Motley Fool Money - Interview with Martin Reeves: Innovation and Imagination

Episode Date: August 10, 2025

Martin Reeves is a business strategist, advisor, and author of several books, including Your Strategy Needs a Strategy, The Imagination Machine, and his most recent - Like: The Button That Changed the World. Motley Fool Chief Investment Officer Andy Cross, contributor Rich Lumelleau, and Martin Reeves discuss: Like button invention and implications Innovation in the digital age The role of imagination in business strategy Host: Andy Cross, Rich LumelleauProducer: Mac GreerEngineer: Adam LandfairDisclosure: Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. The Motley Fool and its affiliates (collectively, “TMF”) do not endorse, recommend, or verify the accuracy or completeness of the statements made within advertisements. TMF is not involved in the offer, sale, or solicitation of any securities advertised herein and makes no representations regarding the suitability, or risks associated with any investment opportunity presented. Investors should conduct their own due diligence and consult with legal, tax, and financial advisors before making any investment decisions. TMF assumes no responsibility for any losses or damages arising from this advertisement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit ⁠megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I mean, I was fascinated by the elegance and the simplicity of the like button in terms of, you know, how could a dozen lines of JavaScript code, which is the like button, change so much about how we transact, how we communicate, how we relate. That was Martin Reeves, business strategist, advisor, and author of several books, including Your Strategy Needs a Strategy, the Imagination Machine, and his most recent, like, the button that changed the world. Motley Fool producer, Mac Career. Now, recently, Motley Fool contributor Rich Lumello and Motleyful chief investment officer, Andy Cross, caught up with Reeves and talked business, imagination, and yes, the like button. Let's just jump in with very recently, you and Bob Goodson released a book called Like, The Button that changed the world, which looks at how digital systems

have kind of reshaped human behavior, identity, society, all catalyzed by quite simply the like button. What sparked the idea for the book? And I have to say, I love this comment from you. It was brilliant in its simplicity. Let's talk a little bit about it. Now you've answered the question. I mean, it is an unusual thing to write a book about it, I think, because it's an apparently trivial object that we maybe don't pay much attention to. But I mean, I was fascinated by the elegance and the simplicity of the like button in terms of, you know, how could a dozen lines of JavaScript code, which is the like button, changed so much about how we transact, how we communicate, how we relate. And then, of course, all of the negative social side effects and the revolution in

advertising and social media. It's just incredible that such a small thing could trigger so many changes. But the more proximal reason is I was actually getting to know Bob Goodson, my co-author, who originally was a medieval literature scholar who somehow ended up as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and CEO. We were just getting to know each other. And I discovered in our coffee conversation that he was a bit of an avid collector. You could even say hoarder. You know, he's collected every train receipt since he was 10 years old. And so to make conversation, and he was moving. So to make conversation, I said to him, you must be finding interesting things in your boxes, Bob. And he said, yes, and he pulled out a sketchbook. And there was a dated sketch of the light button that I immediately

he recognized was about five years before, I'd known Facebook to have rolled out the like button. So I said to Bob, are you telling me you invented the like button, Bob? And he said, he gave me a very strange response. He didn't say yes or no. He said, no, of course not. Maybe I'm not sure. And I thought, how could you not be sure whether you invented the like button or not? So this 30-minute conversation we had extended to a whole day until we have thrown out at the last closing restaurant in

Mill Valley. And essentially by the end of it, we had a plan to write a book about the fascinating and winding story of the invention of the like button. That's amazing. That's a great background. I love how you kind of explore how it basically flattened human nuance, right, into, you know, kind of binary approval, like or not like. What would you say your takeaway, as you wrote the book, are kind of some of the broader consequences of this binary outcome? Well, the actual story, the, you know, like why the thumbs up and who is. invented the light button is fascinating enough. And then what does it tell us about the nature of invention is like a second layer? But, you know, so the surface story is essentially that it's

very, very hard to say even after three years of research who invented the like button because a whole community of pioneers and early Web 2.0 companies were looking at similar challenges at roughly the same time and they all had different versions of things that contributed to the like button. The essential problem was that in the nuclear winter following the dot-com bust, this idea of Web 2.0 emerged. But there were a couple of problems with Web 2.0, the idea of the webware users generate the content. One of them, principally being that the users were not generating any content. So that was one problem to solve. The second problem to solve was that this was pre-broadband.

around the years 2000, this was pre-boardband. So anything you did to communicate with anyone, like displaying a like button or whatever, would likely trigger a page refresh. And the last thing you wanted to do in a conversation was trigger a page refresh because you would lose 20 seconds. You'd probably lose whatever person was doing, what they were doing on your website.

