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This is Reinamoto's podcast, The Creative Mindset.
Hi, everyone. Welcome to The Creative Mindset, a podcast about what the future holds at the
intersection of creativity and technology. I'm Reinamoto, the founding partner of I&CO,
a global innovation firm based in New York and Tokyo. This is part two of my conversation with
Joe Polanyi, the founder and CEO of On Education. Before starting his own company in 2021,
he spent more than 12 years at Apple. Before that, he spent a couple of decades teaching at
Stanford, Harvard and Yale School of Management. If you haven't listened to part one of this
conversation, please go back and listen. There's a lot of interesting and really,
really useful facts and tips about teaching and fostering the culture of creativity.
In part two, we go into what he learned at Apple, including specific episodes,
what the difference between debating and arguing is, and what makes a company good
at what he calls collective creativity. So, let's get started.
日本企業の階層制とアイディアの変化
A lot of Japanese companies are very hierarchy-based, hierarchical. And it's a very
age-based society in that if you are older, you are superior to younger people. There's a cultural
construct in Japan. And that is reflected in the corporate environment as well.
So, it's oftentimes what the boss says that goes. And I would imagine in your past experience that
you've worked at companies that, and particularly Apple, I would imagine that was very hierarchy-
based and there was a very strong individual at the top. So, when you are, or if somebody
finds themselves in a situation where there's a very strong voice at the top or at least in the
room, right? How did you see those ideas getting debated and say, the boss changing, I guess,
in this case, his mind, right? Like, what were some of the tools that you and or the teams around
you used in order to change a strong voice or a person with a very loud voice change their mind?
If at the end of the day, you're really driven by a common purpose and you're really focused on
the ideas that drive the common purpose, there's absolutely no loss in saying, I was wrong about
this. And now I want to go this way because what I care about is what you care about, which is
what we're trying to do for the world, what we're trying to do for our customers,
what we're trying to do to just add to greatness and beauty in the world.
But if it's like the minute, the thing that I care about is the same thing you do,
we're both then really looking for the best idea. Even if I'm a really loud voice, and even if I'm
hard to argue with, I'll keep arguing. I'll keep being loud. And you're going to keep being
uncomfortable. But you're going to care because you care about what we're trying to do together.
Appleの決断
And I'm going to keep at it because I care about that, too. One of the most significant decisions
in Apple's history was the decision to put iPod and iTunes on the Windows platform.
That initially, Steve was very much against putting iPod and iTunes on the Windows platform
because he really believed, and in a way that was very reasonably, that in order for Apple at the
time to succeed at the company, the Mac had to succeed as a business. And the closest thing Apple
had come up with as a killer app, the kind of thing that would make people buy the Macintosh,
was this wonderful music device called iPod. And so Steve was arguing very strongly for that.
And yet, there were people in the company who believed, because Apple, at the time,
only had about 5% of the overall PC market, that there was this huge lost opportunity
for trying to give people an Apple experience by not putting iPod on the Windows platform.
And they debated. And they debated. And they rock tumbled for months and months and months.
And they would role-play. And they would shift views. And then they would come back. And eventually,
Steve was convinced. And again, it was a hugely consequential decision.
Because if iPod hadn't been put on the Windows platform, there's no way Apple
would have had the influence that they did on music. No way it would have had the sales that
it did. No way that they would have been as well-positioned to launch iPhone when they did.
And that obviously transformed the company and transformed the world.
組織内での意思決定と批判的思考
But people did everything that we talked about. They practiced their arguments.
They made it always about the idea, not about the person. There was this incredible respect
for the fact that everybody in the conversation had deep experience, deep expertise.
Yeah, it's a great story.
What was the thing that tipped him over?
That, hey, you know what, let's put iTunes and iPod on the Windows.
So it's interesting what tipped him over because he's somebody who famously
is a very intuitive decision maker. But what tipped him over in this case was some data.
It was a spreadsheet analysis that essentially showed what was the upside opportunity for
sales of iPod in the PC market compared to the downside loss of lost Mac sales
by people not buying iPod. And by the way, they completely underestimated
the sales going to the PC market. Completely underestimated. But even being underestimated,
even being underestimated, it was still overwhelming that that was the thing to do.
And he said, OK, let's give it a try.
Did he ever admit, hey, you guys were right about the iPod-iTunes thing?
