Take Things Apart
Michael Dell is a legend among students at The University of Texas at Austin because the computers in their backpacks came from a start-up he founded from one of their dorm rooms — Dobie Hall, Room 2713 to be exact. He was the classic connector, or even more, meta-connector, in that he enabled mass-market customers to custom configure the exact machine that would perfectly suit their personal computing needs.
It struck me as somewhat ironic to realize where his passion for customization began. In Play Nice But Win, he writes of his first experiences with personal computers as a youngster in Houston, Texas:
“For my fourteenth birthday I was allowed to take almost $1300 of my hard-earned savings (ed: the source of which is worthy of another blog post entirely) out of the bank and order an Apple II. I was beside myself with excitement waiting for it to arrive… Carrying the precious cargo carefully, I took it to my bedroom, unboxed the beautiful computer – it even smell beautiful – and immediately took it apart to see how it worked.
My parents were horrified. And furious. But (I thought but didn’t say) how could you understand it if you didn't take apart?”
I can imagine his parents’ chagrin, watching their son seemingly destroy the precious new machine he spent so much (almost $5000 in today’s dollars) to acquire. It must have seemed so wasteful, unnecessarily destructive.
But the seemingly destructive impulse actually fueled young Michael Dell’s creativity! If connection is the very basis of creativity, anyone who wants to be more creative must consider the question: what fuels new connections?
Surprisingly, disassembly is fantastic means of seeking unexpected inputs and creating entirely new re-combinations. Many of Dell’s key insights, which ultimately drove the development of a personal computing empire worthy of state-university lore, came from the first step of taking things apart. He did the same thing a year later with the first mass-market IBM PC as well.
“As soon as I took my IBM 5150 apart — which of course I did immediately — I discovered a couple of striking things. First of all, as with the Apple II, the 5150s architecture was open: you could literally understand what every chip was doing.
The other thing I found when I disassembled the IBM-PC was that there was nothing inside from IBM! It was all parts from other companies… I could just walk into RadioShack or another local electronics store and buy the chips I needed.”
Dell explicitly credits his parents’ passion to fuel their children’s curiosity, and their determination to not be irritated at such exploits, as foundational to his development as a thinker.
Taking things apart seems destructive. It seems like a waste of time. But what great innovators like Michael Dell have discovered is, sometimes taking things apart is the best way to discover new possibilities.
Related: Make Connections
Related: Seek Random Input
Related: Recombine Existing Parts
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One of the defining contributions the d.school is helping teams ask themselves, “What kind of thinking is appropriate, when?” We call such clarity being “Mindful of Process.” And it can seem like semantics until you realize we need to show up in different ways.