Founders - #125 Charles Kettering (inventor, engineer, founder)

Starting point is 00:00:00 I do know that any introduction that anyone could write to this remarkable story would be overshadowed by the substance of the narrative itself. Its significance is twofold. First, the lesson to be learned, and second, the story itself. Progress has come about when an unusual man broke loose and independently, on his own, started something different. The usual man seldom makes inventions, or strikes out new directions, or blazes new trails, or advances our frontiers of knowledge and understanding. Such things are done by unusual men who have a particular talent, broader vision, more imagination, more ambition, willingness to work, courage to act independently and accordingly to the force of his own convictions. The significant thing is that while the unusual man may profit by his unusual efforts and sacrifice, in an infinitely greater measure does he contribute to the advancement of the whole.

Starting point is 00:01:07 Indeed, that is the only way the whole can ever advance. I present to you the reader, Charles F. Kettering, farmer, school teacher, mechanic, inventor, engineer, scientist, social philosopher, and master salesman. Okay, so that was an excerpt written by Alfred Sloan from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Professional Amateur, the biography of Charles Franklin Kettering, and it was written by Thomas Boyd. So just a few things before I jump into the rest of the book. When this book was first published in 1957, the title was Professional Amateur, the biography of Charles Franklin Kettering. I'm not sure how to pronounce his name. I'm going to call him Ket today because that was his nickname. But when it was reprinted, they changed it to Charles F. Kettering, a biography. But I think the original title, Professional Amateur, gives you a great insight into the way in which Ket approached his work. And the second thing is I'm in the middle

Starting point is 00:01:57 of two multiple part series. The first series is reading a bunch of biographies for the early pioneers in the automobile industry. And the second is a multiple part series on Ellison. You're going to see them appear in the order in which the books arrive. There's a lot of, I guess, disruption in the supply chain right now. And so books are taking a lot longer than they normally do. And it's kind of unpredictable when I receive them. So I don't mean to go out of order like this.

Starting point is 00:02:22 But as the books arrive, I'm just reading them and then turning them into podcasts. Okay, so let me go ahead and get into, I want to start right up front. Normally I start in the early life, but I want to give you some brief summaries of why this Sloan, Alfred Sloan did a multiple part series on him too. It's an extremely accomplished individual and he regards Kett as a genius, as does Billy Durant calls Kett a genius. Walter Kreisler, Henry Leland, the founder of Cadillac. So what is it about this person that Sloan talks about, that Sloan referred to as an unusual, the most unusual individual is what he calls him. So it's impossible to summarize a person, but if you had to summarize Kett, this is the way you would do it.

Starting point is 00:03:05 And it says, as a symbol of progress in the American way of life, as creator of ideas and builder of industries and employment, as inspirer of men to nobler thoughts and greater accomplishments, as foe of ignorance and discouragement, as friend of learning and optimistic resolve. Charles F. Kettering stands among the greatest men of all time. So why are people saying that about him? Let me just read some of his accomplishments from his Wikipedia so you have that understanding right up front. He was an American inventor, engineer, businessman, and holder of 186 patents. He was the founder of Delco and was head of research at General Motors from 1920 to 1947. Among his most widely used automotive developments were the electrical starter and leaded gasoline. He was also responsible for the invention of Freon, which is used in

Starting point is 00:03:59 refrigeration and air conditioning systems. He developed the world's first aerial missile, and he led the advancement of practical lightweight two-stroke diesel engines which revolutionized the locomotive and heavy equipment industries. So when Sloan says that he has a remarkable life story what he means there is how does like what we're going to talk about today is how does a poor farm boy from Ohio transform himself into one of the greatest people in history. And I think a lot of that has to do with the way he approaches work and his mindset. So I want to talk about that term professional amateur. And so a lot of what I'm going to share with you today is direct

Starting point is 00:04:38 quotes from Ket. And this is him talking about why it's so important to approach your work with the mindset that you're a professional amateur. So he says, we are simply professional amateurs. We are amateurs because we are doing things for the first time. We are professional because we know we are going to have a lot of trouble. The price of progress is trouble, and I don't think the price is too high. So before I get to his early life, I want to continue this line of thought that he's having there. And I think these two excerpts are going to explain to you the way he thought.

Starting point is 00:05:12 And then once you understand the way he thinks, you'll see the way he approaches work. It makes sense why he went about his career the way he did. So he says, at this time, he's running a research laboratory for GM. Right. And this is many, many decades into the future. It takes him three. It takes him actually four decades to the idea that we still have everything to learn about automobiles. And that is just a simple truth. Now, that's a hell of a statement when you think that at this time GM is already producing hundreds of thousands, if not millions of cars. He says, we don't even know what makes an automobile run. It is so simple to explain it by saying you take a charge of gasoline and air into the cylinder and compress it and ignite it with a spark. And it explodes and pushes the piston down. And that makes your car go. a charge of gasoline and air into the cylinder and compress it and ignite it with a spark and

Starting point is 00:06:05 it explodes and pushes the piston down and that makes your car go. But if you stop it right there, it's a logical explanation. But what does the spark do? What do you mean by combustion? We don't know why or how the spark sets off that explosion of gas. So I say quite solemnly that we haven't the slightest idea of what really makes the contraption run. He says we call the reaction combustion because it nicely conceals our lack of knowledge on just what takes place in the engine cylinder. I just don't think we can live in this atmosphere of ignorance about what goes on there when our whole business depends on it. So this next excerpt will explain the first one. And you'll hear his idea. There's a quote that Thomas Edison is famous for saying. And he says, we don't know a millionth of 1% about anything. Now think about

Starting point is 00:06:59 how crazy a statement that comes from one of history's most legendary tinkerers uh cat the reason i bring that up is cat has that same belief so he says i object to people running down the future i'm going to live the all the rest of my life there and i would like it to be a nice place polished bright glistening and glorious what i believe is that by proper effort we can make the future almost anything we want to make it. In reality, here's the part that echoes Thomas Edison. In reality, we've only begun to knock a few chips from the great quarry of knowledge that has been given to us to dig out and use. And so I'm going to continue this, but I want to pause here and interject. Remember, Sloan calls him a master salesman.

Starting point is 00:07:46 And one thing that is so wonderful about reading the words of Kett is that he has a great way of taking extremely complex ideas and then breaking it down into a tiny little story that we can understand. And so he does the same thing here because he's saying, listen, first he's using a metaphor. He says, we've just knocked out a few chips, a tiny bit from the great quarry of knowledge. So what he's telling us is clearly that the unknown unknowns are much larger than the known knowns. Right. And he finds it peculiar that most of humanity goes on thinking that we have everything figured out when his belief is the exact opposite. We have almost nothing figured out. So now he has this great story about where he perceives, like how far we've progressed as a species on the attainment of discovery and knowledge, right? So he says, we're like two fellows who started to walk from New York to San Francisco. When they get over into Jersey, one said, we must be pretty nearly there. We have been walking a long, long

Starting point is 00:08:43 time. And so this is Ket's takeaway from there. He says that that is just how we are in what we know technically. We have just barely begun. Okay, so I want to go back in the story. I want to touch on his early life. So we see how a poor farm boy from the hills of Ohio winds up accomplishing everything he accomplished in his, what would that be, five plus decade career. So one aspect of his personality, his sentence is extremely important. And he says his usual unwillingness to believe that anything is impossible. Later on, Alfred Sloan talks about, he's talking about at the end of Kett's career about how important he was to the success of GM.