So that I do not know. What I could say is what I suspect, and this is just speculation,
and it goes back to this idea of it being about the idea, is he would say it doesn't matter.
Even going back to people and saying you were right, I was wrong, is all of a sudden making
it about whose idea it was versus not. All that matters is it's the idea.
Right, right, right. Good point. It was the right idea. It was a good idea.
And it doesn't matter who said it or who.
I suspect.
Yeah, that sounds about right. And I think that is one of the important lessons,
I think, from this conversation. It's about the idea and the purpose, not the people,
you know, who said what, right?
集合的創造性の重要性
And by the way, this is also kind of the beauty. If it had turned out to be wrong,
I'm sure they would have pivoted back. And this is probably one of the other things about
companies. And maybe this is a way to go back to this notion of collective creativity.
What is collective creativity?
You know, so we'll, I'll tie it back to the definition of individual creativity.
So if individual creativity is this, you know, this capacity for original thought
and skillful action based on that thought, then collective creativity would be
the collective or group capacity for original thought and collectively
engaging skillfully on the basis of that thought.
Companies that really are great at executing on collective creativity,
once they come up with like a new idea or a new approach,
they're then all in around the new approach until that new approach looks like it's wrong.
And then they'll pivot to another. So they're never hedging, right?
They're never, you know, wishy-washy, you know, like, okay, well,
maybe we'll do a little bit of this, a little bit of that.
It's like, we're all in, completely all in until we're all in about something else.
And I think that's, I think that's a great way to be like, I mean,
I think that's a great way to get information and data on does this make sense?
Because if you're just dipping your toe in, you don't really know, is the idea good?
You don't know the idea is good or bad until you give it the best shot it's got.
And then when you get the feedback, if it's about the idea and if it's about the purpose,
then everybody's comfortable pivoting.
So how do you balance arguments versus debates and the friction?
マインドセットと役割
You know, how much friction is good friction and how much friction is bad friction?
Yeah, that's a great question.
So one of the things that when I teach about debate cultures that I will talk about is,
you know, like, let's talk about like the tells or the signs that
we're having debates and not just arguments.
And one of the tells, one of the signs is people actually do change their minds.
And as trivial a point as that may be, I think a lot of the people who will be listening to your
podcast have been in companies where there's cultures where nobody changes their mind in
the big room, right?
Like, you know, there may be side conversations outside.
There may be, you know, people trying to persuade people by going into individual offices.
But nobody kind of, people come, they're prepared to advocate.
Nobody's really listening.
Like, I'll give my views, you'll give your views.
Then time will be up because we've got to go to our next meeting.
That's an argument.
So one of the tells is people change their mind.
Now, in order for people to change their mind, what then has to be in place?
One, to just state the obvious is you need curiosity to be an important part of the
culture.
Like when you walk in with a different view than I have, like my first inclination shouldn't be
to try to convince you you're wrong, like to go into advocacy mode.
Like, you know, you're wrong.
My first inclination should be like, wow, like why?
I mean, raised in the same company, raised, been exposed to a lot of the same things I
have as a different view, like, like why?
Like what's behind that?
And so like to kind of like lean in with questioning and not just advocacy.
アイデアの独立性
And so, you know, good friction is we're not just advocating, we're inquiring.
And so that's another sign of the sort of the good level of friction.
I think a third aspect of it is, and this is always hard and it's a
practice, it's something all of us can get better at.
But it's that the ideas can be discussed independently of who presented them.
So we could get to the point where, you know, you end up saying the idea that I came up with
is, and I'll use really strong language here.
That's a really stupid idea, right?
Like you could say that, like, that's a stupid idea.
And here's the reasons why that's a stupid idea.
And I could hear that and not hear it as you are telling me, Joel, you're stupid, right?
The idea is, but I'm not.
You know, and I think the minute it becomes personal, then I also think that's the friction
has gotten too high.
And teams that I have been on that have been really great teams, they're really good at
at walking that line of keeping the focus on the idea, you know, not making it personal,
not hearing it personally, because it's oftentimes in the hearing.
It's not necessarily in the saying.
That's another big piece of the friction, not getting too high.
But I do think there has to be some friction.
I think it's really hard to get a really high level of creativity without friction.
You know, I mean, maybe there are examples of it.
