__ Hey, it's not easy being a Valley proto-prophet. __
My advice is never let a publicist call you a visionary. I've hung out with the visionaries at the famed Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. I've been a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur. I wouldn't touch visionary with a 10-foot pole. It's like putting Who's Who on your résumé, not realizing the whole thing is a moneymaking scam that plays off the vanity of climbers. I'd choose entrepreneur over visionary every time.
It was back in the '80s that they started trying it out on me. In January 1979, I had left Xerox PARC to pursue entrepreneurial ambitions. By June, at 33, I'd founded 3Com Corporation. In another 18 months, I'd raised $1.1 million of venture capital, which in those days was serious money. And in another year, to my naive delight, investors and colleagues started calling me a visionary.
Intoxicated by the flattery, I didn't immediately realize I was being manipulated. I didn't know that nobody really wants visionaries running companies, that visionary is a code word used by investors and colleagues for an unruly guy who, through an accident of history, holds a huge chunk of stock in an otherwise promising company.
It's an old story, I know, but I wanted to run the company I'd founded. Everybody else involved wanted me to sit down and shut up.
I aspired to be both the visionary and the CEO. Where visionaries can be good at persuasion, CEOs are good at wielding authority. Visionaries transcend organizations, resources, and current realities, while CEOs master them. I wanted to do both: think deep thoughts and recruit the team; accumulate fame and direct corporate strategy; plus, ignore the chain of command, undermine day-to-day operations, and opine endlessly on matters of international importance that had nothing to do with the business at hand.
So I started looking for professional managers to handle daily operations. I expected that they would do what I told them, filling in and handling the dirty details, which, as you'll recall, is where God is.
But making the visionary-manager relationship work is like letting two bulls into a china shop. Your chosen managers will be winners, in which case you won't be tolerated for long. Or they won't be, in which case you won't be tolerated for long. Either way, there's all that broken china.
My professional managers, led by Bill Krause from Hewlett-Packard, were winners. In 16 months flat, Krause took the CEO title away from me and over the next eight years grew the company from 12 to 2,000 people.
I figured out quickly, as Krause was wrenching my company from me, that being a visionary means, worst case, being dumped. At best it means being a contributing editor on the masthead of a magazine like Wired. What happens to old visionaries? They end their days with libraries full of books they've written - and if they can be happy with that, fine. Too often, though, they're twisted by their jealousy of the people who have made real what they only predicted. Crying in the wilderness is what visionaries do, and in general, they are not very happy with their compensation.
So after my crucifixion, I chose not to flounce off in a huff. But neither did I settle for being the company's pet visionary, although every time I underperformed, the job was offered to me. Instead, after CEO, I rose again to be vice president of sales and marketing, up through a million dollars a month, and then, as general manager of various divisions, up to $400 million a year, which turned out to be the top of my operating range.
Now I'm fortunate to have a six-story townhouse overlooking the Charles River in Boston. I sometimes host salons there for entrepreneurs, and frequently find myself talking to young MIT engineers who say, Gosh, I hope to be a visionary like you and invent something like Ethernet so I can have a house like this. Inventing Ethernet didn't get me this house, I tell them. Building a company to make Ethernet and waking up early in hotels for 20 years to sell it got me this house.
There is, of course, a much more famous case of two bulls in a china shop. Steve Jobs is today not the annoying visionary he once was, but CEO and kicking butt at Apple. During his first stint there, though, Jobs played visionary to John Sculley's CEO. They locked horns soon enough. After Jobs' expulsion, Sculley tried for a while to be the visionary, publishing his book, Odyssey, and some visionary videos.
Now both Jobs and Sculley, though not reconciled, are out of their respective penalty boxes. Neither goes near the visionary peg. Sculley is a venture "catalyst" who claims to be nothing more than a marketing man. There's another book in the works - not by, but about, Jobs - who's busy again not predicting but creating the future.
For some, though, the allure of the visionary title is irresistible. Consider poor Ted Nelson. A couple of years ago I went to hear the hypermedia visionary talk at a big conference in Washington. In a room with hundreds of seats, there were maybe five of us there sitting at his feet. Apparently, people have grown tired of listening to Nelson bitterly reminding us of what he told-us-so decades ago.
Of course Nelson did tell us so, in his anthology of ideas about what we would later call the World Wide Web. But then, having the misfortune of being the son of a movie star, which carries the same burdens as being a high school quarterback, he didn't do much about it; nothing, at least, that panned out. Actually, Nelson wasn't nearly the first to tell us about the Web. MIT's Vannevar Bush laid most of it out in the '40s, before digital, and J. C. R. Licklider brought it back in the '60s, before personal computers.
