Do Individuals Matter in the Shape and Direction of Technological Change?

The “charismatic authority” or leader is a concept first expressed by the sociologist Max Weber. He reinvented an older Christian concept of charisma as referencing “exceptional individuals” and then infused the term with notions of leadership or influence of individuals over groups. Weber was also influenced by Nietzsche’s concept of Übermensch, which is translated by some as “superman,” though I prefer the English translation by the German scholar Walter Kaufman, “Overman.” The Weber scholars Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills view “charismatic authority” as a “continuation” of Thomas Carlyle’s philosophy in which “the monumentalized individual becomes the sovereign of history.” They also cite the influence of the 19th-century Irish historian W. E. H. Lecky who “broadened the conception in such a way as to apply it to leaders of human conduct rather than merely creators of symbols” [6]. Weber himself defined his concept a bit more judiciously: “The term ‘charisma’ will be applied to a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he [or she] is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers of qualities” [7].

While Weber did not emphasize the particular relevance of charismatic authority to technological change, later analysts have done so. In one typical observation, an influential management professor wrote, “Charisma, in essence, became Weber’s umbrella term for the forces of change and innovation” [8]. By extension, the concept has come to characterize certain organizations where “a ‘definite social structure’ [is] coproduced by a leader and his or her community,” writes historian Link [9], a professor at Dartmouth College. “Charismatic authority,” he adds, “is fundamentally a collective endeavor.”

Charming yet volatile and at times mean, Jobs became both a technological visionary and a popular celebrity.

Weber’s thinking on charisma and its authority flourished 100 years ago, and yet his definition would seem to fit neatly the image and reality of Steve Jobs, the dynamic co-founder of Apple and the corporate creator of the iPhone. Jobs who lacked a university degree, had no formal training in engineering, apparently could not code, and, nevertheless, led three revolutions in digital technology: first the Macintosh, which redefined the frontiers of personal computing in the 1980s; then the iPod, which inaugurated a radical transformation in the way recorded music was played and distributed; and finally the smart phone, which Jobs conceived as an everything-device that brought together texting, email, the Internet, photography, and movie-making. Charming yet volatile and at times mean, Jobs became both a technological visionary and a popular celebrity. His 2005 commencement address to Stanford University undergraduates is consumed almost as breathlessly as the Sermon on the Mount. With his death from cancer in 2011, Jobs’ canonization as a charismatic authority was complete.

Given the ubiquity of the digital devices that Jobs spawned at Apple—and the company’s stature as among the most valuable in the world by market capitalization—is it even conceivable that he was a replaceable cog in the historical wheel of technological change? Few who worked with him would consent to this proposition, and yet those close to him conceded that the sources of his charismatic authority were elusive. “The most basic question about Steve’s career is this: How could the man who had been such an inconsistent, inconsiderate, rash, and wrongheaded businessman that he was exiled from the company he founded become the venerated CEO who revived Apple and created a whole new set of culture-defining products that transformed the company into the most valuable and admired enterprise on earth and that changed the everyday lives of billions of people from all different socioeconomic strata and cultures?” According to Schlender and Tetzeli [10], perhaps the most perceptive writer on Jobs, “The answer wasn’t something Steve had ever been all that interested in discussing.”

J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist, also inspired similar adulation and reveries among his colleagues. Oppenheimer never won a Nobel, and his achievement in physics theory never ranks among the top tier in history. Yet Rabi [11], an eminent physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and attended the Trinity Test in the summer of 1945, spoke for many of the brightest scientists and engineers of his generation when he described the outsized impression that Oppenheimer made—and not only on them but on people generally. “Robert Oppenheimer was one of the most highly regarded personalities in the civilized world,” Rabi declared in a tribute to Oppenheimer following his death in February 1967. “His presence in … a country attracted public attention both from the press and from individuals. I have been in restaurants with him, even in small airports, and people always came up and respectfully asked for his autograph. In many ways, he held a position in public esteem of the nature of that held by Gandhi or Einstein.”

Rabi thought that Oppenheimer’s public renown did not seem inevitable. “This rise to public eminence and recognition was quite sudden and was not presaged by events preceding the war,” Rabi insisted. “At that time Oppenheimer’s reputation and influence were centered around the small and close circle of physicists. As the wartime director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, which made the atomic bomb, he was bound to receive important public attention, but there were other directors of great laboratories, and other physicists, who shared equal esteem but did not become objects of such general interest. Oppenheimer, after Einstein, emerged as the great charismatic figure of the scientific world.”

