the Frances Hesselbein of modern art. Finster had long compiled bricolage displays on his land, from collections of tools to assortments of fruit-bearing plants. He was fixing a bicycle one day in 1976, when he was fifty-nine, and saw what looked like a face in a splotch of white paint on his thumb. “A warm feelin’ come over my body,” he recalled. Finster immediately began an oeuvre of tens of thousands of artworks that filled his property, including thousands of paintings in his unique, semi-cartoonish style, often densely packed with animals and figures—Elvis, George Washington, angels—and set fancifully in apocalyptic landscapes. In short order, he was appearing on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show and creating album covers for R.E.M. and Talking Heads. Upon entry to the garden, I was greeted by a giant self-portrait of a smirking Finster in a burgundy suit, affixed to a cinderblock wall. At the bottom are the words “I began painting pictures in Jan-1976—without any training. This is my painting. A person don’t know what he can do unless he tryes. Trying things is the answer to find your talent.”
CHAPTER 8
The Outsider Advantage
ALPH BINGHAM WILL be the first to admit it: he is hyperspecialized, at least in theory. “My PhD isn’t even in chemistry, it’s in organic chemistry!” he exclaimed. “If there’s not a carbon in it, I’m technically not qualified, okay?”
In graduate school in the 1970s, Bingham and his classmates had to devise ways to create particular molecules. “This was a bunch of smart guys and women and we could make these molecules,” he told me, “but somehow someone’s solution was always cleverer than the others. I was paying attention, and I noticed that the most clever solution always came from a piece of knowledge that was not a part of the normal curriculum.” One day, he was the cleverest.
He had come up with an elegant solution to synthesize a molecule in four short steps, and the key piece of knowledge involved cream of tartar, a baking ingredient Bingham happened to know from childhood. “You could ask twenty chemists right now what cream of tartar is, and a lot of them would have no idea,” he said. “I thought about the process that differentiates solutions, and it wasn’t part of any curriculum or on anybody’s résumé. I realized there was always going to be this somewhat serendipitous outside thinking that was going to make a solution more clever, cost-effective, efficacious, more on the money than anyone else’s. And so I went from that idea, how problems are solved, to ‘How does one build an organization that solves problems that way?’” Years later, when Bingham became the VP of research and development strategy at Eli Lilly, he had a chance to try to build his clever organization.
In the spring of 2001, Bingham collected twenty-one problems that had stymied Eli Lilly scientists and asked a top executive if he could post them on a website for anyone to see. The executive would only consider it if the consulting firm McKinsey thought it was a good idea. “McKinsey’s opinion,” Bingham recalled, “was, ‘Who knows? Why don’t you launch it and tell us the answer.’” Bingham did, but when the scientists who contributed problems saw them online, “every one of them wrote to the chief scientific officer saying that the problem cannot be released, it’s too confidential, ‘Why the hell do you think anyone other than us can solve that problem?’” They had a point. If the most highly educated, highly specialized, well-resourced chemists in the world were stuck on technical problems, why would anyone else be able to help? The chief scientific officer (CSO) had every single problem removed from the site.
Bingham lobbied. It was at least worth a try on problems that would definitely not give away a trade secret, and if it didn’t work, no harm done. The CSO bought his argument. The site relaunched, and by the fall answers started rolling in. It happened to be the middle of the U.S. anthrax scare, so, Bingham told me, he was the rare mail recipient who was excited to be getting sent white powders. “I’m popping them in a spectrometer,” he said, “and going, ‘Woohoo, we got another one!’” Strangers were creating substances that had befuddled Eli Lilly chemists. As Bingham had guessed, outside knowledge was the key. “It validated the hypothesis we had going in, but it still surprised me how these knowledge pockets were hidden under other degrees. I wasn’t really expecting submissions from attorneys.”
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