Now if there were a Web visionary who had reason to complain, it would be Tim Berners-Lee. He designed the first Web protocols and wrote the first browser code almost single-handedly beginning in 1989, somewhat after but with considerably more impact than Nelson. Berners-Lee is now a cloistered academic researcher at MIT, while Marc Andreessen, who did nothing more than write the third or fourth Web browser as a college student, went on to found Netscape, get rich, and become technical visionary at AOL (a position that held his interest for a total of seven months). And then Andreessen could complain, and has in fact done so in court, about the usurpation of his Web visions by Bill Gates.
Nobody, especially after reading his books, calls Gates a visionary. He's a tycoon.
Bush, Licklider, Berners-Lee, Andreessen, Gates - Nelson will have to stand in line a long time to get all the credit he thinks he's due.
Also speaking at that Washington conference was Doug Engelbart, who'll forever be remembered for inventing the mouse. Engelbart's talk was better attended than Nelson's, but also laced with bitterness.
It was my dubious honor to summarize at the conference's closing plenary what Engelbart had said. I told the attendees, some of whom had just woken up from his talk, that Engelbart had not gone over the hill and grown bitterly boring in old age. I told them what I knew from direct experience, that he had been a boring speaker in his prime. I recall falling almost dead asleep in his SRI office in Menlo Park during a late-afternoon job interview in 1972. I'm sure I missed out on quite a lot by failing to listen more attentively. (For one thing, I went to Xerox PARC instead.)
Engelbart got left behind because he embodied his visions in the time-shared computers of his day and missed the detour we all took into stand-alone personal computers. With the emergence of the Web, though, he'll be back. He also recently won the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize for his lifetime of innovation, which has taken the edge off his crying in the wilderness.
One of the best illustrations of the shelf life of visionaries is Xerox PARC, which was a hotbed of them. Perhaps the most famous of the brilliant-research-centers-that-barely-made-anything, PARC was great at nursing big thinkers.
Follow this true tale about how nobody wanted to do the visionaries' shit work. They all wanted to be visionaries themselves.
It begins with PARC's Computer Science Lab. CSL was a tree full of owls, so PARC created a Systems Science Lab (SSL) to take visionary ideas from CSL and engineer them into products.
But of course the good people in SSL preferred not to be a conduit for CSL, but to have their own visionary ideas. So in time PARC created an Advanced Development Lab (ADL) to make practical prototypes out of the ideas from CSL and SSL. PARC cleverly put ADL in Los Angeles, 400 miles from the visionaries, just so ADL people would not be confused about their charter.
Well, you guessed it. ADL's Angelenos would rather have had their fingernails pulled out one at a time than adopt even a single idea from the arrogant twits up near what they insisted on calling Frisco.
And so Xerox, by then desperate to make something of its investment in PARC, created a Systems Development Division (SDD), in Palo Alto, where I worked starting in 1976. And then - as that wasn't quite working out - an Advanced Systems Division (ASD), also in Palo Alto. Next, Xerox's Office Products Division (OPD) in Dallas was given the job.
The technology transfer from PARC's CSL visionaries did not make it to market through the bucket brigade of ever more practical, self-effacing, and subvisionary people in SSL, ADL, SDD, ASD, and OPD. What did happen is that various entrepreneurs, some from within PARC, after a polite period, and some from without, with no politeness at all, stole the visions and made them profitable.
For contrast, consider Compaq, now the world's second-largest personal computer company. Never had a visionary. After Jobs at Apple and Don Estridge (R.I.P.) at IBM, Rod Canion founded Compaq to do no more than make money cloning IBM PCs. When that simple idea ran out of runway, in came Eckhard Pfeiffer, not a visionary if there ever wasn't one. Compaq is now looking, not for its first visionary, but for someone even tougher than Pfeiffer. I'm pushing Slobodan Milosevic.
Now, to be sure, there are visionaries who don't end up poor and bitter, or at least haven't yet. There are MIT's two Greek visionary computer lab directors, Nicholas Negroponte and Michael Dertouzos - although they have the unfair advantage of leading research toward their visions, and then graduating students who become entrepreneurs in their name. And there's Sky Dayton, who doesn't seem the least bit piqued not to be at his company's helm any longer. Dayton, who founded EarthLink, now a large and growing ISP, brags about not having been admitted to college while envisioning how the Internet should evolve. Despite the failure of her girl-software company, famed to have been flooded with visions, so far Brenda Laurel is still affable. And Alan Kay, one of PARC's most famous visionaries, betrays a bit of I-told-you-so, but he's far from bitter. Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future, is a professional think-tank visionary in his prime. I only worry Saffo will succumb to the classic temptation of frequent speakers (and I'm not exempt): saying things that are not right but cute.
So, despite the term's sketchy track record, plenty of people are still claiming it. But I wouldn't. Not with a 10-foot pole. Of course, as you may have noticed, it's quite a trick to get credit without taking it. So, in my dotage, I've settled on the term pundit - a guru without followers, opining about technology. You probably think that, after all this, I know that you know that I want you to think I'm a visionary anyway. Well, you couldn't be further from or closer to the truth.
