adapt. Before he left, Drexler, who knew everything about retail fashion, had made some mistakes. After he joined, Pressler, who knew nothing about retail fashion, would make more mistakes. The difference is that without an understanding of the adaptations that were necessary, it was near impossible for Pressler to learn from his mistakes.

When the next quarter results rose by 12 per cent, polished Pressler was praised. Yet it was too early to give him the credit. The decisions leading to those results were either short-term boosts to sales or came from his predecessor. Products sold today are decided on many months before. The growth was most likely to be successful adaptation by Mickey and his team to the lessons learned from previous disappointments.

Pressler didn’t want to work with Drexler’s team. Despite their talent having created the clothing that was selling so well, he wanted familiar faces around him. He yearned for people who made him feel comfortable, so he hired ex-Disney colleagues to positions in operations, finance and human resources.

Posters were posted. Values were valued.

He rejected the corporate motto of ‘Own it, do it, get it done’ and replaced it with ‘Explore, create and exceed together.’ Posters were posted. Values were valued. The number of meetings to explain the new culture increased. Meetings stole time from the job of turning around the company. Processes robbed the company of energy, spontaneity and the kind of magical, focused creativity that drives results in a fashion retailer.

Instead of looking a year ahead to conjure up the future in time to design it, Gap people were looking at weeks packed full of training and financial reporting. There was no room for the future. The joy had left the building.

It is very tempting to try to remake a new situation to match an old situation. Instead of admitting ignorance, Pressler insisted on doing what he could control. He cut costs by restricting all Gap brands to one supplier of fabric. He cut costs by having all samples made in Asia, not the USA. He did the exact opposite of Inditex. He focused on finance ahead of fashion. He focused on costs instead of growth. He set up blocks to adaptation.

This kind of wrong-headed maladaptation was supported by Gap’s owner because Fisher didn’t want to admit his error in kicking out Drexler. It was particularly difficult to recognize the mistake because Mickey was already transforming J-Crew from safe national mail-order service to international fashion powerhouse.

The more obvious the mistake the less likely an average leader is to confess, and without the rocket fuel of confession, adaptation can never be rapid.

Pressler was out by 2007, thanked by Fisher for being a ‘great partner’ and replaced by Glenn Murphy, ex-CEO of a drug retailer. Drexler had already taken J-Crew into public ownership and turned $609 million in debt into $1 billion revenues.

At Gap, Murphy, who knew nothing about fashion, spent 2008 cutting costs while revenues continued to fall. Inditex had just become the biggest clothes retailer in the world.

‘I look at running a store like playing a game. You want to win,’ said Don Fisher to an employee question. The problem is that he has restricted his definition of winning to staying in control.

It’s not impossible. It's not the fault of the wider global economy. Don has stopped himself from finding a creative successor to Drexler because he is unwilling to adapt to win. Fisher appears to lack the ambitious humility sufficient to let the magic back into Gap.

Why would he sabotage himself? Recent experiments by researchers at the University of Southern California suggest that someone with power may use that power to punish someone who has higher status. They created four groups from 213 volunteers. Each volunteer was randomly assigned to either a high-status or low-status role and asked to work as a partner in a business game. There was a bonus prize of $50 from a draw available for one volunteer.

Volunteers decided what tasks their partner had to do to qualify for the lottery. Both could choose what their partner had to do from a range of 10 tasks, half simple and half demeaning. They could choose to force their partner to complete all tasks or allow their partner to get away with just one task from the list. The difference was that half of the volunteers could decide that they could remove their partner’s name from the lottery if they didn’t like the tasks they had to complete. As a result they had high power while their partners had low power in the situation.

Those with high status and high power felt it unnecessary to humiliate their partners. Feeling good about themselves, they chose easier and fewer tasks for their co-workers. In complete contrast, those with low status and high power forced their partners through demeaning tasks.

They didn’t have to, and they gained nothing monetary through their decision to demean their high-status partner. For most, the power to do something about their feelings of low status was too much to resist. It’s important to note that low status was not about power or reward, it was about how the role was perceived by the individual and the group.

Fisher, the owner of the company, often complained about Drexler getting all the credit, praise and attention. As soon as Fisher had the opportunity, he had attempted to humiliate his rival.

He hired someone who could manage what existed rather than creating anything to challenge his status as founder. He punished Drexler by not letting him put his mistakes right even though the personal price he paid for his pettiness was high.

Sometimes, perhaps often, the first people to recognize something, or gain an insight, are not appreciated. The more extreme, or different, or unpleasant, or radical the insight is, the more extreme or unpleasant can be the reaction from those who do not share the view.