So that was a technical problem. And many businesses were facing different versions of this. Bob Goodson was one of the people that came up with this dated sketch of the light button. The problem he was trying to solve as the employee number one of Yelp was that the people were not submitting restaurant reviews for Yelp's business model. And they didn't have a lot of money. It was a startup. So, you know, what other currency is? There's a currency of recognition. What happens if we allow people to complement the reviews of others? But you couldn't trigger a page refresh. So the answer was, do the computation locally in the browser in Java.

But that was not why JavaScript was designed. This was like an unintended feature of JavaScript. And then other people were doing things at the same time. Like I'm not sure whether you remember a site called Hot or Not, a rather salacious site where you voted on the appearance of your colleagues and your friends. And so there's a voting, right? So voting is the same problem, right? Which is, how do I display my vote?

And how do I vote on things? And how do I get a counter on my vote? page refresh, you know, the same problem. So community of people innovated. Why the like button? Sorry, why the thumbs up gesture? That's also pretty interesting. So you ask, I presume you're both American.

You know, ask anyone American, like, what is the very origin of the like button? They're likely to say the Coliseum of Ancient Rome, where people voted on the fate of the fallen gladiators. The reason that they think that that is the case is that there was a famous painting in 1860. that was very popular with the rising American middle class that displayed the Vestal Virgins in the Coliseum giving the thumbs down gesture. But we know for a fact that this was not what the Romans did. The Romans probably did more something like the sheathed thumb and the downward pointing thumb. But for dramatic effect, this French painter actually had these gestures. And then it became a linguistic fact.

And in fact, it was reinforced in the very year that Bob drew his sketch by the Gladiator movie, Gladiator One, which Ridley Scott originally intended to turn down because he didn't want to do what he called a sandals and toga movie. But he was shown the very same painting that created this myth of the Romans did this and this. And he was persuaded by the drama of the painting to actually make the movie. So the cultural history of the light button is also interesting.

So that, if you like, is some of the story of, you know, how did the light button come about? But I think it tells us a lot also about how does innovation really work? How does technological innovation really work? The old adage goes, it isn't what you say, it's how you say it, because to truly make an impact, you need to set an example and take the lead. You have to adapt to whatever comes your way. When you're that driven, you drive an equally determined vehicle, the Range Rover Sport. The Range Rover Sport blends power, poise, and performance. Its design is distinctly British and free

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roads ahead. The Range Rover event is on now. Explore enhance offers at rangerover.com. And Martin, not just innovation, but creativity. Just the simple design of a thumbs up or thumbs down has had really second order effects in lots of different ways. When you look at this, the history of the arc of history of the light button, does that surprise? The extent of that, does it surprise you the second order effects of such a simple design? Yeah, and I've delved into.

Why was that the case? I mean, what are the effects of this little invention, the like button? It spread like wildfire. Nobody spent a penny on promoting it. We never needed an instruction manual. It just took off. It became a universal, you could call it linguistic standard for the Web 2.0. It spread well beyond social media.

Now every shopping site, every B-to-B site, FedEx and, you know, customer analytics, your Netflix movies, like everybody has... The Molly Fool, we have a like button on our sites. We have a light button. Now, you know, if you look really hard, you can find some people have a heart or some people have a thumbs down button. But basically, the de facto standard globally

is the thumbs up. And so what does it tell us about these things? It tells us a number of things, I think. One of them is that... So I'm not sure how you were educated, but at my school, when we studied science, I heard heroic stories of individual creative geniuses like Sir Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone and Sir Humphrey Davy and the minor safety lamp with great foresight in a moment, you know, a flash of inspiration inventing something. You know, one moment we didn't have the thing they invented and then the next moment we had the blueprint for the invention that would solve some major social problem.