Sometimes the friction comes from the constraints of the resources that you have at your disposal.
Sometimes the friction comes because you're trying to deal with competing views.
But oftentimes that's where the original thinking comes out of.
So you need some, but then you also then need in place, you know, this willingness to change
minds, this, you know, making the conversation about the idea, you know, not, you know, it
being personal.
Tell us a little bit about owner education and what it is and why you started and what
you're trying to do.
オンライン教育の課題
When I was running Apple University, we're in the middle of, you know, we got hit as
the whole world did by COVID.
And like everybody who's teaching and like myself was used to teaching in person.
Now I'm teaching online and my team is teaching online.
And I had great teachers who are still there.
They're still great teachers.
And a great teacher in person can be a great teacher online, but they can't be great for
two hours, four hours, eight hours at a time, right?
With breaks.
I mean, when you teach a group in person, you can continue to teach for, you know, for
some time with breaks, but online, on Zoom, on WebEx, whatever, you can't.
And so now that led to a problem for me.
It led to kind of a problem for my team because we either had to like reduce the ambitions
of how much teaching we could do because we've got to sort of shrink the amount of time people
are in class, or we've got to figure out how do you create collective engagement in those
moments between live sessions around the learning materials that support the course.
I want to understand more specifics of what you mean by collective engagement.
集団的な関与の重要性
Can you give me a few examples of what you mean by collective engagement and how your
platform, your system, Ono Education allows collective engagement to happen?
We're all probably familiar with, well, I don't know if we're all, but many people are
probably familiar with the experience, for example, of like when you're reading a Kindle
book and you'll see there's like a underline because you, and that's telling you that others
who have read this same book have underlined a particular place.
And depending on, you know, who you are, like you can then reflect on that.
You can ask like, oh, well, and that's, by the way, collective engagement.
Like, you know, I mean, not what we're doing on our platform, but just as an example, a very
tangible example that I think, you know, would be clear to others.
What we're doing is, you know, now given that example is imagine for students the ability
as they're going through a textbook to, in a very low friction way, so a really quick way
to identify where they found material that was unclear or where they found material that they
don't necessarily agree with or where they found material that was really important.
And maybe they make some comments about it that then are shared and easily observable.
And giving them the ability to do that, not just on a computer screen, but on a mobile device,
because so many students today, that's really the device that they have with them.
That's one part of it.
And now imagine for the instructor, the ability to see that a whole lot of students have
identified a formula in a text or a particular paragraph as unclear.
And then the ability of them to go in and to add like an audio clip or a text clip.
So you're creating engagement in a very high fidelity, a very specific way,
not like a discussion board where students will say, oh, I really like this book,
or this video was really interesting or I didn't get it.
It's like this line, like, I don't understand, or this line doesn't make sense to me.
I disagree with it.
And then for the instructor to be able to come in and respond and do that,
again, in a very low friction way.
It would be as if everybody in the class were somehow able to kind of do their homework
together, even though we're physically separate, but we're kind of able to do it together.
And it would be as if that faculty member were sort of there and aware.
That's what we're enabling through the learning platform that we're building.
You know, if you were in a physical classroom and if the teacher asks,
hey, does anybody have a question?
Nobody raises their hand.
But if one student raises his hand or her hand and say, oh, I have a question.
If they say something, if they ask a question,
then everybody who didn't ask the question would learn from it.
It's a little bit like that.
And then just being on a digital platform allows for that to be visible simultaneously
or asynchronously as well so that people can engage and learn from it.
Right.
I mean, the great thing about being in class and raising your hand is that's a really easy
thing to do.
I can raise my hand and say I don't understand.
But if all of a sudden, in order to say I don't understand, I've got to open up a pop
up window and I've got to all of a sudden, you know, type through five links in order
to get to where I'm going to share this with a bunch of people.
And for them to see that they've got, you know, if all of a sudden there's that friction,
now it just undermines that.
So you're trying to do it in a really frictionless way.
Education is an industry or market.
And it is huge.
I mean, like in the United States, there's 19 million students who go to college every
year.
You know, there's billions of dollars each year, you know, over $170 billion just spent
on tuition, on higher education in the United States every year.
For all that size, the scale economies in higher education today are the same as they
教育と学習プラットフォームの開発
were 400 years ago.
There's no other industry in the world where the scale economies today are what they were
400 years ago.
