It is in the nature of intellectual revolutions that only with hindsight are their heroes recognised as such. How could it be otherwise? Those engaged in re-defining the very nature of the game cannot expect recognition from existing umpires of the game. 

Those of you who heard me speak at this conference last year may remember that I drew some parallels between the upheavals taking place in the political world, and those taking place in the world of information technology. I expressed at the time my conviction that the information technology industry was in the midst of a revolution. Nothing over the last year has led me to doubt the essential validity of that position. Indeed, if anything the severity of the economic climate has tended to exacerbate the trends I identified a year ago. I said that before the century was out we would see one major player go bust. We didn't have to wait that long: Wang went belly up within the year. I said that IBM would split itself up: and so it has. 

Over the last year, we have all participated in that revolution. Indeed some of you have been in the engine room and, like me, have discovered two basic things about being a revolutionary: first, it's very hard work; second, we have a lot to learn. So I thought that this year, we might look back to some past revolutionaries, in search of some lessons about how to prosper in such revolutions. 


Today I intend to take a look at a few of the great figures who paved the way for the industrial revolution; I will look at the challenges they faced, and the ways they surmounted them, seizing the opportunities they contained; and I will suggest ways we might emulate their example, and thus help shape our future, as they shaped theirs. 


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So who are these revolutionaries from whom we can draw lessons? Let's start with Thomas Telford. Telford was the first and arguably the greatest of the men who shaped industrial Britain - who put in place the basic infrastructure without which the industrial revolution could not have taken place. Telford's relative obscurity, compared to, say, George Stephenson or Isambard Kingdom Brunel, is a bit of a mystery. It is ascribable, at least in part, to the fact that many of his greatest achievements were in the field of canal building; and at the very time he was dying, his canals were about to be overshadowed by an entirely new technology - that of the railways. Yet he was, without doubt, a great man - called by many 'the father of civil engineering'. 

The story of his life is fascinating. It's the story of a lifetime of achievements on the grand scale, achievements built with iron, and stone, and sweat. But despite all the differences between Telford's time and our own, there are so many similarities, and so many common factors which distinguish success and failure. 

Of course, Telford was just the first of a series of engineering giants. There was also Brunel, who designed the Clifton suspension bridge at 24 and went on to create the Great Eastern - the Concorde of its day: a technological masterpiece, a financial folly on the grand scale. There were the Stephenson brothers and their railways. Over the past year, I have begun exploring these giants of the industrial revolution, and pondering the parallels between the challenges they faced and those which face us as we grapple with the implications of the information revolution. 

And the more I've pondered, the more convinced I have become that we are the inheritors of their tradition; and that the values they lived, and the qualities they displayed, can help us take and hold the high ground in the unfolding information revolution. 

After all, though the networks we create are invisible to the naked eye, whereas theirs bestrode the landscape, our networks, like theirs, are the highways by which our society conveys its most valuable and fundamental commodity. The Telfords, Brunels and Stephensons lived in an age where coal and iron - heavy, bulky, and all too visible - were the key commodities. In our age, it's silent, invisible information that is the key resource. But we, like they, are essentially in the business of creating the channels through which the key commodity of our age can be transported from where it is to where it needs to be. 



So what values did they live; what qualities did they display? 



First and, I believe, most importantly, they were known not as 'engineers' but as 'architect-engineers'. Rolt calls Brunel 'the last great figure of the European Renaissance'. He was an engineer; but he was much more than just an engineer - which I believe goes a long way to explaining just why he was the greatest engineer of his age. 

Telford started out not in engineering, but as an architect. Not until his mid-thirties did he begin thinking of himself primarily as an engineer, and even then he quite avowedly took his architectural groundings with him into the new discipline. Brunel's exceptional gifts first surfaced when, at the age of four, he began displaying an enormous talent as an artist. Telford maintained a lifelong passion for poetry, which he read voraciously, and wrote, by all accounts, very badly; while Brunel was recognised in his day as an artist of real merit, with many of his drawings re-printed and sold in great numbers to the general public. Perhaps more importantly still, all of the pioneer architect-engineers, despite being workaholics, managed to maintain friendships across the full spectrum of society. Holt writes of Telford that: 



"...Few men of his generation could have boasted a wider or more varied circle of friends from Members of Parliament, Government officials, great landowners, men of science and fellow engineers, to labourers, working craftsmen and country innkeepers." 



These were men who avoided the dread, dead hand of over-specialisation, by which, it is said, an academic is a man who knows more and more about less and less, until he ends up knowing absolutely everything there is to know about nothing whatsoever. And this, in my opinion, is the single most important lesson we can learn from the pioneers of the industrial revolution: that where specialisation can take us quite capably through known territory, for those wishing to break new ground, breadth of vision is essential. 

For the Victorians, breadth of vision and of accomplishment was the mark of a gentleman. They'd not yet drawn the clear barrier between Art and Science, across which later generations of intellectuals would sneer at each other with mutual contempt and incomprehension. As an architect, Telford was concerned with the form of what he created; as an engineer, with its function. Neither was sacrificed to the other; nor was either, ultimately, sacrificed at the altar of the money men. Because Telford believed, as he and his peers were to demonstrate, that to divorce all aesthetic and ethical values from the creative process was a recipe for staleness, unoriginality and, ultimately, stagnation. They knew that great new challenges demanded fresh new perspectives. They also knew, to put it crudely, that what looked best tended to work best. 