Starting point is 00:09:29 He talks about everybody points like the tangibles because he has, you know, 186 patents. He's invented all these these important things that we use today. But it's his he says is intangibles that are probably more important. And that's his inspiring those around them to keep working and to keep discovering. Let me tell you how Kett remembered his childhood. And I think this section also tells us a lot about how he thought about opportunity. So he says, I'm enthusiastic about being an American because I came from the hills in Ohio. I was a hillbilly. We had only one pair of boots a year. Now, I didn't know at the time that I was an underprivileged person.

Starting point is 00:10:13 I walked three miles to school in a little village, and I thought that was wonderful. I thought of all that as opportunity, and I thought the only thing involved in opportunity was whether I knew how to think with my head and how to do with my hands. I thought that was what opportunity consisted of. I didn't know you had to have money. I didn't know you had to have all these luxuries that we take, that we want everybody to have today. So he's going to school. He's raised on a farm, so he's working on a farm.

Starting point is 00:10:40 And then when he's not working on the farm, he's able to go to school. And the school is, you know, it's not what we think of school today. It's a one-room schoolhouse in the country. But he says he learned a lot in that little schoolhouse. And here's one of the lessons he learned. He says, he talks about they have these things called like McGruffy readers and think of it as like early textbooks for kids, right? And so he's talking about, and this gives you an insight into the perspective

Starting point is 00:11:06 that Kett has. He says in the lesson entitled Poverty and Riches, he read that even the poorest boy is rich in the things that really count. His sight, his hearing, his good health, and many other priceless possessions. Charlie was taught that where there is a will, there is a way. And after a lifetime of experience on his own, it is Ket's philosophy that we can overcome the difficulties if we want to. Now, one of the first jobs Ket has outside of the farm when he's 19, he's a teacher. But before he becomes a teacher and influences the minds of his students, he found, he develops a relationship with one of the most influential teachers in his life. And Ket is now, at this section I'm about to read to you, I think he's around 70 years old, going back and reflecting on everything he learned from this guy named

Starting point is 00:11:57 Neil McLaughlin. So it says, Neil taught his pupils to think in and around and through, Kettering recalled, or Kett recalled. Youngsters, and this is Kett continuing, youngsters naturally have exploring minds. He said, expressing his philosophy of education. They should be encouraged to quest and question. The trouble is we don't get interested in the commonplace things, and it is the commonplace things that make up the universe. So Kett definitely applies that philosophy when he's a teacher now ket like many of the people we said in the podcast they're very resourceful and we see this early resourcefulness because he's walking three miles

Starting point is 00:12:36 to school and three miles back and he's like hey let me not waste this walk and so he says in those daily walks back and forth between the farm and school, Ket often stopped at the big flour mill in the town, which was powered not by a water wheel, but by a steam engine. Remember, most of his life is consisted of working on engines. And so this is the first time he starts learning about it. He made friends with the men who tended the engine and ran the mill, and they taught him many practical things. So I want to emphasize the word practical. Ket says over and over again, he's not big on theory. And he's not big on even criticizes the way we teach kids in most of education that we're not teaching them practical things.

Starting point is 00:13:20 And so I'm going to quote heavily from Ket's views on that point throughout today. But before I get there, so he's learning a lot from the people that are running the engine and running the mill. And one lesson from his childhood that stuck with him his whole life is that you need to worry about what you can't control. And one of the older men is teaching him this through a story. So he says, besides learning about water power and flour mills, he got from the wise old miller some bits of philosophy which he stored in his young mind. A lot of people are bound to worry, the miller once told him. If you can do something about it, you ought to worry. I would think there's something wrong with you if you didn't. But if you can't do anything, then worrying is just like running this mill when

Starting point is 00:14:05 there's no grist to grind. All that does is wear out the mill. So now many decades later, he's still reflecting back on this time. And so it says on his 70th birthday, he said, I had the privilege, not the task of going to school. I had the privilege of going past the mill too. And there I learned about engines there's a great difference between knowing a thing and understanding it you can know a lot and not really understand anything but from those practice that word again practical men there in that mill and elsewhere i learned how to understand things and so something that they taught him he's very important like uh even when he's very important like uh even when

Starting point is 00:14:46 he's in school and later even when he goes to college he's not really interested in rote memorization he wants to understand the principles behind the things the why he constantly asks why and so um this this the sentence right here is going to are these two sentences going to tell you something about his personality but also about how he approached learning. He did not care so much about what the answer to a problem was, but he wanted to be sure that he knew the reason for it and how it was arrived at. He kept working at things until he got them. Okay, so let me fast forward in the timeline. This is after he completes high school, or I guess their version of high school. And his first job as a teacher. And this is where we see that Ket is definitely a misfit.

Starting point is 00:15:27 He decides that he wants to do things his own way. And he's largely influenced by how he learned. Ket did not follow slavishly the teaching practices at the time. Instead of teaching spelling solely by having the class memorize the spellings of a group of words in the spelling book, he would vary the assignment by having his pupils read something in the newspaper and tell them that they would be expected to know how to spell the words contained in it. This is a very important part. He wanted their study of spelling, and you could extrapolate this out to the learning of really anything. He wanted their study of spelling to to not be detached and abstract but

Starting point is 00:16:07 tied in with something concrete he told of once having been in a store looking over some books that he found there when he asked to buy two of them the keeper of the store remarked mister them ain't reading books them school books ket thought that school books ought to be reading books too so at this point he's teaching he's still a young man and like many young people he's looking for answers he has no idea what his life is going to be um he didn't even know he winds up spending most of his life as an engineer but he didn't know what engineering was um so that changed one day when he happened let me read this to you he He gets, this is the seed of the idea. It's like, Hey, maybe I can learn engineering too.

Starting point is 00:16:48 So it says, Kat happened to see an Ohio state university catalog from it. He learned that the courses in engineering at university taught blacksmithing and shop practice. So he's like, okay, well I know shop and I know blacksmithing. And if they're teaching engineers that maybe maybe I can become whatever an engineer is. He really had very little understanding then of what engineering was. But if the engineering course had blacksmithing in it, he could understand that.

Starting point is 00:17:13 He can understand that because he grew up on a farm. Now, what's interesting here is before, so he doesn't have a normal, you know, it's not, okay, 18, 17, 18, 19 years old, graduate high school, go to college, kind of the normal thing that happens now. He teaches for a few years. He doesn't get to start college until he's 22, and he doesn't graduate until he's 28 because he's got severe health problems, which I'll get to in a minute. So he's still teaching. He's got this idea that he wants to go to college, maybe become an engineer, but he can't get there. He doesn't have any money and he's still teaching.

Starting point is 00:17:47 What was very interesting, though, is Kett collects all these individuals in his life, right, that teach him a great deal. And so we already referenced that with the people working at the mill. Now he's going to learn from a wagon maker. And this is fascinating what Kett says about this. So remember, at this point in time, Kett is 20 years old. OK, the man from whom he learned most was Hiram Sweet, the wagon maker. But Sweet was more than a wagon maker. He was, as Kett said long afterward, an engineer of such keen ability as to be remarkable. You would no more think of running across such a man in a small town than you would of flying without a flying machine.

