This recent video from the PBS NEWSHOUR about Silicon Valley tells the story of how creativity is so hard to hold on to and how what we were is what we want to be.
It was in the 1960s that the valley transitioned from “The Valley of Hearts Delight,” where fruit and nuts were king, to Silicon Valley where chips were king. Those forty years gave the world the integrated circuit, microprocessors, calculators, digital everything, personal computers, smart phones and many other innovative tools and toys.
We were all young then, and willing to take on the established world. As I look back over the past 30 years I see a parade of young people who are now middle aged or older. Andy Groves of Intel has retired, both Hewlett and Packard have passed on, even Jerry Yang of Yahoo and Steve Jobs at Apple are getting older. And, the founders of Google are older and more mature than most of the entrepreneurs of the 1970s and 1980s.
Back then, we challenged and taunted the traditional East coast and moaned about how “yesterday” they were. Steve Jobs could, in his early twenties, declare that he would put a computer on every desk while, at nearly the same time, the CEO of Digital Equipment, Ken Olsen, quipped that he saw, “no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.” It was a classic confrontation between the then emerging Silicon Valley culture and the older more established culture of Boston and the East coast.
Silicon Valley was all about doing it differently, if for no other reason than to be different. We went to casual clothing. We got rid of offices with closed doors and embraced the cubicle culture. We were disrespectful of hierarchy and we thumbed our noses at normal working hours, making something of a cult out of working 12 hour days or more. We gave everybody, not just executives, stock options. We said it was okay to switch jobs every few years (or sometimes months). And we made education and engineers important. We also opened up to venture capitalists and took their piles of cash and grew it into huge companies such as Intel, Apple, Yahoo, Oracle, Sun, Electronic Arts, and Cisco. New ideas and inventions were what we were all about.
And then it seems that we all, almost overnight, grew conservative.
Today we defend the way we do things and oppose change. We struggle to embrace tomorrow, because we are still in love with yesterday.
We don’t even adapt to what we built. We still go to offices, yet we invented the technology to make going unnecessary. We still clog freeways with our cars and make it dangerous to walk or ride bicycles, even though we pioneered the environmental movement and invented all sorts of personal movement technologies such as Segways and lightweight bicycles. We send our children to schools with very traditional curriculum’s, even though many of the Valley founders were renegades and college dropouts. We are a valley of contradictions — holding on to yesterday with as much stickiness as the East coast held on to its past.
Innovation will (probably has) moved on. Most likely to India or China this time. Silicon Valley will remain a beacon for techies for a long time, but the excitement and irreverence of the 1970s and 1980s are gone. And I miss them, because the ability to remain open to new ideas, to challenge everything, to try anything, to fund a bunch of long shot ideas, to make irreverence a virtue are the signs of Spring, of creativity and of tomorrow.
The Valley has now entered its Autumn.
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