The New Polymath – Book Review

A new trying to make innovation important again by showing how much is actually going on.

At one of the first analyst events I went to I got a lesson in analyst cynicism that’s stuck with me. After a day of the vendor presenting I asked a much older analyst what he thought of the day – just making small talk, really. “Well,” he began, “I haven’t really seen anything innovative and new.” I asked him the last time he had and he citing a chip from several years back.

I was stumped because I didn’t really think that level of innovation was really the point of the enterprise vendor we were talking with: making money selling and servicing (mostly “old”) technology was their strength, not inventing the next Internet.

And that’s about where we are now with many IT vendors: they’re not expected to dramatically innovate and come up with groundbreaking technologies that “change the world.” Apple leads in out in the consumer world, and people used to expect Google to stumble into innovation every-now-and-then. But the existing “elder companies”? They mostly get sinkers when they use the word “innovate.”

Expect Innovation

Vinnie Mirchandani’s book, The New Polymath, is a relentless narration of companies, vendors, and others trying to go against that technology innovation boredom and stagnation. It boarders on rocket car impossibility at times, but it’s depressingly one of the few books I’ve read recently that wants to really accelerate things beyond the status quo. The last one like that was probably Nick Carr’s The Big Switch.

I know Vinnie as one of the guys you get when you’re doing some enterprise software deal knife fighting with vendors. He’s the kind of guy who’ll say “instead of spending $30,000 to hire The B-52s for this conference, they should charge less for their software.” So his brutal optimism in The New Polymath was unexpected and provides a nice contrast.

In a sense, this book is more of a velvet knife: instead of just complaining about price and lack of innovation, it shows companies what they should be doing and expect from technology. The numerous profiles and cases show companies large and small innovating, and the framework towards the end tries to tell you how it’s done (the choice of BP in this context is unavoidably tragic, but shouldn’t detract from it).

There’s the usual framework for Evil Caniveling it into innovation – drive fast, jump high, but always wear a helmet – wrapped up at the end. Really, though, the point of the book is: get off your ass and innovate.