Very often those who receive the Nobel Prize have seen something first and have adapted their work to fit what they have seen. On 8 April 1982, Danny Shechtman, a scientist at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, saw something that was impossible. As he looked at photos of a rapidly cooled alloy, there were atoms arranged in a pattern that did not repeat itself.

They were crystals, yet not crystals. He saw something that should have not existed according to scientific knowledge at the time.

The head of his research group asked him to leave because he was bringing disgrace to them all. It broke so many basic rules that people would not accept that he could be right about what he observed.

There was even opposition from Linus Pauling, ‘father of molecular biology’ and double Noble Prize winner. Pauling famously rejected the notion saying, ‘There is no such thing as quasi-crystals, only quasi-scientists.’ Ouch.

Shechtman persevered. He found one supporter, then a second, then a third. His first paper was rejected, his second accepted but ridiculed by mainstream chemists. He gained increasing belief from mathematicians and physicists outside his direct expertise.

At one point, he received a copy of Thomas Kuhn’s book on the Philosophy of Science and found his experience fighting consensus on its pages.

The quasi-crystal story illustrates the importance of different kinds of adaptability. Pauling could not adapt his position to accept a new discovery in comparison to Shechtman who was unwilling to adapt his position to deny what he had found.

Opponents couldn’t accept the rewriting of orthodoxy, but eventually adapted to new evidence.

Ambition is a way of seeing the future.

Ambition is not equally distributed, nor is the kind of ambition we have equal in its nature. There are different kinds of ambition. Blind ambition is much criticized, while much endured. Narcissistic ambition can be unattractive to those who deal with the self-obsessed. Low ambitions may keep people in self-limiting situations while ambition to overcome constraints can be an act of imagination that changes the world.

Think back to Bill Gates wanting a computer on every desk. In 1981, this was an ambitious statement. In 1981, this seemed excessive because the personal computer was only just emerging from the hobbyist’s workbench and inventor’s garage. Ambition is a way of seeing the future. The way we see different futures shapes our actions in the present. We can only change anything in time going forward; ambition is what gets us started.

When Ponoko announces the world’s easiest making system, they are demonstrating revolutionary ambition. When they shout about the personal factory movement, they have introduced an idea that will not die even if they failed. Ponoko is a clever idea woven together with long-term human trends. We like to build. We like to find products that enhance our lives and solve our problems. Ponoko fulfils both needs.

It’s hard to overstate their ambition. They want to make it possible for someone to turn their idea into a real-life product as easy as buying a book on amazon.com. You are invited to upload your idea, buy or modify existing design templates. You can then add your products to an online showroom where they are made to order and delivered to customers.

The production is local or as local as possible. The idea is that people with 3D printers in their homes print the products for delivery to customers. It’s like frame knitting in the nineteenth century all over again, with family-sized businesses able to produce customized products to order from their houses, flats and cottages. They imagine a community of ideas made wonderful by increasing involvement and making production easier.

The local factory movement is a world away from the limited ambition of cutting costs to increase earnings. In many ways, 3D printing is characteristic of how technology revolutions happen. It started with curiosity. It continues to be nurtured with a kind of obsessive, altruistic fascination with making new ideas work through adaptation of existing technologies. Ideas are renewed with relentless experimentation.

Woodblock printing goes back nearly 2,000 years where it spread from China to the rest of the world. It took the Chinese, and then the Koreans, another 800 years to figure out movable type.

Another 400 years were required for a European to make a printing press. Around 1439, Johannes Gutenberg adapted the movable type idea into something faster, requiring fewer people and costing less money. Many consider his invention as the greatest of the second millennium.

A new typographical age energized the Renaissance throughout Europe. Ideas were able to travel faster between individuals, groups and nations. Opinions and discoveries could be shared. Once shared, the merits of ideas could be debated, critiqued and improved upon. The basis of a more reliable scientific community was made possible by the simple printing press. Scientists could see further by standing on giants’ shoulders, and those shoulders were made of books.

Something similar is happening with the internet. Online discussions, critiques and collaborations are much faster than with printed material. Speed may not be everything but if all interactions are of a similar standard then it is almost everything. The more attempts there are at solving something collectively, the more likely a solution is to be found.

Claims are made, objections discussed, and research interests exchanged. There are still benefits to publishing in paper but they may have less to do with making original contributions to human knowledge, much more with perpetuating systems of academic measurement and status.

