The Engineer as Creative Monopolist

Peter Thiel is the founder of PayPal and was an early investor in Facebook and many other celebrated technology firms.  Thiel is currently teaching a class this semester in the Stanford Computer Science Department.  A student named Blake Masters posted his outstanding class notes online, and Thiel has confirmed their accuracy (The link - - class notes).

In the class, Thiel argues that companies mistakenly seek to be good competitors.  The focus and ultimate goal being just a little better than 150 (or 150,000) similar companies.  Instead, Thiel thinks companies should redirect their attention on being really good monopolists.  By monopolists, Thiel means the following - - instead of being slightly better than everybody else in a crowded and established field, it's often more valuable to create a new market and totally dominate it.

David Brooks had an excellent column discussing this on April 24, 2012 (New York Times - - The Creative Monopoly).  Brooks wrote the following:

"Think about the traits that creative people possess.  Creative people don't follow the crowds; they seek out the blank spots on the map.  Creative people wander through faraway and forgotten traditions and then integrate marginal perspectives back to the mainstream.  Instead of being fastest around the tracks everybody knows, creative people move adaptively through wilderness nobody knows."

The "Engineer as Competitor" is and will be necessary - - mainstream capitalism will always value the skills of discipline, rigor, and reliability.  But the "Engineer as Competitor" also needs the skills of the "Engineer as Creative Monopolist" - - that person that brings alertness, independence, and the ability to redeem forgotten innovative traditions.

A key point engineers should remember - - competition should not trump value creation.  Competition must not undermine innovation and creativity.  The outcome is clear for the "Engineer as Creative Monopolist" - - the world of the creative monopolist has much higher profit margins with the potential value to society being much greater.

Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead belongs in the Creative Monopolist Hall of Fame with his - "You don't what to be the best of the best, you want to be the only one that does what you do."  So the next time you go to a Little League baseball game, you will probably see 99 kids engaged in the art and glory of competition.  You also probably have one that turned his or her back on competition.  The one that is thinking about inventing their own game, with new rules, and new markets.  The difference between an A-Rod or Mark Zuckerburg.  The competitor versus the creative monopolist.  Then you have the Steve Jobs of the world - - equal parts competitor and monopolist.