Quality is a probabilistic function of quantity

The New Yorker has a tremendous collection of writers - - Dexter Filkins, Anthony Lane, Steve Coll, Lawrence Wright, Jon Lee Anderson, Jane Mayer, Roger Angell, Ken Auletta, Ian Frazier, Adam Gopnik, Seymour Hersh - - and many more.  Probably the best collection of writers on any magazine staff (The Economist is a close second!).

Malcolm Gladwell also writes for The New Yorker and he is one of the writers and thinkers engineers need to follow.  Author of The Tipping Point (2000), Blink (2005), Outliers (2008), and What the Dog Saw (2009) - - his work deals with the very interesting intersection among the social sciences, business, technology, and everyday life.  This intersection is important for engineers to understand (Gladwell's father is a civil engineering professor emeritus at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada) - - our real-world Big Policy problems are more complex than we think.  They have a human dimension, a local dimension, and are likely to change as circumstances change.

Reading Gladwell starts you thinking - - he gets the right hemisphere talking to the left hemisphere.  The country also needs more engineers that are foxes (versus the hedgehogs), with a wide-ranging curiosity and willingness to embrace change.  Gladwell writes for the foxes.

The New Yorker has two columns that Gladwell writes for - - "Annals of Business" and "Annals of Innovation."  Both are excellent.  In the April 16, 2011issue, Gladwell has a story, "Creation Myth" that covers innovation - - mostly in the context of Xerox PARC and Apple (the next time you are at the grocery store, try and figure out the connection between the deodorant aisle and Apple).

Gladwell writes the following:

The psychologist Dean Simonton argues that this fecundity is often at the heart of what distinguishes the truly gifted.  The difference between Bach and his forgotten peers isn't necessarily that he had a better ratio of hits to misses.  The difference is that the mediocre might have a dozen ideas, while Bach, in his lifetime, created more than a thousand full-fledged musical compositions.  A genius is a genius.  Simonton maintains, because he can put together such a staggering number of insights, ideas, theories, random observations, and unexpected connections that he almost inevitably ends up with something great.  "Quality," Simonton writes, is "a probabilistic function of quantity."

Simonton's point is that there is nothing neat and efficient about creativity.  "The more successes there are," he says, "the more failures there are as well" - - meaning that the person who had far more ideas than the rest of us will have far more bad ideas than the rest of us, too.  This is why managing the creative process is so difficult.  The making of the classic Rolling Stones album "Exile on Main Street" was an ordeal, Keith Richards writes in his new memoir, because the band had too many ideas.  It had to fight form under an avalanche of mediocrity:  "Head in the Toilet Blues," "Leather Jackets," "Windmill," "I Was Just a Country Boy," "Bent Green Needles," "Labour Pains," and "Pommes de Terre" - - the last of which Richards explains with the apologetic, "Well. we were in France at the time."

At one point, Richards quotes a friend, Jim Dickinson, remembering the origins of the song "Brown Sugar."

I watched Mick write the lyrics . . . He wrote it down as fast as he could move his hand.  I'd never seen anything like it.  He had one of those yellow legal pads, and he'd write a verse and then turn the page, and when he had three pages filled, they started to cut it.  It was amazing.

Richards goes on to marvel, "It's unbelievable how how prolific he was."  Then he writes, "Sometimes you'd wonder how to turn the f--- tap off.  The odd times he would come with so many lyrics, you're crowding the airwaves, boy."  Richards clearly saw himself as the creative steward of the Rolling Stones (only in a rock-and-roll band, by the way, can someone like Keith Richards perceive himself as the responsible one), and he came to understand that one of the hardest and most crucial parts of his job was to "turn the f --- tap off," to rein in Mick Jagger's incredible creative energy.