The Discoverers: A History of Man's Search to Know His World and Himself

"This is probably the least obvious pick of the five, but it is the book that I often recommend to students who come to me with a true curiosity. It’s arguably more about innovation than about entrepreneurship per se. (Here we already have a question about whether entrepreneurs are innovators. Yes, a lot of them are, but not all of them. Are all innovators entrepreneurs? Absolutely not!) The Discoverers is about the origin of a lot of entrepreneurial activity, which is human curiosity. It’s an amazing book that covers several thousands of years in human history. It looks at human history through the angle of innovation and how much people struggled to identify new ideas and concepts—ideas and concepts that we take for granted. It’s that process of struggle and going down the wrong lane and having all sorts of surprises along the path that is so intrinsic to the entrepreneurial process. Rather than starting with entrepreneurship itself, I want people to start there and get the really big picture of why we are doing this and why entrepreneurship is important for the world. “My favourite part is about Christopher Columbus. That really is an entrepreneurial story” I’ll give two or three examples from the book and chapters that are particularly interesting. One part of the book I really like is called “Time” and it describes the history of how mankind discovered the concept of time and started measuring time. And this is very unobvious—and it clearly has nothing to do with entrepreneurship—but it is incredibly relevant because it is about discovering the ambiguity and difficulty that a human has to make sense of something. But once you have it, it becomes so clear. Today, for us, a clock is the simplest thing in the world. We teach five-year-olds how to read them—but for thousands of years people didn’t have clocks and they didn’t have this sense. There were so many aspects that were required for people to understand and then measure time. This is an eye-opener for the kind of challenge that we, as humans, can face and solve. It’s amazing how we can measure time today. The part of the book I love the best is the story of the explorers. It’s really fun, but the book does an exceptional job in explaining how difficult the major discoveries were. My favourite part is about Christopher Columbus. That really is an entrepreneurial story. Here is an entrepreneur who spends a lot of time trying to find the money to do an exploration. He’s looking for the western route to the Indies. The notion of discovering a new continent never occurred to anyone in the entire process until they found land and in fact mistakenly took it for India. That is a beautiful analogy of the entrepreneurial process. First, you have to put a lot of effort in to get something going. And then when you get something going, something else can happen and it can turn into something completely different to what you expected. So, those were some of the things that really opened my mind about innovation and this process of going from not understanding and not knowing to something that we understand and take almost for granted. Yes, we do some of that. We certainly teach them and try to alert them to the immense part of things that we don’t know. In fact, we sometimes give them practical tools for figuring out what they don’t know, and for generating listening and observational skills that will open them up to the things that are not being said. And then, when they are studying the entrepreneurial process, it’s all about looking for the gaps. It’s all about looking for the things that are not there. Let me give you a practical example. There’s a group of students who were thinking about starting some kind of medical device company. Instead of saying, ‘Here’s a solution to a problem where we don’t understand the problem and we’re not sure if our solution works’—which is the bad way of doing entrepreneurship—they started by being very careful about trying to understand what the underlying practice is. They spent some time being a fly-on-the-wall in an operating room and observing surgeons doing surgery for a couple days. They discovered that certain movements of the surgeons were taking a lot of time, delaying the operation and were probably unnecessary. The surgeon kept facing the patient but then having to look at pictures that were located somewhere else in the operating room. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter They then came up with a solution because they understood a problem that nobody was aware of. Surgeons who had been doing this procedure for years were never aware of the problem. They figured out that by projecting the image that the surgeon was looking at onto the body of the patient, they could improve the efficiency of the operation. That’s an example where nobody knew the problem really existed. You could have just come up with a new device, but what the actual surgeon needs is something very different."