In the field of horticulture, you have a concept of cross pollination that has driven some really wonderful innovations for humanity. Corn, for example, the corn that we eat. Wheat, the wheat that we know and love, unless you're gluten-free. Flowers, beautiful flowers that would not right now it exists in major or made possible because of cross pollination. What's happening here is some human being is taking pollen from the flower of one species of plant, and putting it into the flower of another species to pollinate it and create a third species. Hybridization is another word for it. These are new plants that would not exist because regular honeybees don't ordinarily go from this flower to that flower. They only go from this flower to these similar flowers, but a human being with a toothpick or some sort of a swab, can get some of that pollen and put it into the other one. Create this new species that's making the world a better place. So, that's a concept that's also really valuable in business. Lee Fleming is a researcher at Harvard Business school and he put together this study that came out in Harvard Business Review Recently. And what he determined, was that when you have a lower alignment of the disciplines of your team members, so you see that on the x-axis. The alignment is low, that means that diversity is high. You have a higher chance of breakthrough innovation. So, it's true that those people, when the teams have a lot of diversity, they came with a lot more ideas that were insignificant, that strayed from the average in the negative direction. But the majority, the most, the highest number of breakthrough innovations came from teams with high diversity. He talked about in the article one lesson that you can take away from his study, from his research was that, in addition to having high diversity on their teams, one thing that helped increase the chance of success was having people from two established fields. Fields that were already well understood. Trying to think of new ideas. So it was successful when they brought together people from the semi-conductor field and the field of mechanical engineering. So these are two well established fields, and they came up with nano technology. So now there's new kinds of medical cures that involve lots of potential for tiny little, this one shows a robot. It's a little science fiction I think, but the nanotechnology field arose from that kind of diverse collaboration with existing, established fields. However, connecting the automotive industry, automotive industry, very established, with the nuclear industry. In the 1950's, 1960's, very poorly understood. They came up with weird innovations that did not have a lot of value. Things like this nuclear car. This is a real concept from General Motors, but you know they didn't understand it very well. So the innovations they came up with, from the nuclear people talking to the automotive people. I mean, you can imagine what would happen if you got into a car crash with this weird car, and I bet it weighed, ten thousand pounds. Why is the front wheel right underneath the, where people sit in the back seat maybe, how could you drive up a hill with this car? I don't understand why this would be a great idea. They also came up with a toaster, a nuclear powered toaster. I couldn't find a picture of it, but I read about, imagine toasting your bagel with nuclear power in your kitchen. Yes, I'm sure you saved a little bit of money on your electrical bill, but that's just a bad idea. Now on your team you can add diversity in a successful way, by hiring, or becoming yourself, a T-shaped person. And what we mean by this, is be a person who is really broad in your interests and your knowledge, sort of a jack of all trades, but a master of one. Understanding one thing well, one specific skill deeply, but a bunch of things just have a familiarity with them. You're adding diversity then within yourself, for bringing those people onto your team they're gonna be adding diversity in a great way. Having a little bit of a familiarity, knowing that it would benefit you if you talked with someone in the fungus field, because I remember reading something about how the mycelium of fungus operates in this way and it can transmit nutrients. And maybe that can also be applied in the field of network systems, just throwing something out there. T-shaped people are really valuable on a team. We talked about breakthrough alignment today. So, rather breakthrough innovation and how it's correlated to alignment. So, if you have a team that's got low alignment, you'll have higher chance of a breakthrough innovation. Low alignment, which means high diversity, entire chance of a breakthrough of radical innovation. We talked about bringing together two established fields, people from the chemical engineering and people from semiconductors came up with nanotechnology. That can increase your chances of having success with diversity. And we talked about T-shaped people, who are broad in their knowledge, but also deep on their specific knowledge of one thing.