And by scale economies, I mean the ratio of teacher time to student time, they essentially
haven't changed.
And they haven't changed because we haven't figured out how to create, you know, how to
create collective engagement and learning at scale outside of that classroom, whether
or not it's physical or, you know, online.
But I and some others grew to believe that the technology is there to do that.
And if you could do that, not only could you fundamentally change the economics of higher
education in a way that would help a lot of institutions that are hurting.
You could also do it in a way that would add more flexibility to the lives of students
because they wouldn't need to be physically in class for nearly the length of time that
they otherwise would have to be in class.
And especially in today's world, where so many students are not just going to school,
but are trying to balance that with jobs or other, you know, responsibilities of their
lives, taking care of family members, children, elderly parents.
If you could change that ratio of, like, in-person class to, like, you know, to asynchronous
engagement between live classes where more can be done in those moments between the live
sessions, you'd really change things fundamentally.
And so that's what we've been focused on doing, is building a teaching and a learning
platform that enables collective engagement at scale around those learning artifacts outside
of those live moments in a way that we really believe can be transformative for institutions
of higher learning and their students.
And frankly, even on the corporate side, it's very similar because, you know, the old model
of a corporate university is, like, you take people out of their jobs in order to, you
know, attend classes and sessions.
And the way the world is today, you know, with people being in the office less, and
frankly, just being more physically distributed, that's harder and harder to do now to just
create special time.
And so you need to do the same in the corporate setting.
You know, the model like at GE of Crotonville, which was, you know, GE had this very famous
Latin, you know, it was sort of the leading ideal of the last century of a corporate
university.
It was this huge physical campus.
GE's gotten rid of Crotonville.
Other big corporations have gotten rid of their big centers.
They're all looking for ways to create really special learning experiences for distributed
groups of employees without them having to go to a common physical place.
It's a similar problem to solve.
座学から非同期の学習への変化
Lightning Questions
During the interview, we dig deep into different topics surrounding creativity.
On the contrary, with this section, we ask the same questions to the guests to react
on the spot, and we don't let them see the questions in advance.
Lightning Questions
Question number one.
If you weren't doing what you're doing or, you know, becoming a professor in academia,
what else would you have been doing?
You know, honestly, I didn't know a lot about the world you're in, and I don't know if I
would be any good at it, but part of my time at Apple just gave me such an unbelievable
amount of respect and appreciation and love for the work of designers.
I would have at least tried.
Wow.
I would have at least tried.
I'm super honored.
Question number two.
The next place that you would like to travel to for fun?
Mexico City.
What's your favorite type of food or dish?
I love a great, you know, burrito or taco.
I mean, Mexican food.
What's your favorite type of music or song?
I'm a kid of the 80s, so kind of 80s rock and roll, classic rock.
What's your turning point in life?
There have been a lot, but I think it was absolutely transformative for me anyway,
when Steve recruited me to Apple.
What is your superpower?
My superpower is if you get a diverse group of individuals and you need to find a common
thread that sort of brings them together.
If there is a common thread to bring them together, I will find it.
Last question.
For you, what is creativity?
And I'm not asking about the definition of creativity, but for you, what does creativity
mean?
Over the arc of my career, the moments where I feel that sense of authentic
ability to kind of move and be and in response to what I may be thinking, you know, because
I think that's what you're asking.
Like, where do I feel creative?
Where do I feel like that just comes naturally?
It's when I'm teaching.
I mean, you know, for me, teaching a great class is as creative an act as it as comes.
Right.
You know, you're getting a completely new group of students every time the material
is always, you know, could be different, but the discussion is always going to be different.
And weaving that together to create something where people feel different, think different,
going out of it than they came in.
Like, you know, that's, you know, it's just magical when it happens.
Beautiful.
You did great.
You did great.
You got me on the food though.
This was part two of my conversation with Joel Polanyi, the founder and CEO of Honor
Education.
The most memorable moment in this conversation was when Joel shared an episode with Steve
Jobs where Steve Jobs changed his mind that determined the future of Apple.
Joel talks about the decision that Steve Jobs and Apple had to make on the future of iPod
and whether to make the iPod available to Windows users.
As you heard in the episode, they did eventually convince Steve Jobs to make potentially what
I would imagine a painful decision of making an Apple product available to Windows users.
