As noted earlier in this blog, when management guru Peter Drucker taught innovation at New York University  Business School in the 1950’s, he taught it as “innovation and abandonment” — the title of an excellent chapter in The Essential Drucker*, a biography of his ideas. His key point: There is no birth without death. You cannot bring new things into the world without old things disappearing, because new things need resources, freed only when old things stop using up resources and disappear.

Dell Computer Co. expanded rapidly in the 1990’s, mainly because it could hire talented engineers dumped by IBM, which at the time was downsizing. Israel’s high-tech industry boomed in the 1990’s, when it absorbed a million Russians, many of them highly educated, as they left the sinking ex-USSR economy. 

A fine book by historian Dava Sobel, Galileo’s Daughter, reveals that innovators’ birth and death occur simultaneously, not just those of innovations. Her appendix shows that:

*  Galileo Galilei, whose telescope proved the earth revolved around the sun, was born in Pisa, on Feb. 15, 1564.   On Feb. 18, 3 days later, sculptor and artist Michaelangelo Buonarroti died in Florence. And two months later, on April 23, William Shakespeare was born in England.

*  On Jan. 8, 1642, Galileo died. That same year, Isaac Newton, discoverer of the laws of gravity, was born (on Christmas Day, Dec. 25).  

Sobel, who also wrote the fascinating book Longitude, about how John Harrison invented the concept of longitude,  notes another interesting fact about Galileo. At the time, all scholars wrote in Latin, so that other scholars could understand their work, in other countries. Galileo wrote his books in Italian. Why? He wanted them understood not by other scholars, but by the shipbuilders at the Venetian Arsenale, and the glassblowers of Murano, and the lens grinders and instrument makers. He wanted his ideas known, understood — and used to change the world. 

“I wrote it in the colloquial tongue because I must have everyone able to read it,” Galileo wrote. “I am induced to do this by seeing how the young men are sent through the universities at random, to be made into physicians, philosophers, and so on; thus many of them are committed to professions to which they are unsuited…..I want them to see that just as Nature has given them…eyes with which to see her works, so she has also given them brains capable of penetrating and understanding them.”

Henry Ford once complained that each time he hired a pair of hands, they came attached to a brain. Galileo wrote in colloquial Italian, precisely because each pair of eyes that read his work came attached to a brain.   

Even though he lived four centuries ago, innovators can learn much from Galileo’s wisdom.

*By Elizabeth Edersheim.