Of course, the power of charismatic authority can also be exploited by evil-doers to advance immoral and illegal purposes. Domination of others by persuasive lunatics is a staple of the literature on cults and studies of dictators, which routinely demonstrate how the concentration of immense power corrupts immensely. Even technological projects can fall prey to the blindness that can afflict charismatic leaders; the physicist Edward Teller, who deceptively promoted a flawed “Star Wars” defense in the 1980s [12] and an even more flawed concept of a radiation-free, “clean,” nuclear bomb in the 1950s [13], [14], illustrated how charismatic authority went wrong in the domain of military technologies. Teller is widely viewed as one of the people on whom the film director Stanley Kubrick based his Dr. Strangelove character in the 1964 movie of the same name.1

Of course, the power of charismatic authority can also be exploited by evildoers to advance immoral and illegal purposes.

The current usage of “entrepreneur” flows directly from the mind and pen of Joseph Schumpeter, and his relentless advocacy by him and his later acolytes, that a class of risk-taking individuals, pioneers with a taste for technological gambles, decisively shapes the pace and direction of technological trajectories. The human factor is essential, and decisive, for Schumpeter; the exceptional person is also socially progressive at core in the sense that they seek change above all and change in the sense that Marx meant to convey with his famous phrase, “all that is solid melts into air,” from his Manifesto. Schumpeter [16] echoes this sensibility when he tackles the raison d’etre of his dynamic entrepreneur: “We have seen that the function of entrepreneurs is to reform or revolutionize the pattern of production by exploiting an invention or, more generally, an untried technological possibility for producing a new commodity or producing an old one in a new way… ”

From Schumpeter’s perspective, entrepreneurial authority depends on the patent systems and the rewards of a push-and-pull market system. For scientists and engineers, the pursuit of “credit”—whether in the form of patents or stock options or windfall earnings—provides the ground from which both hero worship and charisma—the twin archetypes of innovation—grow and thrive.

“The core ethos of capitalism looks constantly ahead and relies on credit in launching new ventures,” the historian Thomas K. McGraw wrote in his biography of Schumpeter, Prophet of Innovation. The concept of credit that Schumpeter invoked was not limited to finance but was animated by the slippery quality of “vision.” “From the Latin root credo— “I believe”—credit represents a wager on a better future,” McGraw wrote. Entrepreneurs, as Schumpeter envisioned them in the 1930s and as the past 75 years have amply demonstrated, “often care little about the past and have scant patience with the present. They undertake innovative projects … that require far greater resources than those lying at hand. In the absence of credit, both consumers and entrepreneurs would suffer endless frustrations.”

These pioneers, often self-styled “disrupters,” are, in McGraw’s magisterial evocation of Schumpeter, “the pivot on which everything turns.” McGraw [17] continues: “Entrepreneurs—whether they operate in big firms or small ones, old companies, or startups—are the agents of innovation and creative destruction [another term of art central to Schumpeter’s theory of technological change]. “Their projects are the wellsprings of new jobs, higher incomes, and general economic progress.”

Attending to the role of entrepreneurs as a source and fuel of technological change coexists and coevolves with other explanatory frameworks. As the sociologist Volti [18] has observed, “Other histories of technological advance have remained within this framework but have looked to a different kind of genius as the source of advance. The key players here are not the inventors of new technologies, but the entrepreneurs who make inventions into commercial successes by taking risks, moving into uncharted territory, and in general doing what hadn’t been done before.”

One effect of the rise of microprocessor-based computing in the 1970s was to highlight the prominence of outsiders and misfits. Many of the leaders of the first generation of personal computing were self-taught tinkerers and experimenters who had little or no academic training or employment with the dominant “mainframe” or “minicomputer” companies of the 1970s and early 1980s. Both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates famously never finished university studies and indeed seemed to thrive because of their idiosyncratic experiences. Jobs spent time in a cave in India, meditating with a pal, and later dropped acid, insisting those who had never taken LSD could not grasp the source of his creativity. Gates, meanwhile, envisioned small, cheap PCs taking over many of the functions performed by expensive, large, and cumbersome mainframe and minicomputers. The successes of these newcomers brought renewed attention to Schumpeter’s economic ideas and reinforced the belief that the brash newcomer often leads the overthrow of prevailing engineering paradigms. Elon Musk, while disparaged for his political activities, stands as the embodiment of the entrepreneurial authority. With no experience in designing or making autos, he built Tesla into a formidable rival in electric cars. He did the same with space systems even though he had no experience in the field before setting out to overthrow the prevailing models.

