Bell Labs as a Pioneer of Culture and Practices that Made Knowledge Workers Productive

A number of elements were needed to create the information economy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, much of what was needed emerged at the company responsible for America's communication: AT&T. Bell Labs did not just develop amazing technology like transistors, fiber optics, lasers and cellular telephones. They developed the practices that made knowledge workers productive.

Three of those practices were a reliance on
1. research rather than just tinkering,
2. creating a community of minds, and
3. crossing boundaries between the private and public sector.

research rather than just tinkering
Thomas Edison tinkered. It took him about 3,000 experiments before he figured out the light bulb. He gained knowledge through trial and error.

No one has the time and money it would take to develop fiber optics, transistors, or satellites with trial and error. To develop products that much more sophisticated than a lightbulb required basic research, gaining an understanding of theory. Bell Labs had folks focused on basic research, on gaining understanding of deeper principles that would enable technologies like fiber optics that could carry thousands of conversations along the same strand or satellites that could seemingly defy gravity while collecting and transmitting information across continents at the speed of light.

Because it was a place where people could perform basic research, nine Nobel Prizes were awarded for work at Bell Labs. The ripple effect of this basic research has still not been fully felt. Three of those Nobel Prizes were awarded for the development of the transistor and one of those prize winners went on to found the first in a series of companies that would lay the foundation for Silicon Valley. It is true that a lot of basic research will never payoff; it is also true that it is impossible to fully calculate the value of successful basic research. Early in the 1900s, William James was explaining pragmatism as assessing the cash value of holding an idea. An idea like transistors and all that it enabled has a value in the trillions and counting.

creating a community of minds
Bell Labs was a community.

It was a creative environment that fostered a rich exchange of ideas, something the science writer Steven Johnson has observed is more important in eliciting important new insights than market forces. The projects at Bell Labs required teams. Those teams required a community. The problems they were solving and possibilities they were pursuing were far beyond the capabilities of any one person.

crossing boundaries between the private and public sector
One of the many reasons that the information economy is a global economy is because ideas show as little respect for borders as clouds or pandemics. Translating ideas into value doesn’t come from rigid barriers between nations or institutions. It comes from a flow of ideas and practices across such lines.

A 2008 study titled "Where do Innovations Come From?" concluded that partnerships between corporations, government laboratories, and university researchers has become essential to innovation. In 2006, for example, 77 of 88 US entities that produced significant innovations had received federal funding.

Bell Labs received government funding in a couple of ways. The first was that the government granted it monopoly status to run the nation’s phone system. This guaranteed steady revenues to fund long-term research. The second was that Bell Labs received billions from the federal government. In World War 2 alone, Bell Labs received thousands of contracts. It was the beneficiary of the funding for these projects and of course the beneficiary of the intellectual capital generated by these projects.

The central question of the information economy was how to make more knowledge workers and make them more productive. Bell Labs gave us some great answers to the question of how to make them more productive. Their technology made the flow of information – and thus ideas – easier, which made knowledge workers more productive. As befits a company responsible for creating and maintaining the phone system that connected an entire nation, it also pioneered a culture and practices for corporate America that encouraged cooperation and a free flow of ideas.

Given the complexity of the problems in the 20th century, any successful effort would find a way to encourage collaboration among lots of really smart and informed people. Because one of the many truths to emerge out of the 20th century is that all of us are smarter when all of us are smarter. As we connect and share ideas, your insights become mine and mine become yours. Often, this inspires yet another insight or idea. If I give you a dollar and you give me a dollar, we walk away no better off. If you give me an idea and I give you an idea, we both walk away better. Technology and culture that encourages communication and collaboration – even across traditional boundaries of private and public sector - is key to making knowledge workers more productive.

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Much of the above information about Bell Labs came from Jon Gertner's The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation.

The Month in Which the Modern Information Age Was Born

In December of 1947, Bell Labs researchers laid the foundation for the world that so defines us today.
Doug Ring and Rae Young wrote a memo "Mobile Telephony: Wide Area Coverage," in which they laid out the idea of a honeycomb of hexagons and repeating frequencies within cells, a system that would eventually be called cellular phones.
John Bardeen and Walter Brattain - working under the management of William Shockley - were perfecting the transistor that became the foundation for computer chips.
Claude Shannon coined the term "bit" as he defined a new field that would be known as information theory. (No one had previously thought of a unit of measurement for something as abstract as information.)
All within one month.
Why mention this?
World War 2 ended in 1945. A tremendous amount of money, problem-solving and research went into this problem of how to save democracy. WWII was a tragedy but it triggered a tsunami of problem-solving and breakthroughs. More importantly, it was a catalyst for new ideas and exposed everyone to new situations. It wasn't just that a lot of knowledge came out of this. It set in place processes, practices and new technologies that continued to generate new knowledge. As all that potential shifted from war to peacetime, it created new possibilities. About two years after the world war was over, its momentum helped to lay the foundation for the smart phone you're holding in your hand right now, a supercomputer in your palm linked to endless libraries of information.
Our response to COVID-19 could be very similar, a catalyst for ideas that will create new worlds. Some good will come out of these odd times.