Starting point is 00:18:30 Hiram Sweet had invented and built a self-computing cash register, which was then in daily use as a drugstore. He also made an astronomical clock. Where did you find out all this, Ket asked Sweet? This is Sweet's reply, which is one of my favorite sentences in the entire book. I work in the wagon shop 10 hours a day, from 6.30 in the morning until 5.30 in the afternoon. And when I have no wagon work to do, I work on Sweet's head. Years afterward, when Ket had become a noted man, he recalled the days spent in Sweet's wagon shop.

Starting point is 00:19:06 Listen to the language here. It's so fascinating. Letting him work on my head, I learned more from that old wagon maker than I did in college. The world was so wonderful and he knew so little about it that he hated to sleep. Now that line, that sentence right there sounds very much like Ket later on in his life. Finally, at 22, he decides to make the jump. He quits being a teacher and he enrolls and he's a freshman at Ohio State University. And he says, but he had to work. He had to go to college, but he could not. He had to work at the same time. He had no money. He had to find work for when he entered the university. He had very little money.

Starting point is 00:19:45 By working early and late, so he'd work early in the morning, go to class, then work at night, and living for a while on 35 cents a day, he was able to get along. Now, it's very fascinating when you hear Cat reflect back on the things that are important. A lot of them is not in the textbooks in school. But it's these, it doesn't mean he didn't learn things in college, but this is, he's going to tell us right now one of the most important lessons he learned in college and really didn't have anything to do

Starting point is 00:20:11 with the actual material he's taught, but it's the relationships and the experience he's having, right? So it says, Keck got what he later said was one of the most important lessons he learned in college. He learned it from the eminent actor,

Starting point is 00:20:26 this guy named Joseph Jefferson. It says Jefferson, together with his company, came to the university town to play his famous part of Rip Van Winkle. One of the men asked him how often he had played the part of Rip Van Winkle. The great actor told him how many hundreds of times he had played the role. And so he's asked, don't you get terribly tired of doing it so often? Yes, I did get tired after a while, but the people wanted Rip. And so I went on playing him. I said to myself, this is the most important part. It doesn't matter how you feel. Your job is to entertain the audience. Then I made up my mind that then I made up my mind that I would try to portray Rip Van Winkle just a little bit better each time. And that constant effort at improving the part has kept up my

Starting point is 00:21:13 interest and enthusiasm. I thought that was very interesting that Kett explicitly says that's one of the most important lessons he learned. Now, what you also love about Kett is his undying or unrelenting optimism. So this is Ket on the power of imagination. So let me give you some background. Ket had bad eyes. I have no idea. I couldn't find his life, but it was intermittent. It would happen for maybe a few months, maybe even a year, and then he would be fine. I think later on it just went away, but that's not really what I want you to focus on. I want you to focus on the fact that he flips a disability to a superpower. So what's happening right now is he's at Ohio State University, and he can't read. So his classmates are reading the material to him. So he's laying down sitting there with his eyes closed. And this is where he's just, OK, I'm going to let the power of my imagination mesh with the information that's in this book that's being read aloud to me.

Starting point is 00:22:16 Right. She says also because he could read less and less, he learned more and more to picture things in his mind. This capacity was value to him, valuable to him later in life. Without imagination, he once said, you can't get anywhere. He even remarked that by such mental digestion of new facts, direct quote from him now, you can know three times as much as you know without learning any more. So this period of his life, though, this gets to be be so overwhelming it's one thing you can't read so okay his friends and classmates are reading to him but then his migraines and his headaches

Starting point is 00:22:50 are so unrelenting that he has to leave school that's why i said he enrolls at 22 doesn't graduate till 28 it's not because he was dilly-dallying he's that's not there's no there's nothing in cat's life that it's this dilly-dallying he wakes up and he and he shoots off like a rocket um but this is one of the first times again no one's perfect we all have to work through things that it's this dilly-dallying. He wakes up and he shoots off like a rocket. But this is one of the first times, again, no one's perfect. We all have to work through things that, you know, there's problems in our lives, there's times where we're discouraged. I think back to that excerpt or that paragraph,

Starting point is 00:23:19 I guess section is a better way to put it, in my 40 years with Ford, where this is now Ford's third attempt at building an automobile manufacturing company. And he comes to see the author of the book is Charles Sorensen. And he comes to see Charlie and he's just like, you know what, we're about to run out of money. I guess I'm just not going to have my, you know, I'm just not gonna be able to accomplish this goal. And, you know, there's this conversation that takes place between the two people. And eventually at the end, Ford is like he's fired back up he's like you know i felt like quitting at the beginning of this conversation now i don't and that and then just a few short years later he

Starting point is 00:23:54 winds up attaining his life goal is one single goal of building a car uh so inexpensively that you know the average people can have it so i just just think it's important. That's Henry Ford, one of the most successful entrepreneurs of all time. And there's so many times in his life story that he wants to quit, that he's disheartened. And I think the difference is that the benefit of listening to this podcast is you're going to be brainwashed. A lot of people already believe in themselves.

Starting point is 00:24:19 So there's two things that are going to happen. One, you're going to be brainwashed into believing in yourself. And the people that are already believing in themselves, you're going to be brainwashed into believing in yourself. And the people that are already believing in themselves, you're going to be brainwashed into not quitting. Because that's the two main traits of almost every single person. It's like they believe in their ability to do what they were setting up to do, even if they understand that there's going to be setbacks along the way. And there's going to be some times when they're tempted to quit.

Starting point is 00:24:37 And the second thing is they don't quit. And so this is Ket being disheartened, but he's not going to quit. He's going to quit temporarily, but he goes back at it. So it says, the condition of his eyes then went from bad to worse. Not only could he not see to study, but he also, but also the headaches which plagued him grew more and more violent. He became sick. His eyes failed him so completely that he simply had to leave the university. At that point, he was a disheartened young man. And this is going to be a hell of a statement from Ket. I'm glad it didn't turn out this way leaving for home he said to a friend if my eyes won't

Starting point is 00:25:09 let me finish my schooling i hope the train runs off the track and kills me okay so he goes back and he's like maybe working outside he gets a job at um they're they're laying the line think about like the time uh the relatively new invention of the telephone. So they have to, you know, there's physical labor, just like in the railroad industry of laying the track, right? So he's doing that work,

Starting point is 00:25:35 working outside and he's not having to read, winds up helping his eyes, right? But he also learns a lot about engineering. Remember, he's pausing his engineering degree, but he's learning a lot about engineering, but he's learning about engineering, engineering telephone networks. Right. Which is kind of crazy because this guy is almost like I don't even know how to describe him. He's such like something also to think about. Like I read all of his some of his accomplishments at the beginning. But like he has weird things that he gets interested in. Like there's no records at the time but there's a very good chance that he flew more than any other he had more hours and

Starting point is 00:26:09 more miles in the air than any other american uh when he was in his early life he winds up being friends with the wright brothers because they both live in dayton ohio which i'll get to more later on um he has the first house that in America that has air conditioning. Like he just, he's just a, he's just a really fascinating person. The reason I'm bringing all this up is because what he's about to say right here is that like, you don't, you got it backwards. If you think that you need to accept a job before you know how to do it. So at the time he's asked to, he's like, Hey, can you, they're helping run before you know how to do it. So at the time, he's asked to,

Starting point is 00:26:45 he's like, hey, they're helping run telephone lines and poles and everything else. Can you develop a telephone exchange? And so essentially what's happening is he's asked to do a job he doesn't know how to do. And I absolutely love his response. So it says, soon Ket was asked whether he could install a telephone exchange. Certainly he could. Although in truth, he actually knew very little about it. But the obstacle of not knowing, never kept him from under, not knowing how, excuse me, the obstacle of not knowing how never kept him from undertaking anything he thought needed to be done. It is a fundamental rule with me that if I want to do something, I start whether I know how or not. As a rule, you can find that out by trying. So this is also tied to his personality trait and the personality trait that I find maybe most inspiring.