Of all the heirs to Schumpeter’s legacy, I find the most interesting, intellectually, to be Peter Thiel, the billionaire conservative and former partner of Elon Musk. A serial entrepreneur whose first triumph was PayPal, Thiel was the first outside investor in Facebook and a cofounder of Palantir, the surveillance company that mostly serves the U.S. government. Possessing both a BA from Stanford University and a JD from Stanford Law School, Thiel is the embodiment of the Schumpeterian entrepreneur who “creatively destroys” existing industries through systems-building that exploits emerging technologies. His most coherent views are found in a small book he published with a former student in 2014, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.

A few choice quotes from Thiel highlight his attachment to the “entrepreneurial authority” framework, and his penchant for making bold, blunt proclamations in defense of this framework:

• “If success were mostly a matter of luck these kinds of serial entrepreneurs probably wouldn’t exist.”

• “The best entrepreneurs know … a great company is a conspiracy to change the world.”

• “The best startups might be considered less extreme kinds of cults… . People at successful startups are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.”

• “Extreme founder figures are not new in human affairs.”
• “The single biggest danger for a founder is to become so certain of his own myth that he loses his mind” [19].

While the right-wing, technocratic, and authoritarian political program associated with Thiel cannot be ignored, Thiel’s perspective on how innovation arises, and from which sources, stands as a powerful, yet highly debatable, model for the role of the exceptional individual within theories of technological change. Next, we will look at a complementary framework, the role of teams, which builds on the recognition that because of complexity and the need for scale, groups are more decisive than individuals in invention and discovery.

The charismatic authority will always be a polarizing figure, both in the messy trenches of engineering practice or in the lofty debates between scholars in Ivory Towers. Let us look at another “face” of the human factor: the team or, more specifically, the “team of rivals.”2 In technoscientific tribes, as in political ones, differences emerge. Teams often are a collection of strong-willed, creative, ambitious, and risk-taking technical and scientific individuals who join in pursuit of a common technological goal—even in the face of strong disagreements over how to proceed. Notable technical achievements in the modern world have depended on large groups of relatively anonymous contributors; their contributions and their internal tensions rarely leak outside of their team’s boundaries. The Apollo program and the mapping of the human genome are archetypal instances.

While these projects were directed by nominal leaders—James Webb, in the case of Apollo in its formative years—no one mistook them as the chief source of innovation but rather they stood as administrative or charismatic authorities on the strength of their personalities and privileged position in a hierarchy that controlled resources and assignments. By emphasizing the collective, a group of people, rather than a single person, as the unit of analysis for the sources, structure, pace, and outcomes of technological change, the human factor is affirmed, and the perils of cultish celebration of a single techno- Übermensch would seem to be sharply diminished.

Teams often are a collection of strongwilled, creative, ambitious, and risktaking technical and scientific individuals who join in pursuit of a common technological goal—even in the face of strong disagreements over how to proceed.

Field observations of technical or scientific teams, whether in digital, biomedical, space, or weapons, present roughly the same lesson: teams are crucial because scale, complexity, and urgency require them. While Google’s search engine was famously created by two graduate computer students at Stanford University, such solitary achievements are rare. The lone inventor, while not extinct, is largely a thing of the past. More typical are teams, underwritten by well-funded corporations or foundations, which pursue hard problems with a sense of urgency and practical considerations. However, these teams usually work in secret, and even if members publish papers or accounts of their work, they are limited by the dictates of intellectual property law and corporate competition and profit aspirations. Some teams even shield their members from public awareness out of fear they will be poached by a rival or even a partner organization. Getting a glimpse inside the “black box” of techno-scientific teams can be difficult or impossible.

Narratives of the process of invention and innovation do exist, and they draw on techniques common in ethnography and observational journalism to achieve a “fly on the wall,” you-are-there cinematic quality. Bruno Latour’s Laboratory Life [20], nourished by his own training in anthropology, is perhaps the most cited example in academic literature of the closely observed study of a team at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Tracy Kidder’s Soul of a New Machine illustrates the power of immersive journalism to achieve a close chronicle of a charismatic leader and his team racing toward a finished product. Detailed chronicles by inside participants can deliver insights on which technologies advance and which do not, but these accounts can suffer from bias or exclusion. Perhaps, the most famous memoir by a scientist in the 20th, The Double-Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA, suffers woefully from the exclusion of Rosalind Franklin, an English scientist who played a decisive role in the story but who Watson flagrantly failed to credit. A personal favorite of mine is Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes, by the Swedish scientist and Nobel Prize winner, Svante Paabo, who specializes in the field of evolutionary genetics. While including the kind of personal detail readers expect from a memoir, Paabo also provided granular detail on the hunt for ancient materials to analyze, a tale of adventure that involved legions of fellow scientists scattered around the world.