The Libertarian Philosophy - A Truth (often ignored) and a Misconception (largely embraced)

Libertarians advocate one thing that seems to me obviously right (but is often resisted) and another obviously wrong (but nonetheless wins the approval of most Americans).

A general trust in markets seems to me the most important thing they get right. Market solutions don't require consensus or bringing along committees and citizen action groups or the popular vote. An entrepreneur can just try something and assuming they can convince the right mix of investors and employees to go along, they have a chance to change how we live. That's pretty cool and the libertarians' trust in individuals seems to me repeatedly justified by the on-going success of entrepreneurs whose success may never have been predicted by any majority opinion.

The problem with market-driven progress is that it blows in on gales of creative destruction. Solar power can close down coal mines; digital photography can close down picture development kiosks. The status quo has a lot of wealth and power and part of what libertarians get right is that because of this power, government tends towards crony capitalism that protects existing industries in order to protect those investors and employees rather than forcing them to respond to the market. Government can become an obstacle to progress. Look at the coal miners in West Virginia, an industry that began in 1740. If we protect the 44 year old miner today, how much longer do we need to save his job? For two more generations? Two more years? What is society's obligation to protect him? Some politicians will say that for as many generations as he'll vote for you to go to DC to protect him and as long as the coal mining investors will fund your political campaign. Industries that would have a rough time getting thousands from a venture capitalist are sometimes successful at getting billions from governments.

Libertarians' belief that we should let markets disrupt and create new wealth and jobs even while eradicating old jobs and wealth is something I think is right. Still, it seems easy to find programs that protect industries (think of our enormous subsidies to farming and oil). This feel likes a truth often ignored.

So what do I think they get obviously wrong? This notion that government should then be small. I believe that successful markets depend on robust government programs in at least two ways. People always want protection and security. If you are not going to protect their jobs and industries, you need to offer them some personal protection. This, to me, means healthy unemployment insurance, jobs retraining and really hefty subsidies to kindergarten through grad school education, among other things. I also believe that we can hardly spend too much on research at places like the Center for Disease Control or National Health Institute or the National Science Foundation.

I have worked with hundreds of product development firms within companies, from startups funding only one project to Fortune 50 firms with thousands of projects. They develop new products. They need a product that can launch soon. The pharmaceutical companies have the longest development window - about a decade - but most target product launches within about 2 to 4 years. You've heard of R&D, research and development? This is D, the development. It's important. It's crucial. As cliche as it sounds, it can change the lives of investors and consumers. The iPhone is an example of development. The rightful focus of private companies is the D in R&D.

Research is hugely uncertain, though. It will probably result in nothing. If it does result in something cool it may happen a decade or three later than you expected. Not every cool thing becomes profitable. Because of this, corporations rarely finance research and it needs to be heavily funded by government, by groups like DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) or the University of California. This research - the R - is crucial to corporations' later development - the D. "The parts of the smart phone that make it smart—GPS, touch screens, the Internet—were advanced by the Defense Department," as Mariana Mazzucato points out in her book The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths. Corporations try to find a way to translate R that has taken one to two decades into D that takes two to four years. It's a pretty cool system.

The libertarian fantasy that communities work well with lean governments is wrong on two counts: a community that learns to sail the gales of creative destruction makes its people feel secure with change rather than resistant to it (which requires a strong welfare state) and getting the research to the point that companies can make it profitable takes considerable public sector leadership.

James Watt, employee at University
of  Glasgow, the same university that
employed professor Adam Smith

The contest between the public and private sector is not zero sum. A strong public sector can make the private sector healthier, and vice versa. (And obviously by strong I don't mean power over, the power of corporate lobbyists to choke government or for governments agencies to choke corporations. Instead, I mean power to, the way that advances in one lead to advances in the other, each enabling the other.)

When a libertarian talks about how markets are more innovative than government programs and how individuals should be given freedom to pursue what they think will make them happy, nod knowingly and agree with him. (Libertarians are twice as likely to be men, so this is probably a "him" you're talking to.)  Say something like, "Yeah. The pursuit of happiness. It's literally in our founding documents."  

When he tells you that this means governments should be much smaller, laugh at his naivete. (Libertarian men love when you do that because then they chuckle with you and say, "Well, you can't blame me for wanting lower taxes.") 

The formula that has seemed to work for progress is to let entrepreneurs and companies rapidly change our world while funding the cost of their creativity with research and education and then funding the cost of their disruption with welfare, unemployment insurance, universal healthcare and - yep - more education and jobs training. Who pays for those government programs? Everyone, but the ones who pay the most are the ones who succeed the most: those successful entrepreneurs and companies who so benefit from being part of a system that knows how to create and then harness the gales of creative destruction.