Starting point is 00:27:33 Not one of the most inspiring things. There's a lot of inspiring things I'm taking from Kat. It's his refusal to accept defeat. He would tell you that it's supposed to be hard and that everything of value is hard. So it says this resolute attitude of not accepting defeat has saved Kett from failure on many of his important endeavors. This is a non-direct quote from Kett. If an experiment fails, then you ought to be careful to find out why it failed, because that failure may not have had anything to do with the reasonableness of the principle. Every great improvement has come after

Starting point is 00:28:05 repeated failures. Virtually nothing comes out first or excuse me, comes out right the first time. Failures, repeated failures are finger posts on the road to achievement. So again, that ties, I don't know if I've been explicit enough in trying to impart this onto you. He is a fan of trial and error. He is a fan of tinkering. I've read, I think, what, 125 books so far for this podcast. My favorite books still to this day, the top 10 favorite books change. It fluctuates. The number one has not fluctuated yet. It is James Dyson's autobiography. I think it is essential for anybody that wants to have a remarkable life, whether that, whatever that means to you to read that book. And not only is it short and interesting and he's a, he's a hilarious person. He writes very like witty and cheeky. And he's

Starting point is 00:28:53 like, you see this person, I bleeds off the pages, but he gives you very practical, um, ideas about how to achieve things that are, that are hard. And one section of the book is called the Edison, what he believes in, what James Dyson believes in, is what also what Kett believes in, is the Edisonian principle of design, which is essentially just you have to tinker your way through. And so his point, you know, James Dyson is most famous for making a bagless vacuum. He thought, you know, why is it we have millions of vacuum cleaners and none of them work? Like, how has nobody noticed this? And one of his most famous quotes, he's like, listen, I made 5,127 prototypes before I got it right. You don't just sit down and think, okay, think, think, you don't sit down, think, okay, think this is how it's going to work. And then

Starting point is 00:29:40 it just, it works exactly like reality does not align to your thoughts so ditch it like discover reality through trial and error and i just love that idea of what and that's what kent's saying here he's like every great improvement has come after repeated failures virtually nothing comes out right the first time and he also applies this principle like in a philosophical way in his speeches to the early automobile industry um later on i'm going to give you some great quotes about he's like, listen, you can't plan industries who plan the automobile industry like that's ridiculous. It grew organically through, you know, hundreds, then soon to be thousands and then now millions of tinkerers. OK, so let me get back to the story, though.

Starting point is 00:30:21 Oh, so this is really interesting. The cast of characters that that Kett like that his life intersects with intersects with is almost unbelievable right um and one of those is him and uh i'll get to where he's going to work after college but he he knows thomas watson the founder of ibm they work at ncr national cash register uh and i'm going to talk more about what he learned there but But so Kett takes this job and it's the same company Thomas Watson Jr. works at. And this is how it happens. Before the end of Kett's senior year, a letter. Oh, so I skipped over a bunch. He's he went back to Ohio State after his his eyes improved. He's going to graduate. And so there's a letter to the university.

Starting point is 00:31:03 It says before the end of Kett's senior year, a letter came to university asking for a young man with an inventive turn of mind and a good knowledge of electricity to join the invention staff of the National Cash Register Company at Dayton, Ohio. And so the person that gets this, I don't know if it's a professor, department head, any whatever, whoever it was, says, hey, yeah, I got the guy just for you. This is this crazy guy named Kett. So Kett takes the job. Right. And what's fascinating, I love the way he approaches these opportunities. He calls it his graduate school because of all the stuff he learned there. In July 1904, Kett entered what he later said would be his graduate school. He was on the invention staff at the National Cash Register Company. Just read that. The president of NCR was John Patterson. He was a genius of a man, a farm boy and an ex coal dealer who, at the age of 40, had organized the company around a purchased invention, which was an embryonic cash register. Remember, these are not electro electronic cash registers yet. In fact, Kett is one of the people that that helped invent that method. These are, I think, electromechanical, is I think what they're called. Patterson was a business showman and a pioneer in modern methods of advertising and selling. Through his originality and drive, he had built the company into one of the best in the nation.

Starting point is 00:32:15 He had a special knack of picking good people and was said to have conducted the greatest business university in America. And so we see Ket is at the right place at the right time, again, with the right set of skills. He has the traits necessary to succeed in new product creation. So I think that's most of the insights that we're going to get from Ket is like, how do you approach if you're trying to do something new? How do you do that? Right. So it says when Ket went to NCR, he was by no means the usual new college graduate. He was almost 28 years old,

Starting point is 00:32:42 but he was already a self-taught and experienced experimenter. He also had the enthusiasm, the intensity of interest, and the boundless energy essential to success in the tough business of developing new products. Now, this is where he also at NCR, he picks up on the importance of sales. Remember, Kett was described as a master salesman by Alfred Sloan. And so this is Ket remembering this time in his life. He says, I didn't hang much around with the other inventors or the executives. I lived with the sales gang. They had some real notion of what people wanted and sensitivity to what people want has all through his life has been a marked characteristic. Remember, Ket said, that you and I get no place in the world except in proportion as we serve the fellow who pays for our dinner. Now, something else I found fascinating about Ket is that he'll take one lesson in his life and then apply it to a different domain later on.

Starting point is 00:33:38 At this point, cash registers were hand cranked, which sounds really crazy to us, right? So he invents a way to not need a hand crank on a cash register. Now, what's interesting to me is he's also the person that, remember, cars used to be had to crank and started. So he realizes it's the same solution, the same principle behind the solution that he invents for the cash register can be applied to the car later on, right? So I don't want to go into detail here, but I want to tell you the print, like his, his larger thought here, which I think is important more than once. This is cat talking more than once we have seen research accomplishments fit together, like the words of a crossword puzzle to aid it, to aid us in solving other problems. Okay. So, um, he works at NCR for five years.