Observation-based accounts share some limits with ethnography generally, notably the possibility of the observer becoming a captive of those they observe. The problem of the “observer and the observed,” a theme which the great historian of anthropology, George Stocking, explored in his classic Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Field Work (1985), opens opportunities for historians versed in dense or prolonged reconstructions that are rendered through chronologically based narratives. Creation stories—the birth of X-technology—lend themselves to this approach. One famous example is The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986) by Richard Rhodes, then a stylish writer of both nonfiction and fiction with no experience in nuclear history or science. His book remains a standard granular account of the Los Alamos team led by Oppenheimer. A lesser-known, but equally outstanding reconstruction is Dealers of Lightning: Xerox Parc and the Dawn of the Computer Age (1999). The author, Michael A. Hiltzik, elegantly weaves together retrospective interviews with participants and contemporaneous documents of various sorts.

Another imaginative account by historian Nathan Ensmenger, The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise, highlights the way in which digital computing reordered hierarchies of expertise, gender roles, and how technical teams functioned in the second half of the last century. As Ensmenger adroitly describes the aims of his highly original and illuminating study:

“The book traces the history of the computer boys as they struggled to establish a role for themselves within traditional organizational, professional, and academic hierarchies. It focuses on the tensions that emerged between the craft-centered practices of vocational programmers, the increasingly theoretical agenda of academic computer science, and the desire of corporate managers to control and routinize the process of software development… A central theme of the book is that computer specialists possessed skills and abilities that transcended existing boundaries between scientific, technical, and business expertise. As the electronic computer moved out of the laboratory and into the marketplace, it became an increasingly valuable source of professional and institutional power and authority. In their role as mediators between the technical system (the computer) and its social environment (existing structures and practices), computer programmers played a crucial role in transforming the computer from a scientific instrument into a powerful tool for corporate control and communication… . By virtue of their control over the powerful new technology of electronic computing, however, computer specialists were granted an unprecedented degree of independence and authority. Their work brought them into conflict with established networks of power and authority” [25].

The lone inventor, while not extinct, is largely a thing of the past.

To depict teams over time, and to avoid becoming captives of influential team members, demands that chroniclers blend eye-witness accounts with textual, photographic, audio, and video sources; all sources potentially provide context and help resolve or identify conflicts between participants who disagree about central issues of contribution and credit. I saw the challenges up close when, in the early 1990s, I began a close, immersive observation of a large team at Microsoft tasked with writing the first version of the Windows NT operating system. In total, the project consisted of about 250 people, including code testers and writers, and their managers, who included Bill Gates, co-founder and, at the time, chief executive of Microsoft. The leader of the team was David Cutler, a charismatic authority by virtue of his coding prowess, inspirational personality, and signal prior achievements while a code writer for Digital Equipment Corporation’s legendary Programmed Data Processor (PDP) line of computers.

In terms of team dynamics, the NT project served, among other things, as a rehearsal for the wrenching shift toward greater space for and recognition of women’s contributions in software. Gender relations also highlighted the hostile or forbidding environments that made success less likely for even talented women engineers and programmers in the 1990s. One of the leading code writers on the original NT, Steve Wood, worked closely with a woman coder and conceded, it was “infinitely harder for women to prove their worth on this project.” His colleague, Therese Stowell, a graduate of Brown University, was the first female coder on the project. Microsoft hired her out of college, and after two years with the company, she was assigned to work with Wood, who was highly regarded for his coding chops and technical judgments. While she perceived Wood as supportive, she felt her abilities were questioned by others. She sought to establish her coding credibility with male colleagues while, at the same time, maintaining her personal style (she hung love beads in the doorway to her office and burned incense). Over time, while still battling for respect, she realized “the whole image of code writing as a masculine pursuit was a distortion” and that “the leading edge of programming had not always been a world without women.” She decided to organize a bulletin board for NT’s woman programmers, naming the group “Hoppers,” after Grace Hopper, the female computer expert who joined the Navy during World War II and became an influential programmer and later participated in the design of the earliest digital computers. For Stowell, Hopper was her hero, and her informal association of female coders, which convened its first meeting with about 20 women in October 1990, was a historic first, at Microsoft and possibly across the entire world of commercial computing in the United States. The women focused on combating the perception that “women weren’t as valued as much” as men on the team, and “expended a lot of extra energy just educating the men around them.” However, Stowell and her female colleagues persisted, and their influence on the NT team grew, as did recognition of their contributions and talents [21].