It tells us that actually innovation is not generally like that. because this was absolutely a community of innovators. And there's good science that shows that this is the norm rather than the exception. And also, I interviewed all of these people, or my co-author Bob did, and one characteristic of all of these pioneering interviews is that not a single one of these pioneers of the like button actually had any great foresight over the eventual impact of the like button In fact, something really strange happened when we tried to talk to these pioneers about the like button.

Let's say, you know, what day are you talking about? Because it wasn't, there was not such a thing in the afternoon in their minds as the afternoon when I invented the like button. How they thought about this was that particular day I was just trying to solve a tactical challenge just like every other day. And it just so happened that this tactical challenge I solved may have contributed to something bigger. Absolutely no one was saying this is this will come. create the monetization model for the social media industry. This will create enormous social side effects. This will change how we interact. We only came across one person and we look very hard that had the foresight of the end state and it was not a technologist. Can you, can you

guess who it was? It was a science fiction author, Gary Steingard. So Gary Steingard at the very beginning of the social media revolution was writing a novel called The True Sad Love Story. this is a great novel, a great science fiction novel, and he foresaw how all of this would play out. And we asked him how he could possibly do that. It turns out that he was asking a different question. So the technologists were basically asking, how do I solve my tactical problem, or what can the technology do? He asked a different question. He said, well, assuming this thing, the like button, does what it's purported to do, what will humans do with it?

And of course, the answer, using his knowledge of humanity was, they'll lie with it, they'll steal with it, they'll beg, steal, borrow, imitate, flatter. They will do all of the human things. And if you factor that into the equation, you can see dimly then what might become of this. You might have this world where people are evaluating other over the social web, where kids are spending too much time on screens, where there's this strange virtualization of reality. people prefer to comment on a video of a steak and a glass of wine rather than actually consume a physical one. And he foresaw all of that. But he was the only person, not any of the technologists. The other sort of big thing about the like button is that there was an interesting philosophy going on, which was a bit unconventional.

So a book was published in 2000 that was very influential in Silicon Valley called Don't Make Me Think. And the idea was that if you have something innovative, do not make it look new, do not talk about the whizbang features, reduce friction, make it seem ordinary. And what's more ordinary than the thumbs up gesture? I don't need to know about the JavaScript code or the advanced functionality. It's like, great, you know, I can already do it. And this became quite an influential philosophy, and I think it applies to the Apple Watch, if you think about it. The Apple Watch is not a watch. But by making it seem like a watch, it's like, oh, it's no big deal.

I'll buy one of those. If I said, would you like to buy an advanced supercomputer on your wrist with extremely interesting programming? I mean, you'd probably say, well, you know, I don't think I understand that. Well, it's the same with our phones, I think, too. I'd be like, when are we going to stop calling our phones actual phones? Yes. Considering the amount of time we talk on them, compared to the amount of times we hold them are, I don't know, 1%. Well, it's a really important issue for innovators, I think.

I talk about this in one of my other books, the imagination machine. I think there is a critical issue. moment when, I call it the moment when a thing becomes a thing. The thing that didn't have a name gets a name, the fax machine, the Apple watch. And I think you have three ways you can go in how you name things. And I think it's very strategic to how successful the invention is going to be. One of them is you can emphasize familiarity. You can say it's not new. It's just, it's just a watch. Or you can go functional. You can say, yeah, you don't, you will never guess what this thing is, this fax machine thing. So I'm going to actually describe in the name.

I call it a facsimile machine. It creates facsimiles of pieces of paper. I'm so, okay, now I know what it does. Or you can go overboard in emphasizing novelty. So think about the French connection T-shirt, the FCUK T-shirt. You do the double-take because you think you read an obscene word. And there's absolutely nothing new about a T-shirt, but it grabs the attention to call it, you know, FCUK. And so, you know, under what circumstances would you use one of these philosophies?

of his rather than another, you know, that's a really important decision. So in the case of the like button, the important thing was that it was familiar, it was quickly adoptable, it became a human linguistic currency, you know, compliments were given, compliments were received, and this enabled the social net. So that sort of, that probably didn't even feel like a decision at the time, like not an explicit decision to the innovators, but that's sort of what was going on. If you're early in your career and looking for insight, inspiration, and honest advice, listen to the Capital Ideas podcast here from Capital Group professionals about leaning into the differences that make you unique, making decisions that last, and what it means to lead with purpose. The Capital Ideas Podcast from Capital Group, available wherever you listen, published by Capital Client Group, Inc. It's interesting when you talk about how, like, you know, there was no eureka moment where they kind of said, oh, that was the day I worked on the like button.