Starting point is 00:34:23 I'm fast forwarding. He makes four major inventions. Those four major inventions wind up being for many years the principal products at the company. And so he gets this idea that he wants to eventually have his own invention shop. He wants to do like independent engineering. He doesn't really know how. At this time, obviously, the automobile industry is booming. And so this is going to give him the opportunity to have his own business where he can invent the things that he wants to invent, right? So he has a friend named Howard, this guy, he works at Cadillac, right? And Howard's telling Kett one day, he says, Howard told Ket that at Cadillac, they were not satisfied with the automobile ignition systems of that time and asked him if he could think up of a solution. So he's like, OK, we have a company that has a problem. I think I have a unique set of skills and I could solve that problem. So he starts working, you know, nights and weekends to solve the problem because he understands that, hey, if I can, like, there's already a need here. If I can fill that need, then I can get money and I can do this on my own. Right. So he now this is what's really interesting about this. So he funds his work, this work, this like nighttime and

Starting point is 00:35:35 weekend work first from his savings. And he get his office spacers is really a friend's barn. OK, so it says to provide the machine tools that the men needed in that experimental work, they took out savings, this is him and his wife, they took out savings of $1,500, nearly the total amount they had. With that money, Kett purchased a lathe and a milling machine that added to the meager equipment in their little shop. This was only the beginning of Mrs. Kettering's efforts to help her husband in his independent inventive endeavors. Often when the men were working late in the barn,

Starting point is 00:36:14 she would bring them coffee and an evening snack. Remembering the loyal support she gave him during this trying period and afterward, Kett said of her, she was a great help in those early struggles. She never got discouraged. She winds up passing away from cancer. And one of the, he talks about like what a wonderful life they had together. But he also said something I thought was very insightful about their relationships. He said that she was the only thing in his life that he never tried to improve. Okay, so all this work in the barn pays off. They get a contract to produce 8,000 ignitions from Henry Leland. So we've talked a lot about Henry Leland. Henry Leland was extremely

Starting point is 00:36:56 influential. Not only was he an early automobile pioneer himself, but he's extremely influential on almost all of the other early automobile pioneers. He was extremely important. I can't find a biography of him. If you can, if you can, please send in my direction. He's really fascinating.

Starting point is 00:37:14 So there, well, first of all, Kat also does something. He's going to form a company here and he realizes he needs a good, somebody to do business. Like somebody can handle the business because he's not really interested in that end of it.

Starting point is 00:37:27 This is very similar to like the arrangement at like the early days of Rolls-Royce where you have Henry Royce as the engineer and then Rolls as the business person. So it says Deeds, that's the guy's name, and Kettering were called up to Detroit by Henry Leland and then they gave okay I already said that they have a contract this was really more than the two men had contemplated they were

Starting point is 00:37:50 thinking only of becoming originators of new product products not manufacturers of anything so they wanted Kat because like well we we figured out can you manufacture it that's not how it works so they're hired to manufacture so what they do at the beginning is they can subcontract out the manufacturing but eventually they start making things that no one else has to make so they have to grow into manufacturers themselves um so after the contract was signed ket resigns so what that tells you is this this the beginning of this company just like last week when we talked to larry ellison in the beginning of Oracle, it was a side hustle. It was then that Kett resigned from NCR. Now, this is a description of the hours that the barn gang kept. And that's the beginning of the company, right?

Starting point is 00:38:33 As for the working hours kept by the men in the barn, one of them put it this way. Quit at five o'clock? Boy, we didn't even know there was any five o'clock. All we knew was there was light and there was dark. Now, back to Leland. Leland, like many other people, called Kett a straight up genius, but that doesn't mean he's not going to be hard on him. Leland had had unbelievably high standards and was ruthless to people that did not meet his high standards. So he says the man whom Leland called an absolutely unknown electrical genius, succeeded in selling not only his product, but also himself to everyone at Cadillac with whom he had to deal.

Starting point is 00:39:14 But Leland was a most exacting and critical purchaser. He found fault with many things about the new system. Trying to satisfy him and everything and everyone else concerned and to solve the unexpected problems that arose, Kettering or Kett began a long period of traveling. So it's this long period of traveling back and forth between Dayton and Detroit, where sometimes he would drive, sometimes he would take the train. Eventually, he's like, I'm just going to learn how to fly. And so he starts flying back and forth between the two cities.

Starting point is 00:39:47 Now, fast forwarding, he's very successful creating this ignition system. But what Kett is most well known for is the fact that he invented the electrical starter, right? And the way it came about was very fascinating. Leland's friend and fellow automobile founder pulled over to the side of the road one day. He's trying to help this lady crank her car. It comes loose, breaks his jaw. The guy's old at the time, and from complications of a broken jaw, he dies. But that's Leland's friend, right?

Starting point is 00:40:14 And so this motivates Leland to find a solution to the hand crank. Broken bones and other injuries were common when cars were cranked by hand. But Carter was not a young man, and complications arising from the accident caused his death. Now it happened that Carter was a friend of Harry Leland. Soon afterward in Leland's office, Kett remarked that he thought it would be possible to do away with the hand crank by cranking cars electrically. In Leland's distress at the loss of his friend, he took up the suggestion at once. If Kett could develop a successful self-starter he would agree to put it on the cadillac car the next year and so this one invention is what is where we see kett's company which is called delco have rapid growth and eventually that rapid growth is noticed

Starting point is 00:40:58 by billy durant and billy durant's gonna buy it and that's how he's folded into gm okay we're not there yet um but i want to get to the point about, well, first of all, Delco has to, I already said that they're going to turn, they have to turn into manufacturers, right? Or else the electric starter doesn't get built. So I thought it was interesting how they financed the company. It became necessary for Delco. I had to finance the stage of this company, I should say. It became necessary for Delco itself to set up the job of manufacturing a large part of the equipment. There were only 12 men on the payroll at the time.

Starting point is 00:41:29 They grew from 12 men to 1,200 very, very fast. But to get even that small endeavor underway, Kett and Deeds had to put all the money they could scrape up. They mortgaged everything they had. Deeds put a mortgage on his house, and Kett put a mortgage on a lot that he owned. Both borrowed money on their life insurance policies. They also put up patents and contracts with Cadillac as collateral for a loan from the bank. Cadillac also paid them some money in advance.

Starting point is 00:41:59 So they're doing whatever they can, right? They sold some preferred stock and raised money in every possible way. At this time, there's a great quote that Kett has. All human development, no matter what form it takes, must be outside the rules. Otherwise, we would never have anything new. And so what he's referencing there is he successfully invents an electric starter, right? But then when he goes and gives a presentation at this formal organization of electrical engineers,

Starting point is 00:42:29 one guy stands up and is like, oh, you didn't use our methods to invent this, so it's fine that you did this, but I would never do that because I'm a real electrical engineer. This is stupid. What are you talking about? And so Ket, you know, he's rather ambivalent about this.

Starting point is 00:42:44 He's like, I don't care about this. I care about solutions. I are you talking about? And so Ket, you know, he's rather ambivalent about this. Like, I don't care about this. I care about solutions. I don't care about your methods or your gatekeeping way you think should be done. So he says, never mind about the experts, Ket said. The public liked the self-starter. They never troubled their heads about whether the theory was right or not. And so Ket's also talking about like this time and period in his life you having to to do something he's never done before how do i scale a company like i don't know what

Starting point is 00:43:09 i'm doing so he says nobody is nobody is smart enough to get into the business that you end up in that saying comes in part out of his experience in delco which he was forced to depart from its original objective of developing new ideas to become a manufacturer. So I'm speeding through this time because I want to get to a lot of his philosophies and on on just all the lessons he learned in his career. So Billy Durant buys buys Delco. I thought Katz response to it was hilarious. One day in 1916, Katz was working away in the experimental department when Deeds came in and said to him, Well, Kett, you know we've been discussing a deal with United Motors for some time. We're going to get $9 million for Delco.