The result of my immersive recounting of the making of a software program was a book-length narrative, published in 1994. Showstopper details the human, technical, and managerial dimensions of the creation of the Windows NT software operating system. In a review of the book in the Harvard Business Review, Bill Taylor noted, “More than anything else, we come to appreciate what a miracle software really is: a unique blend of artistry and drudgery, mathematical order and creative chaos” [22]. Today, NT code remains an important piece of Microsoft’s “cloud” computing service. Thirty years ago, at the time of its release, NT was the largest, most complex, and ambitious computer program ever designed and written for the personal computer. The cost is US$ 150 million. Nearly five years in the making, the massive program consisted of 5.6 million lines of code. The title of my book refers to a category of programming errors, or software bugs, which can stop a program cold. Indeed, the search to identify and fix “showstopper” bugs was among the most dramatic, pressurized aspects of working on the team [21].

My underlying aim in this essay is to reengage with a long discredited theoretical question once central to understanding technological change: how to account for exceptional individuals (charismatic or entrepreneurial) and teams of individuals in conflict and cooperation.

Because of my fascination with archival documentary materials, several years after publishing Showstopper, I donated to the Department of Special Collections and University Archives at Stanford all of my many interviews, handwritten notes, and other research materials, such as internal Microsoft documents and videos of meetings and workshops. These papers and materials—5.8 linear feet in six boxes—are available to researchers, a modest gesture of mine to the scholarly possibilities of chasing after the elusive human factor in the creation of novel technologies.3

Showstopper is a dramatic narrative, lubricated with computing and software explanations in vernacular English, and because of the high value I placed on documenting the humanity of the significant participants in the project, the book is bereft of theory. The immersive experience required to document the human aspect was so absorbing and enervating, I found that reflecting on deeper significance and abstract questions was beyond me.

Four years after the publication of Showstopper, I began to perceive high-order meanings in my material, though still immaturely. In 1998, I published an article in the academic journal Information Technology & People under the title “Armed Truce: software in an age of teams,” in which I tried to sketch out the ways in which rivalries and disagreements between team members played a crucial role in elevating technical aspirations and exposing engineering flaws and novelties. I tentatively concluded that “so rapid are technical developments that the core of the [technology] corporation is now the team, the only unit small enough to retain its intellectual edge.” Drawing on my Microsoft case study but thinking also of research teams embedded in universities and stand-alone laboratories, I add that size and scale matter. “The larger the team,” I wrote, “the harder it is to chart its nuances, its inner strengths and contradictions” [23].

What I dimly grasped 30 years ago, after writing a code creation story, I perceive more clearly now: teams are at the heart of creative advance at the artifactual level of emerging technologies.

A program for researchers could well be to examine and explore how teams promote innovation and to what extent teams, rather than exceptional individuals, are the decisive forces in innovation. Are narrative accounts of engineering and scientific creations a supplement or a substitute for the conceptual and philosophical analysis of the logic and structure of technological change? That is a debate for another occasion. I can only say here that sometimes, I cannot help concluding that well-written fiction can achieve insights and “truths” that escape empirical analysis; in the same way, I wonder if narrative accounts, drawing on a blend of contemporaneous and retrospective sources, can deliver a deeper understanding of the technological realm than can abstract conceptual accounts.

My underlying aim in this essay is to reengage with a long-discredited theoretical question once central to understanding technological change: how to account for exceptional individuals (charismatic or entrepreneurial) and teams of individuals in conflict and cooperation. Rather than a direct argument on behalf of the proposition that individuals and teams are decisive in technological trajectories, I have offered a well-meaning provocation that asks how the human factor might be brought systematically back into the sociocultural analysis of technoscientific change, however, tentatively or partially.

A totalizing focus on impersonal factors seems to drain much meaning from the seething, throbbing technoscientific ebb and flow. Though their language has altered, observers have been wrestling with the role of the individual and the human dimension broadly for a long time.

To underscore, a final glimpse from yesterday: In 1926, in the journal Social Forces, William F. Ogburn, a titan of early 20th-century sociology, published an essay, “The Great Man versus Social Forces.” He concluded, “The role of the exceptional individual in the social process and the relative dependence of social change and achievement on social forces, or on the great man, will no doubt be a subject of debate for some time to come” [24]. My hope is for more scholars and participants in the story of technological change to join this debate and enliven it.

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