I would only imagine how difficult that may have been emotionally for Steve.
But it was data that changed Steve's mind that made it clear to the executives around
him that, hey, making the decision to go into the Windows market with the iPod is
potentially a great decision.
It turned out their estimate was grossly underestimated and the success of the iPod is just
beyond anybody's imagination at that time.
The question that I asked Joel was, did Steve Jobs admit he was wrong about not wanting
to go into the Windows market?
Joel said that he didn't know what happened or if in fact Steve said that he was wrong
or not, but he imagined that if you asked Steve, hey, were you wrong about this?
He would have probably said, it doesn't matter.
アイデアと創造性
The lesson here is that, again, the importance of focusing on ideas and less about who the
idea came from.
Never say, I was right, you were wrong.
The moment you say that, you make it about the person and not make it about the idea.
It doesn't really matter where Steve was right or Steve was wrong or Joel was right
or Joel was wrong.
Is the idea the right idea to pursue?
By the way, it's also okay if the idea does turn out to be not the right idea for the
company, for the team to pivot to something else.
Let me to think about another thing that he said, which is Apple as an organization, he
said never hedged, meaning that Apple or any company that is good at collective creativity,
those companies tend to go all in.
They never hedge until they go all in on something else.
That is one of the important factors of collective creativity and making a company more creative,
not just an individual more creative, but a company, a group of people successful and
creative as a collective.
Finally, the question that I asked him was, what's the difference between arguing and
debating and what's the line of friction where it's enough friction for creativity
to prosper and it's too much friction so that the creativity can suffer.
It looked like, as I was talking to him over the screen, that he gave a deep thought to
that question and he said that there are a few tells for debating, not arguing.
The tell number one is, are people willing to change their minds?
Number two, inquiring, not advocating.
Number three, ideas should be discussed independent of who came up with them.
So what are the tells?
議論と口論の境界線
Are people willing to change their minds?
If people are sticking to their idea because it's their idea, that's not a good sign.
If people are willing to change their minds, as Steve Jobs did when he realized that something
was a good idea, that's a tell of debating, not arguing.
So that's number one.
Number two, inquiring, not advocating.
What Joe meant by this is that when somebody advocates for an idea, it's often easy for
the idea to become about that person, not the idea itself.
However, when people inquire into, hey, what are we trying to do?
What's this idea about?
Is this a really good idea?
When they are interrogating and inquiring the idea itself and not necessarily advocating
whether it's their idea that should go forward versus other people's ideas.
So inquiring versus advocating, it's a fine line, but I thought that was a useful filter
that we could use.
And finally, number three, ideas should be discussed independent of who came up with
them.
Similar to point number two, inquiring, not advocating, one of the most important aspects
of what he calls collective creativity is friction.
Friction is really necessary for creativity to flourish.
And that's where the difference between debating and arguing is key.
On this point, he says that it actually requires practice.
It's often easy for people who hear that, hey, you know what, somebody tells you that's
a bad idea.
It's natural for the individual to take it personally and feel like that they're being
attacked for their personality or who they are as opposed to the idea.
So it's oftentimes in the hearing, not in the saying.
Joel Pognyとの対話の概要
Of course, we need to practice the saying as well, but also it depends on the hearing
and the person hearing that critique from colleagues to not take it personally.
So just to summarize that point, arguing versus debating, that tells for what is a good debate
versus not a productive argument.
One is, are people willing to change minds?
Number two, inquiring, not advocating.
Number three, ideas should be discussed independent of who came up with them.
This was part two of my conversation with Joel Pogny, the founder and CEO of Honor Education
and a very accomplished educator in academia and at Apple.
As I mentioned in the previous episode of my conversation with Joel, I had to listen
to the recording of my chat with him a few times to really dissect what I wanted the
takeaways to be.
There were so many good nuggets in this conversation that both Yukiko, my editor and the producer
of this podcast, and I had to really narrow down to specific parts of this conversation.
And it was even difficult to contain into 30 minutes of episode part one and 30 minutes
of part two, just because there were many other things that we could have included.
And that's how I reached the conversation with Joel.
And as I'm talking about this, I realized that he's made me think critically about the
subject matter, which is how do you nurture and how do you teach creativity?
And I really thank Joel for that.
I am Rainer Moto, and this is The Creative Mindset.
See you next time.