Starting point is 00:43:52 That's a heck of a lot of money, was Kett's only comment as he went ahead with what he was working on. And I think something that Kett was extremely smart on. He knew what he was good at and knew what he was bad at. So he says, the greatest invention an inventor can make is to get a good businessman to run his business for him. So he had deeds in earlier life and then Sloan plays that role later on. So this is Ket on the fact that product development is chaos. Out of his years of experience, Ket once said, development work is always a slightly organized chaos. This is Kett on his idea for a double profit system. Concerning business, Kett said, I am for the double profit system,

Starting point is 00:44:37 a reasonable profit for the manufacturer and a much greater profit for the customer. This is Kett, his how like how can you know how far along a project is he says the way to tell whether a new development is over the hump he once remarked is to is by try is to try taking your hands off of it and if it runs back at you it has not been pushed far enough but if it continues to go forward meaning other people can can continue your efforts then it is far enough along for the it continues to go forward, meaning other people can continue your efforts, then it is far enough along for the research man to leave it to others. I mentioned earlier that it was a rather small world, that Kett knew the Wright brothers. He says, because

Starting point is 00:45:17 Kett lived in Dayton and knew the Wright brothers, he became interested in flying. His first airplane flight was made at the flying school operated by Orville Wright. Kett admired Wilbur and Orville Wright and all they did in overcoming obstacles to successful flight. Those obstacles were psychological as well as physical, for it was commonly believed then that heavier-than-air flight was impossible. The Wright brothers, Kett said, flew right through the smokescreen of impossibility. So he develops a love of flying and he would fly in bad air, bad conditions on purpose just to study weather and air currents.

Starting point is 00:45:59 But he figured out a way to like he had a limit and he figured out a way to, like he had a limit. And he figured out a way to find where the line he didn't want to cross was. And I thought there's a lot of knowledge in this short sentence. I've always had a rule for myself. Never fly when the birds don't because they have a lot of experience. So as a result of the, like he's one of the first people to understand the impact and the miracle that flight was. And so he realized, oh, there's going to be an industry that's going to grow up behind this. He said, I made only two railroad trips last year. I flew more than 15,000 miles. I was not out joy riding. I was just one place and wanted to go somewhere else. And I traveled by airplane.

Starting point is 00:46:42 Several years hence, the aircraft industry will be a big business it is in its infancy but it's developing a means of transportation three to five times faster than any other is a utility it is such a great utility that we do not first appreciate it and so this flying is not only transportation to him not only is he running experience uh experiments rather but he's gaining perspective that he feels is valuable. Remember, he thinks that we don't put things in a proper perspective. Like we think we know more than we do and we think we are more important than we really are. And so he says, as with everything else Kett did, his flying was reflected in his philosophy.

Starting point is 00:47:22 This is now a direct quote from Kett. Everyone ought to take a ride in his philosophy. This is now a direct quote from Ket. Everyone ought to take a ride in an airplane. If an airplane passenger has any personal conceit, such an experience will remove it before he again reaches the ground. If the general manager of some great factory reaches an altitude of 5,000 feet, looks back and sees a little bit of the factory about the size of a postage stamp, he is bound to realize that he is not so much after all. I mentioned earlier that Kett had the first air-conditioned home in America. It was funny how this came about, and it gives you an insight into his personality. The air-conditioned equipment

Starting point is 00:48:04 was put in against the advice of the architect and the contractor. They threw up their hands at my suggestion, Kett recalled. So I bought what was needed to harness a well understood scientific principle and made my own air conditioning plant. That is just one of the compensations of being an independent sort of mechanic. While he's working at Delco, he sets up his own personal research lab. And he does it because he feels he's being distracted too much by the commercial needs of the business, right? So he says in his disappointment that his laboratory at Delco

Starting point is 00:48:36 had not been able to do much of the pioneering kind of research he wanted to do because of the continual hindrance from current problems that demanded solution, he determined to try again to set up a separate laboratory for research alone. That decision was important both because of the good results that came from it directly and also because it became a link in the chain of circumstance that led him to instill broader fields. So he's not only going to be working in automobiles, but he starts working on innovations for airplanes, diesel engines that can be applied to farm equipment and trains. He doesn't know where his experiences are going to lead him. He's just willing to follow the path that they're making.

Starting point is 00:49:21 And to that point, this is Ket on the power of trial and error. The destruction of a theory is of no consequence, for theories are only stepping stones. More great scientific development has been made by stumbling than by what is thought of as science. In my opinion, an ounce of experimentation is worth a pound of theory. This is why Ken hates committees. He does a lot of work for the country in both World War I and World War II. So during World War I, the army or the military has an issue. There's this thing called knock.

Starting point is 00:49:59 It happens in engines and cars, but it's also happening in engines and planes. And so through trial and error, he discovers, hey, gasoline, for whatever reason, gasoline that's produced in California causes the engine to knock less than gasoline that is used from that is that is created in Pennsylvania. So he tells them the result of his experience experiments, but they the committee's doesn't agree. And so it says it was accordingly suggested that California gasoline be used as fuel for airplanes flown in combat. But unfortunately, there was a wartime committee which turned down the recommendation. Recommendation is not practical. I think it's the definition of practical. Actually, it was this frustrating experience and several others which Kettering had with committees acting on progressive ideas that caused him to say later, if you want to iron a thing down to the most simple, commonplace, low form of mediocrity, get a committee to pick the flaws in it. Why? Because there isn't one man

Starting point is 00:50:53 in a thousand who has any imagination. This is a great story that illustrates his opinion on this matter. Ten years afterward, when his wife read about Charles Lindbergh's solo flight across the Atlantic, she said to her husband, how wonderful that he did it all alone. It would, and this is Kett's reply. It's hilarious. It would have still been more wonderful if he had done it with a committee. And so Kett has this philosophy. I love this idea. He says, and this is very similar to a lot of like Henry Ford would say something similar. We find that in research, a certain amount of intelligent ignorance is essential to progress. For if you know too much, you won't try the thing.

