The world grows through two kinds of invention, and both are important.The Great Leap is a huge technological breakthrough: putting an engine inside a carriage instead of needing a couple of horses at the front. Developing a way to send the human voice across distance, or humans to the moon. Making the connection between sanitation and infection control.
Kaizen is a Japanese word for continuous improvement—usually pretty small improvement. Think about making Twitter actually useful by letting users add a hyperlink that didn’t count in the 140-character limit that existed at the time. Or about the continuous miniaturization of computer chip size while magnifying power.
My first laptop had 24K—not gig, not even megabyte—just 24 measly kilobytes of main memory. It had an almost unreadable eight-line screen with no character descenders (black-and-white only, of course). But it was still life-changing, because I could type out a draft for an hour and a half or two hours before I ran out of memory and had to upload the file to my Mac (where I could revise on a legible screen). All of a sudden, I could go interview someone and type the interview directly to a computer instead of spending hours deciphering and typing my much less complete handwritten notes. Once I bought a storage device, I could take notes on trips and conferences. That machine was released in 1983; I got mine in 1986. Thousands of Kaizens over just 39 years resulted not only in the full-fledged laptop computers I now use but also in a 64-gigabyte smartphone that can do pretty much anything a computer can do and fits in my pocket. In a few years, smart phones will probably have holographic full-size keyboards and will be a lot better for us writers. But meanwhile, I can at least dictate a rough draft and then clean up the dictation errors.
Often, an invention can be both a Great Leap and Kaizen—like the original iPhone, which combined phone and usable Internet functions with an intuitive interface and still fit in a pocket (Great Leap), but was also simply an improved (Kaizen)—MUCH-improved—portable phone—and then was re-Kaizened a gazillion times with better reception, better camera, better touch screen, better voice recognition, etc. And of course, prices came way down.
Nobody would want an iPhone 1 as their default phone today—but it was so much better than a flip phone, even a flip phone that had (text-only) Internet and a (crummy) camera. Still, it was the series of Kaizens that allowed smartphones to become the default hand-held device. When the first smartphone was introduced, I didn’t buy it because it was too expensive. I waited until (Android) smartphones were under $200. Now, I’ve met people who are homeless, migrants who ran for their lives from other countries with almost no possessions, grade-school kids, teens in Africa who live in deep poverty—and they have smartphones.
Similarly, a motorcar was built at least as far back as 1769 when Joseph Cugnot threw a huge, clumsy steam boiler on a three-wheel wagon. And Leonardo Da Vinci sketched a design for a spring-powered car in (are you sitting down?) 1478, though he never built a prototype. (Da Vinci also sketched out a helicopter, by the way.) And the internal combustion engine, which powered or partially powered almost all motor vehicles larger than golfcarts built between about 1920 and 2008 (when Tesla introduced the first modern all-electric car) dates at least to the 1860s and some say to the 1790s—but the auto industry was tiny until Henry Ford figured out how to lower costs by standardizing production along an assembly line. The Model T (not Ford’s first car) was introduced in 1908, when salaries for low-level workers started around $200 a year, and skilled professionals like engineers could make a few thousand. Once production ramped up enough to produce major economies of scale a few years later, he was able to offer his Model T starting at just $260. The previous year, the average price of all cars was $2834.
The point of this little history lesson is that Ford, like many popularizers, was a Kaizenist, not a Great Leap inventor. He took a manufacturing process from the gun industry and applied it to the production of cars, until then individually crafted and very expensive. That enabled him to lower the price enough that people wanted to buy it, and a lot of people did just that. Bill Gates is also a Kaizenist. Once he landed the contract to supply the PC operating systems that built the Microsoft empire, he bought and modified a variant of the then-popular CP/M operating system.
The questions I have for you: Which kind are you, and how will you cross-pollinate with the other kind?
