Transcript
Introduction
"High technological drama" was the way Edwin Land described his company situation in the spring of 1971. This phrase impressed me more than any other single thing I had read from him, perhaps because it was so characteristic of his entire outlook and approach. At the time he said it, the SX-70 camera system, one of the dreams of Land's life had already cost millions of dollars and had not yet turned back a dime. The company was establishing manufacturing capability and experiencing wrenching growing pains in the process. And the solutions to the myriad of scientific issues attending the camera's evolution were looming just out of reach. I could easily imagine other corporate leaders of international stature retreating behind such well-worn expressions as negative cash flow, unfavorable balances, and unforeseen developmental increments.
But to Edwin Land, facing what Fortune Magazine would call the biggest gamble ever made on a consumer product and miss this onslaught of seemingly insurmountable problems inside the Corporation in the form of cost overruns and the technologies which refused to be born and outside in the form of a gradually deflating consumer economy was to be regarded as the stuff of high technological drama. The next several years after 1971 would be increasingly difficult ones for Polaroid, a company whose dazzling success had little prepared it for lean times. But I was struck by the observation that the word 'problem' had completely departed from Edwin Land's vocabulary to be replaced by the word 'opportunity.' What was it about this man and his company that allowed such confidence and seeming lack of concern with the traditional top priorities of American business?
My continuing interest as I attempted to analyze it seems to stem at least partially from the elements that set Polaroid apart from virtually every other American company and also from a man who is impossible to typecast by any readily applicable standard. The Polaroid story is several different but interrelated stories, all converging in the singular personality of Edwin Land. Polaroid is far from the largest nor has it grown the fastest of its high-technology bellwethers. There is, however, something unique about Polaroid, having to do both with the human dimension of the company and with the unity of vision of its founder and guiding genius. Polaroid executives now take great pains to point out that the almost 70-year-old Land is not the company, but its development and the development of the industry it pioneered is the story of Edwin Land.
In Land, I saw a number of American types and traditions coming together. He is a New England inventor in direct spiritual lineage from Eli Whitney, Charles Goodyear and George Westinghouse. He is perhaps the last of the major technological visionaries-cum-business entrepreneurs in the larger-than-life tradition of Henry Ford and the other photographic giant, George Eastman. He is the contemporary incarnation of the American dream. Perhaps the single most important aspect of Land's character and the one to which he owes his and Polaroid's success is his ability to regard things around him in a new and totally different way. There is the Instant Camera, his most famous invention, the polarizing filter, which began his career and founded this company, and most recently, the polar vision system of instant motion pictures.
All of these are radical departures from previous thought and practice, each coming at a moment and forming into an instant image of what needed to be done to see it through to reality. Right from the beginning of his career, Land had paid scant attention to what experts had to say, trusting his own instincts instead. For example, most experts, who continually predicted that Land and Polaroid would fail in the marketplace with each new product development, were evaluating those products only in terms of the way they fit into the current market. Clearly, in most cases, the new products had little to do technologically with what was available on the current market, except that they too produced photographs and there was a market for cameras. But Land has always believed that for any item sufficiently ingenious and intriguing, a new market could be created. Conventional wisdom has little capacity with which to evaluate a market that did not exist prior to the product that defines it.
Land had already gotten his coworkers have a habit of relying on what was already there. It is not merely a concept of successful marketing but the basis of his theory of inventiveness and creativity. He feels that creativity is an individual thing, not generally applicable to group generation as he wrote in the Harvard Business Review, I think human beings and the mass are fun at square dances, exciting to be within a theater audience, and thrilling to cheer with at the California or Stanford or Harvard or Yale games. At the same time, I think whether outside science or within science, there is no such thing as group originality or group creativity. Land is a man deeply caught up in the creative potential of the individual. This is not surprising since Land owes his success to the realizing of his own creative potential, but it's not just himself, his scientific brethren, and his artistic peers that Land is talking about. He is talking about all of us.
That is an extract from the book that I want to talk to you about today, which is The Instant Image: Edwin Land and the Polaroid experience. And it comes from a section in the book called The Lengthened Shadow. And what that is a reference to is a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson who says, "an institution is the lengthened shadow of one man." And that is a great way to think about Polaroid and the influence that Edwin Land had on his company. So this is going to be the start of a 3-part series that I'm going to do on Edwin Land. I previously covered 2 different books on Edwin Land all the way back on Founders 40. I talked to you about what I learned from reading Insisting On the Impossible and the book, Instant: The Story of Polaroid. About 2 months ago, a listener named Dustin, send me a message that he went down this rabbit hole reading every single book that he could find on Edwin Land. And he's the one that put me on to the next 3 books that I'll be talking to you about.