Starting point is 00:51:37 This is Kett on the importance of firsthand experience. It may seem strange that with all his responsibilities and with as much capable help as he had, Kett would devote so much of his own time to road testing, meaning driving the automobile to make sure that what he fixed is actually fixed. It was done in the exercise of his belief that it is a mistake for any person engaged in research to leave the practicing of it altogether to others. It takes personal practice to drive delusions out of a fellow's mind, he said. In an illustration of this belief, he once told this story. I was running some tests off the coast of Florida in connection with automatic steering devices for small boats. And when the weather was bad, I used to work out there every day

Starting point is 00:52:23 from about 9 in the morning to about 3 or 4 in the afternoon. The test had to be run in bad weather because we couldn't find out anything in good weather. Some friends of mine down there for a vacation said, We think you're crazy running that little boat up and down in the stormy Gulf Stream all day long. Why don't you get somebody else to do that for you? One of those men happened to be a very good golfer and the other was an excellent violinist. So I said, I'll tell you what I'll do. You fellows get somebody to play your golf game for you and to practice your fiddle for you. If you find that works, let me know and I

Starting point is 00:52:57 will get somebody to ride that boat for me. Right now, I do not know how anybody else could get my firsthand experience for me. One of the fundamental principles of Kat's life was the fact that he would, you know, he wouldn't he'd veer off the path. Like if you believe that there's more things that we don't know than we do know, then just traveling on a well-worn path is not the way to discover new things. Right. And so what was interesting is he applied this even in his travel. So he's talking to this person. They both have to drive back from Dayton to Detroit quite a bit. And at the time, Route 25 was like the main highway to do so. And so Kett tells him, you know, I can I can get there, whatever. I think it's like four

Starting point is 00:53:38 for the guy says you couldn't make the drive in four hours. And and Kett says, well, I do make it in four hours. And so he's like, I'm'm gonna ride with you next time you do because i want to see how you do this because you're doing it so much faster than me um so it says often kettering used the story this story to emphasize to young people and others the importance of getting off the beaten track especially if one is to be successful in developing new things invention he would say is nothing more than getting off route 25. So what this guy discovers is when he's riding with Ket, this guy would stay on Route 25 all the time. So it takes him, you know, six hours, seven hours, whatever it was. Ket discovered through trial and error

Starting point is 00:54:13 that you get on and off Route 25 and you can get there faster. And so he uses that as an illustration. It's like, OK, it's the same thing when you're trying to do new things. Ket was a master salesman, not because necessarily he wanted to, even though it does have, you know, extreme practical uses in life, but because he understood that the hardest job in life is selling new ideas. One of Ket's important functions was that of selling the results of research to practical engineers and executives in the manufacturing divisions. That was seldom easy. Out of his experience, Ket had said that new ideas are the hardest things in the world to merchandise. This is hilarious. He's very funny, actually.

Starting point is 00:54:54 Concerning one man with whom he had to deal, one who made it an invariable practice to resist change, Ket suggested to the general manager of that man's division that he would be better off to pay this guy a good salary to stay away from the plant altogether than to let him remain in a position to prevent new things from being done. It's now Ket's saying. Just tell him that anytime he comes nearer than a mile from the plant, his salary will stop. One of the remarkable people that Ket's life intersected with was Henry Ford. This is really interesting. And this also tells you the self-confidence that kett's life intersected with was henry ford this was really interesting and this also tells you like the self-confidence that kett has to talk to henry

Starting point is 00:55:29 ford the way he's about to talk to him kett believes in the in the inevitability of progress he recalled a time in the days of the model t when henry ford told kett that he was not going to put a self-starter on the ford car mr ford kett replied that is something you are not going to put a self-starter on the Ford car. Mr. Ford, Kett replied, that is something you are not going to have anything to say about. I'm saying it's not up to you. Progress is going to march right past you. This is a good idea of how he managed. In guiding the efforts of those associated with him, he suggested rather than directed. So great was his respect for independent thought and initiative and others that it was often difficult for those working on a project to find out just what he himself thought about what should be done in a given circumstance.

Starting point is 00:56:15 Why is he doing that? He was careful not to stamp out a spark of fire in anyone. Instead, he would fan it to a bright glow. If he did any prodding of those working on an endeavor, This is Sloan on the fact that Kett's intangibles outweighed his tangibles, even though his tangibles, tangible contributions to GM were great. Sloan gave an evaluation of the part that Kett had been in playing in its success, meaning the success of GM. I start with a very ordinary statement that Mr. Kett, I'm going to call him Mr. Kett, contributed to General Motors, contribution to General Motors has been most outstanding. And I would say that the contribution divides itself into tangibles and intangibles. On the tangible side are the things that are specific.

Starting point is 00:57:15 That's Kett's inventions and improvements, right? I would say that on the intangible side of it, if it could be evaluated, has meant more to all of us than all of the tangible things, as important as the tangible things were. He has been an inspiration to me and the whole organization particularly in directing our thoughts and imaginations and our activities towards doing a better job technically and the tremendous importance of technological progress. Also, his courage, his tenacity, his belief in the soundness of his deductions and his work have been essential because nobody knows better than you, meaning Ket, the terrible resistance

Starting point is 00:57:59 you get in trying to do something different. So this is Kett talking to us about new ideas and what he calls the shirt losing zone. Ideas grow very much like plants. You have to sow the seed. Then when the shoot comes first to the ground, they are quite tender and vulnerable. The proper care of the plant in this state is very important if it's to live and grow. In doing a new thing, only occasionally does anything go right. At least 90% of the time is taken up in overcoming all sorts of new and unexpected difficulties. It has been my good fortune to go through at least a dozen of these new developments. All the life histories of all of them are very much the same in each there is a period which i've called the t-shirt or excuse me the shirt losing zone

Starting point is 00:58:52 that is the time after the article has been put on the market when it gets a serious setback this is the most dangerous period and many good ideas have failed at this point. It's also tied to this is that his idea that you need to release your product as soon as it has any utility to another person. And he says, once it's being used by other people, you're going to feel pressure to improve it faster than you otherwise would. So this is how he describes that. Why did we not wait to begin selling the product until all the problems of using it had been completely solved? The answer is this. I have found that once a product has reached a stage at which it is useful to people or better than what they have otherwise, it is

Starting point is 00:59:36 time to begin making it available to them. Doing this serves two purposes. The first is that people get the benefit of the improvement sooner than they would otherwise. And the second is that the further improvement of the product will proceed faster and more intelligently when there is such practical use to stimulate and guide it. The summary of this quote is really, you must act, you must move. You have to try things, Kett says. Action without intelligence is a form of insanity. But intelligence without action is the greatest form of stupidity in the world. This is Kett on the price of progress.

Starting point is 01:00:23 In putting out new things, troubles are not the exception. They are the rule. That is why I have said on many occasions that the price of progress is trouble. Now this section I'm about to read to you is, you could summarize it saying that overconfidence can get you killed. Another way to think about this is this, this person is the, if you could find the opposite of Ket, it would be Josiah Stamp. Okay. So it says, this is right before World War II. Among the prominent Englishmen whom Ket met at this time was Sir Josiah Stamp, later known as Lord Stamp, and was the chief economist of the Bank of England. Sir Josiah

Starting point is 01:01:01 was negative to the introduction of ethyl gasoline into England. His arguments were based in part upon the idea that it is not possible to have a stable economic world if it is going to be upset continually by introduction of new inventions. In 1938, Kett had a further experience with Lord Stamp, which he afterward related as follows. I had just returned to England from Germany, and knowing that over there they were getting ready to go to war, I asked Lord Stamp whether or not England felt prepared to meet it. Lord Stamp replied that it was not necessary that England be prepared for war, because Germany could not fight a long war. In support of his view, he pulled out a piece of paper

Starting point is 01:01:46 and set up the relative percentages of Germany's gold reserves and various other indexes, which are commonly used in rating a nation's commercial ability or industrial activity. He said that with Germany's indexes so low, she would go broke before she could even start an important war. This opinion of his proved to be a great fallacy, of course, She would go broke before she could even start an important war. This opinion of his proved to be a great fallacy, of course.

