Page and Tesla
Larry Page grew up in a house full of books and magazines. He spent his childhood immersed: reading, reading, reading. When he was twelve, Page read Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla, which described how Tesla remained anonymous because of his lack of commercial ability. Despite the fact that he was a genius, whose ideas were lighting up the world, “He was just one of the strange individuals of whom it takes a great many of varying types to make up a complete population of a great metropolis.” That is the final sentence of Prodigal Genius. It made twelve-year-old Larry Page cry, and stayed with Page for the rest of his life.
Throughout his career, Page has been described in stereotypical terms like “robotic”. Stories of his brusque impersonal management style are renowned. Journalists wrote patronisingly of his supposed emotional immaturity. But the most important insight of his career—that to be a successful innovator, one must be commercial, as well as create something new—was a revelation delivered emotionally. That is what made him an Edison of our time, rather than a Tesla. He learned how to conform when he needed to, and when to stick to his own ideas.
This is a conflict at the heart of Larry Page that points to a larger conflict inside us all. Like Tesla, he is idiosyncratic, highly motivated, and a little reclusive, naturally uncomfortable with corporate and commercial life. He has a strong inner drive and follows it. But, Page has also learned to conform where necessary. He developed as a manager against his natural inclination.
Larry Page was so successful because he harnessed the productive tension between conformity and independence. He was neither part of the crowd nor inimically opposed to it. He found a balance between mimesis and anti-mimesis.
Mimesis
Mimesis is the idea that we want what other people have, and that wanting drives our behaviour. Mimesis garnered credibility when Peter Thiel (who invested in Facebook because of mimesis) revealed he was inspired by the French historian and philosopher Rene Girard. To many people working in technology, the idea of mimesis is inextricably Girardian.
Girard’s fundamental insight is that we want what others have, in order to become more like them. All desire is a desire for being someone else. But, the more confident we become in our model, the less confident we become in ourselves. This frustration turns our model into a rival. Rivalry leads to violence, violence unifies groups against each other, until a common enemy is converged upon, who is sacrificed to end the dispute.
Mimesis is a strong driver of corporate behaviour. Peter Thiel described in Zero to One, that companies with rivalry, like Microsoft and Google, don’t compete because they are different, but because they are the same. They become each other’s common enemy. This creates a trap where each imitates the other’s products, leaving space in the market for innovators to surpass them.
Giving in to our desire to have what other people have can be limiting: mimesis often restricts ambition to the known, the visible.
The inner self
So, the question arises—how can we become anti-mimetic, to avoid the trap of imitating and fighting our rivals and thus limiting ourselves?
This is not a simple question of taking the path less trodden. Girard warned that many people leave the familiar path only to fall into the gutter. All too often, the non-conformist is the most conventional of all. As Peter Thiel said, “The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.”
True anti-mimesis comes from the inner self, the originating force inside us. You might call this a mind, or a soul. To the Ancient Greeks, it was a daemon, an inner spirit. We often think of it as consciousness: the something inside you that is uniquely you and feels like you.
This inner self means something inside us pre-exists mimesis. We are not blank slates. When we see something we want to imitate, it must chime with something already inside us. We do not blindly imitate what we are exposed to. There is interplay. “The fact narrated,” the transcendentalist philosopher Emerson said, “must correspond to something in me to be credible or intelligible.”
Girard and the inner self
Girard was concerned to find the Truth, the hidden theories that explain reality, what Plato called “the really real.” He was reacting against the Romantics, who saw imagination as the only limit of reality. As the philosopher Richard Rorty said, imagination sets the bounds of thought, imagination breaks the path that reason follows. Before you can know something in the world—reason about it, analyse it, imitate it—you must be able to imagine it.
Imagination expands the world. Just as economic growth and technological invention create new things in the world—things unknown since the beginning of time—so does language. We live, as the poet Robert Graves said, in a web of language. The bigger our web, the bigger our world.
That expansion of imagination is crucial to understanding Page. How many other readers of that Tesla biography took its lesson so deeply to heart? There was something in Page already that made the account of Tesla’s life resonate so deeply with him. The story then expanded his capacity to imagine the world. And that gave him the capacity to develop and evolve.
Page’s management development
During his first period in charge of Google, Page underwent a significant period of adjustment, learning how to manage people in a large organisation, something that didn’t come naturally. Despite his strong disinclination to have managers running Google, he later cooperated with Eric Schmidt and others, realising that they were commercialising the business and allowing him to work on projects like Google Books. With his hard-won abilities as a manager, Page acquired, developed, and launched (with Andy Rubin) the Android operating system that became a major challenge to the iPhone. Many of the most ambitious projects in Google and Alphabet can be traced back to Page.
There were many social norms Page did not observe. He gradually adopted some of these norms, but he did not become a conformist. He retained his visionary ideas about the scale on which Google ought to operate. That is why he later took back the CEO job from Eric Schmidt. He continued to apply the lesson that he had learned so deeply at the age of twelve from reading Tesla’s biography, without losing the core of himself.
He was able to keep the balance between mimesis and anti-mimesis.
How to control mimesis
Girard distinguishes between the stability of unfulfilled desire and the instability of fulfilled desire. When mimetic desire succeeds, it withers away; when it is thwarted, it intensifies. Hence the war-like competition between corporations. Both rivals are driven by acquisitive mimesis: they want the same thing. Eventually, order must be restored, so conflictual mimesis occurs: both sides pick a common enemy.
Girard’s solution is religion: the repression and diversion of mimetic forces. Rules, rituals, and prohibitions limit rivalry.
But Girard thought the modern world had become too complicated to rely on priests or philosophers. Instead, we turn to self-help gurus and experts. To Girard, this verged on “archaic man’s faith in terrifying idols.” What could be more conformist than listening to a self-help guru? Even in the startup world—where software reduces scarcity and is supposed to reduce mimetic conflicts—a culture apparently dedicated to anti-mimesis is often driven by emulation of successful founders, searching for “types” to invest in, and clustering around ideas of good habits and rational thinking, promoted by a selection of priest-replacement gurus.
Girard’s theory is based around the way we see ourselves in other people. In this way, mimesis narrows our view: we become so obsessed with our mentor-rival, we lose a broader vision of the world and of ourselves.