And it's kind of like one of the, you know, a rock band when they're, you know, kind of arguing should this song be on the album or not. And then it turns out, yeah, they kind of throw it on at somebody's insistence and it becomes like, you know, a smash number one hit. And they were like, really? That was the number one hit? It sounds a little bit like that when you describe, you know, kind of the genesis of it. I have to ask the question, is it possible to try to foresee that next like button that has just such a huge impact or is that just to, you know, kind of. No, I think, I think, so I've actually done some serious mathematical work with the London Institute of Mathematical Sciences on what I call the mathematical signature of serendipity. Like, what is it? Is it randomness? Is it a pattern that is predictable? Is it a pattern that we can understand but not predict? And it seems to a pattern that we can't predict. It's not randomness. So if you look at the, you know, how fields evolve in terms of innovations and you can apply this to anything. You can apply this to jazz bands. You know, what are the composition of successful rock and jazz bands? You can apply it to films. You can apply it to recipes. You can apply it to software stacks. And we've done all of that. And it looks like innovation is mostly the recombination of existing elements.

And some of those combinations turn out to have incredible utility, and some of them don't. And it's very hard to predict. So we can't predict it, I'd say, in general. Sure. But we can adopt. the right mental model. So if you say, okay, I buy it, you know, basically innovation is serendipitous. What can you do to promote serendipity? The technical definition is unanticipated favorable outcomes, unpredictable favorable outcomes. Well, you can increase the number of collisions,

right, which is the more recombinations you've done, the more shots on goal, the more likely one of them is have a probability of going into the goal. The trouble is that's normally expensive. So the second thing you can do is you can reduce the costs of, of playing around with ideas. So Lego, the toy company, has a philosophy of learning through play. It applies surely to its toys and its child customers or users, but it also applies actually to the management model. The idea is continuously experiment and informally experiment and discover new combinations.

A third thing you can do is to go external. I mean, who invented, is it more likely that you will invent something inside a company or outside a company? The famous Andy Grove quote, I think it was Andy Grove, wasn't it, that said that like most of the smart people are out there, not in here. I mean, the like story basically is a story of parallel, a loosely connected community of innovation. So if you were entirely introverted as a company, you wouldn't be accessing that, you might call it collective intelligence. But you can do things like Akkwe hires, right? You can look at who's doing what and you can hire them. There's a lot of that going on right now with AI and the big AI players.

They're trying to steal the people with the ideas and the abilities. You can be very mentally flexible. So often, you know, the famous psychology experiment where somebody in a like a gorilla suit runs across a basketball court. because people are not expecting it, they actually don't see it. You know, we see what we expect to see. So some companies actually train their executives in close observation, the idea of thinking more like a novelist than an accountant, to actually observe the details.

Because by definition, these unusual recombinations that turn out to be hit products, they sort of are an anomaly, right? They're the needle in the haystack. And so you have to be, your mind has to be primed to, you know, we may not have the best thing forever. Like there may be a needle in a haystack. So you're looking for pattern breaking. And this is supported by psychological research that basically says that the human imagination is triggered by pattern breaking by surprise.

We're extremely good at exception detection. And so we need to surprise ourselves. And the sure way of avoiding surprising yourself is not to look out the window to be entirely introverted, which is, by the way, what many large corporations are. They're basically looking internally. That was Martin Reeves. The book is Like, the button that changed the world. As always, people in the program may have interested in the stocks they talk about,

and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against. So, don't buy or sell stock space solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows Motley Fool editorial standards, and is not approved by advertisers. Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show. show notes. For the Motley Full Money team, I'm Matt Greer. Thanks for listening, and we will see you tomorrow.