Reddit mentions of The Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation

I am currently taking a class called Engineering Innovation and we had to read excerpts from this book called The Medici Effect. One chapter is focused on the importance of diversity in innovating. Here is an excerpt that is relevant. I am posting this since the book is for us STEM types, which GGers, etc. claim to be.

> How Diversity is the Foundation for Groundbreaking Innovation; Working with Diverse Groups of People

>During World War II, the Allies were fighting a losing battle against the German navy. When a German submarine spotted an Allied convoy, it would send a coded signal to other German submarines in the area. These submarines would then gather into a group formation, known as “wolf packs,” and attack the ship with punishing success. The Germans were amazingly effective; between 1940 and 1941 they sank more than fifty ships a month, leading to total casualties exceeding fifty thousand.

>The Allies were helpless against these attacks because they were unable to break the German coding system, which was produced via a coding machine known as the Enigma, the most formidable of ciphers. British intelligence therefore built the most formidable of code-breaking groups, headquartered in a large Victorian mansion called Bletchely Park. Although cryptologists had traditionally come from the field of linguistics, this group also contained mathematicians, scientists, classicists, chess grand masters, and crossword addicts, all of whom worked together under supreme secrecy. Together this diverse team managed to break the Enigma and, as a result, turned the tide of the naval battle.

>There is little doubt that diverse teams, like the one at Bletchely Park, have a greater chance of coming up with unique ideas. I don’t mean diversity only in terms of disciplines, but also in terms of culture, ethnicity, geography, age, and gender.
Diversity in teams allows different viewpoints, approaches, and frames of mind to emerge. Diversity is also a proven way to increase the randomness of concept combinations. It is often said that one of the reasons for the United States’ unparalleled innovation rate is its very diverse population. People who have experienced the innovative power of diverse teams tend to do everything they can to encourage them.

>Steve Miller is such a person. He is the former CEO and chairman of Royal Dutch/Shell, the world’s fourth-largest company. If you talk to Miller about innovation for any length of time, it becomes clear that he believes diversity is a critical ingredient. Globalization has made it a necessity for a multinational like Shell. “You begin to find that you get some really neat ideas generated from creating a culture where people of different ethnicities, cultures, backgrounds, [and] countries … come together,” he says. “Invariably you find that the best ideas come from this mosaic of players working together in a team on a project. They will come up with an answer that is different from what any one of them would have come up with individually.”

>Working with a diverse group of people, then, is a great way to increase creativity. Even though this may seem like an obvious truth, it is remarkable how seldom we use it. People tend to stick to their own disciplines and domains. They stick to their own ethnicities and cultures. Miller often sees managers who logically understand that a team with people from different backgrounds can be more creative since “you can intellectually work your way through that.” But most people have a difficult time going from understanding the logic of such an argument to actually applying it, Miller says. He believes it is easier to do if you have actually seen the power of diverse teams, “because then you really know that it works.”

There is a little more that talks about the psychology of why people tend to self-discriminate that I can add if anyone is interested.

> I am seriously considering going into Academic/clinical psychology as a career path.

and Art on the side?

Take a look at this book The Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation, the TL;DR: is that Innovation happens most at the intersection of two unseemingly connected disciplines.