Starting point is 01:02:17 And it was unfortunate that Lord Stamp and his wife were killed by a German bomb which fell on their home outside London. Kat continues, I should like to have been able to discuss this subject with him further, but I'm not sure whether economists and inventors will go to the same place when they die. Later on in his life, he gets interested in boats. He takes some people out on a cruise of one of his boats, and this gives you an insight into his personality. The boat breaks down, and so as a guest on that cruise remembers with admiration, Ket's persistence and dogged determination to make those injectors perform he worked hour after hour under the most distressing circumstances until at last he did overcome the difficulty yeah so at this time uh he's working on the development of diesel engines uh and specifically diesel locomotives.

Starting point is 01:03:10 And so he has this person he's working with saying, hey, you know, we're getting a lot of feedback. Like at the time, a lot of them were using steam engines, right? And so people are saying we're crazy. People are saying we're wasting our time. Ket, why don't you get out there and like evangelize this idea and educate people why we think we're going to be successful? And Ket completely disagrees. And so the summary of this section is let the competition think you're crazy. By the time they get it, it'll be too late. So it says, why don't you, this is Ket talking to this guy. Why don't you know, young man, that the finest asset we have for our diesel locomotive business is the fact that all of

Starting point is 01:03:42 our competitors believe that we are crazy? If you will, if you will help them keep, if you will help them keep on thinking that we'll not be bothered with competition during the years in which we are working out the bugs and developing a really good locomotive. This is a quote from the person he was speaking to. I took Kat's idea to heart and it worked like a charm. By the time the opposition woke to what was happening, the rush to diesel power was on in full force. And to stay in business, they had to make hasty, ill-prepared entries into the field. Now this section, he talks about when you're doing experiments, don't we be worried about duplication of effort? So this is different. Last week, we talked about Larry Ellison was worried about duplication of effort, but it wasn't with experiment.

Starting point is 01:04:23 It was with actual the implementation of business processes. Right. And in that case, you should be worried about duplication of effort. But but Kat's going to tell us why you shouldn't be worried about that when you're just doing research. Kat did not want to suppress originality in any way. Once another man who was doing much to support research on cancer suggested to Kat that to get better coordination in cancer research and to avoid duplication of effort, the two of them together should go and try to organize all the cancer studies in the nation and get them under one common head. No, Kett said, he would not favor that at all. I'm afraid of a single direction in such things. It is too likely to steer the endeavor down one road, which may turn out to be the wrong road.

Starting point is 01:05:05 I'm not worried about the duplication of effort and research. Such duplication is sometimes a good thing. It is not what two groups do alike that matters. It's what they do different that is liable to count. I like this idea he has. I would summarize it by saying, don't look to rest. Look for progress. The trouble with many businessmen is that they are trying to find some way in which things will take care of themselves.

Starting point is 01:05:33 All the way along the road of life, people are looking for park benches where they can sit down and rest. There is only one place where there are park benches, and that is immediately in front of the undertaker's office. There are no places in an industrial situation where anyone can sit and rest. So let's go back to Kett's idea that we just don't know that much as a species. And he applies it to why you can't plan new industries. We don't know enough to plan new industries. You can't plan industries because you can't tell whether something is going to be an industry or not when you see it. And the chances are that it grows up right in front of you without ever being recognized as being an industry. Who planned the automobile industry? Nobody thought of anything. Nobody thought anything of it at all. It grew in spite

Starting point is 01:06:30 of planning. I doubt whether anybody was ever conscious of creating an industry at the time it was started. You get into an industry without knowing it. Economic planning is like predicting the Kentucky Derby. You are very likely to bet on the wrong horse. So this is Kett on how you can teach anyone to be an inventor and the problem with modern education. If you have somebody like Kett who believes that we know next to nothing, then of course, he's going to think that the way we teach people is almost back, is actually backwards. And so he talks a lot about this and it makes a lot of sense. So he says, I could take any, any group of young people and teach them how to be inventors.

Starting point is 01:07:09 If I can get them to throw off the hazard of being afraid to fail. A study made a number of years ago said that the more education a person has, the less likely they are to be an inventor. Now the reason for that is quite simple. It is because throughout, throughout life, they have been taught the dangers of failure. From the time they enter the first grade until they graduate from university, they are examined three or four times each year. And if they fail, they are out and in many cases disgraced. While in research and inventions and inventions work, you fail hundreds and even thousands of times.

Starting point is 01:07:40 And if you succeed once, you are in. So it's completely backwards, right? It therefore seems that the only factor which needs to be corrected is to teach the highly educated person that it is not a disgrace to fail and that they must analyze every failure to find the cause. We paraphrase this by saying you must learn how to fail intelligently, for failing is one of the greatest arts in the world. Once you fail, analyze the problem and find out why, because each failure is one more step leading to the cathedral of success. The only time you don't want to fail is the last time you try.

Starting point is 01:08:18 And so he expounds on this idea that humans know nothing, because in Kett's view, the field of human knowledge is so far from complete, he thinks our schools ought to teach that we know very little about anything and this kind of this this this story quick story from his uh wife kind of ties everything together including the the the title of the book professional amateur so often that he spoke about what he did not know that his wife once told him that on his tombstone, she was going to carve those words. I don't know. I love this idea because it's a common theme that we actually get people that run from discomfort or doing themselves a disservice. You need to seek difficulty because it makes you stronger. This is now Ket talking about that.

Starting point is 01:09:08 The greatest thing that most fellows are lacking today is the full trait of jumping into something and sticking at it until they come out all right. It was out of his belief in the need for young people to meet up with some really difficult tasks that must be done that he said, men who come up the hard way usually try to make things as easy as possible for their children, thus denying them the discipline of struggle that works so well in their own cases. Every time a youngster has to face a first-class difficulty and masters it, his wings become that much stronger. Every time he makes a choice and acts on it, boldly and decisively, he is girding himself anew with confidence and courage. And what I took away from this next

Starting point is 01:09:53 section is that we have no use for timidity. He also seems to have a complete absence of any timidity whatsoever. An important aspect of his courage and confidence is the quite unusual tenacity with which he holds to and stands up for his ideas whenever he thinks he is right. Also, the persistence with which he pursues the effort to verify and establish them, even in the face of opposition and of repeated rebuffs and failures. No matter what the difficulties or discouragements, he is so full of spunk that he always comes up fighting his philosophy in this regard he expressed by saying that the lord has given a fellow the right to choose the kind of troubles he will have he may have either those that go with being a pioneer or those with being a trailer as for, he prefers the troubles of the pioneer. And I'll close with some inspiring words directly from Ket that we can all take with us as we move forward.

Starting point is 01:10:52 I can conceive of nothing more foolish than to say the world is finished. We are not at the end of our progress, but at the very beginning. We have but reached the shores of a great unexplored continent. We cannot turn back. It is man's destiny to ponder on the riddle of existence and as a byproduct of his wonderment to create a new life on this earth. All right, that's 125 books done, 1,000 to go. If you buy the book using the link that's in the show notes, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time and I'll talk to you again soon.

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Founders - #125 Charles Kettering (inventor, engineer, founder)

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