Those who seek urgent answers and deep understanding will not wait for refereed journals with years of anonymous reviews and revisions. The adaptive process of recognition, understanding and action is accelerated by internet functionality and a collaborative sensibility. Some scientific communities have adapted centuries-old ways of working to the internet.

As a recent example, Ed Nelson, a professor at Princeton, announced that he had found inconsistencies with some of the fundamental principles of mathematics. The principles are known as the Peano axioms and were published in 1889 by Giuseppe Peano, an Italian mathematician.

The Peano axioms are believed by almost all mathematicians to be consistent on the basis of intuition; they seem true. For many, they are considered untouchable tenants of mathematical orthodoxy.

So when the claim was made that a proof had been found, significant debate began on the web. Maths bloggers, academics and amateurs, quickly joined in.

Terry Tao, UCLA mathematics prodigy, shared his concerns on his Google+ blog. Those concerns were reported by blogger John Baez, over at the University of Texas. Edward Nelson defended Tao’s criticisms about where the error in reasoning was likely to be found. Until after a couple of exchanges, Nelson conceded that his ‘original response was wrong’ and withdrew his claim. The work leading up to the claim must have taken years. The debunking of the claim leading to its withdrawal took just one day.

The speed is important, as is the manner of the exchange. As soon as an idea is released onto the web, it can be found through search engines by billions of users. They don’t need to be working with the originator of the idea, or to know about the details, they may just stumble upon it. Communities may form around individuals with ideas or the ideas themselves. Terry Tao has over 5,000 people following his discussions online: just a small example of the adaptive power of mass connectivity.

This is the kind of mass experimentation that the personal factory movement imagine. It is also the kind of mass personalization that ambitious visionaries see happening in industries as diverse as medicine, fashion, electronics and toys. They are trying to build systems that can adapt to the imagination, needs and dreams of the global population.

George Church is the kind of man who has ambition beyond the possible. This driven approach to adaptation seeks out necessity. He wants an improved world and so seeks ways of integrating disciplines to create what he wants.

In his lab at Harvard, he surrounds himself with younger people, he says, because ‘they will indulge me in my dreams’. He values their inexperience because, like him, ‘they don’t think things are impossible’. For other more experienced, or less imaginative, people, it is easier to reject ideas as crazy, just because they don’t yet work.

The chairman of bioethics at Boston University described some of Church’s vision as ‘in the realm of science fiction’ and felt that ‘you’ve got to be foolish to make as much progress as he imagines’. Such thinking doesn’t fully recognize the need or opportunity to adapt because it is limited by the current situation.

Thirty years ago, Church was one of the few who recognized the opportunity to sequence the full human genome. His lab was the first to design and build a machine to decode the genome. It cost $3 billion the first time around, so he kept improving it until the price to decode a genome reduced to $5,000. He believes the cost will rapidly lower to less than $250, to become a routine medical test.

He is involved in more than 20 different groups, private and publicly funded, with the aim of bringing together insights from different disciplines and as many resources as he can find. The focus is to map all seven billion of the world’s phenotypes, the way we are, with its genotypes, our genetic material. He will start with 100,000 volunteers and each of the 60 million bits that make up their individual genomes.

And that’s not all. Next he wants to build machines that will allow individual genomes to be deliberately adapted. They would go beyond genome sequencers to genome adaptors. According to Church, we will build machines to reprogram our individual genomes genetically and epigenetically. The process takes adult stem cells and takes them back to a pluripotent state where they can grow into any cell type.

Our focus here is twofold. First, how easily others reject unorthodox talk as a form of science-fiction-infected irrational exuberance despite the progress that has been made.

Perhaps only irrational exuberance can overcome the constraints of previous systems and knowledge? Perhaps only fiction is able to put the limits of the present situation aside for long enough to think our way to a far better place? Ambition takes you further.

Second, this concept of taking back adult cells to a more adaptable state is directly analogous to human systems. Each part of a social group, and each individual in a social group, tends to specialize.

This specialization includes economic roles or professions,but it also includes thousands of behaviours that fit into the patterns of behaviour around them. These become habitual, shortcut heuristics, many of which are followed without conscious thought. We may not even know why we are doing something.

Restoring our behaviour to a completely open state is probably not desirable but opening up is essential to allow new adaptation. Getting your ambition on requires a certain letting go of old limitations, forgetting of old constraints, going over the line, and towards new worlds ■

◾️Audiobook: Adaptability: How to Win in an Age of Uncertainty)

◾️Adaptability: Table of Contents

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