Somewhere between their era and ours, driven by a sheer volume of knowledge which defies mastery by any one individual, the Arts and Sciences have become estranged, and the men of specialised expertise have taken over from the men of comprehensive vision. As Holt puts it: 



"So long as the artist or the man of culture had been able to advance shoulder to shoulder with engineer and scientist and with them see the picture whole, he could share their sense of mastery and confidence and believe wholeheartedly in material progress. But so soon as science and the arts became divorced, so soon as they ceased to speak a common language, confidence vanished and doubts and fears came crowding in." 



One phrase in that paragraph, it seems to me, summarises the single most important challenge that faces us all - we, who are creating the basic infrastructure of the information revolution: we must try, if we can, to adopt a new and broader perspective. We must try, if we can, to 'see the picture whole'. 

The second interesting thing about the pioneers is that they were what we would now call 'hands-on' managers. Most of them came from humble backgrounds, and worked their way up from the ranks. They had great practical experience; they knew their tools and their materials; and they invariably followed their projects through from concept to completion. They might have designed at the desk, but when it came to the building, they were there in the muck and the mire, encouraging, cajoling, sharing the hardships and the triumphs with their people. 

Brunel was legendary for his omnipresence. Like many of his contemporaries, he frequently had several major projects on the go at once, but by constant travelling, he managed to keep in close contact with progress at all of them. 

You think you have a busy schedule? Here's a list Brunel compiled of the projects he was engaged in simultaneously in 1835: Clifton Bridge, Bristol Docks, Great Western Railway, Cheltenham Railway, Bristol & Exeter docks, Merthyr and Cardiff Docks, Newbury Branch line, Sunderland Docks, the Thames Suspension Bridge and the Bristol and Gloster Railway. All told, the projects involved capital investments totalling £5,590,000 - no mean sum in the 1830s. He was, incidentally, 29 at the time. 

When the Stephenson brothers' plans for the xxxxx railway line ran into serious problems, it's reported that they stayed up for five days and nights, floundering in mud and rain alongside their workmen until the crisis was past. No highbrow pointy-head theorising for them; they spent more time in the rain than they did in the office. You think you have a heavy travelling schedule? Here's Telford, writing to a friend about one year's journeying: 

"After Parliament was prorogued, I went thro' North Wales where some 500 men are employed, & from thence into and along all the eastern side of Ireland from Waterford to Belfast & Donaghadee and across by Portpatrick to Carlisle, from thence to Glasgow and back by Moffat to Edinburgh. From thence by St Andrews & Dundee to Aberdeen, then up the Western parts of that County, then across it to Banffshire and to every Town on the Coast to Inverness - from thence across to Fort William on the West Sea and back to Inverness - then back to Fort William. From thence by Tyndrum and Inverary down to the Crinan Canal in Cantyre, thence back by Inverary and Loch Lomond to Glasgow to perform over again before I reach the border." 

He was, incidentally, 60 at the time. 

This, then, illustrates the second great example set by our predecessors: intellectual leadership is necessary, but not sufficient. The great revolutionaries were not just great thinkers; they were great leaders. They gave not just their brains to the projects they were engaged in, but their whole beings: body and soul. None worked apart from their people, or lorded it over their people - they worked with their people: man-management was as important as creativity. 

I've said that most of these men rose from the ranks, which brings me to my third point: these men were engineers; but they were also businessmen. As such, they had to ensure that the projects they conceived and the roads, canals and railways they created were viable not only technically, but financially. 

Such projects as they worked on were generally the Great Public Works which shaped the face of Victorian Britain. As such, they were generally put out to tender: the winning contractor had to have got his sums right, or he'd go bust. What's more, just to complicate matters, these were often long term projects, lasting a decade or more, during which time the financial climate could alter fundamentally. And it has to be said that where the greats failed, it was invariably financially rather than technically. 

Brunel, as was mentioned earlier, built the Great Eastern - a massive iron-clad, more than twice the size of any predecessor. It was a technological marvel, and broke technical ground which others would later occupy with great success. But at the time, it was a financial turkey of the first order. Worse still was the famous 'railway boom' of the mid-1840s, when vast speculative funds, drawn by the sheer sexiness of the new technology, were used to construct thousands of miles of track which basically connected nowhere very much with nowhere at all. The much-reviled Beeching, credited with the destruction of Britain's railways after the last war, was in reality doing no more than laying to rest ventures that had been stillborn at the outset. 

What's more, it wasn't just changing financial circumstances the pioneers had to contend with. Then, as now, today's technical masterpiece could very swiftly become tomorrow's technical white elephant. As I mentioned at the beginning of this talk, many of Telford's greatest achievements became totally obsolete almost overnight when the canals were superseded by the railways. Then, as now, technical achievement could not take place in a vacuum: no solution, no matter how adventurous, elegant, or innovative, could prosper if the commercial demand proved inadequate to support the technical supply. 

Lesson three, then, is pretty straightforward: creativity and leadership are essential in an era of change - but, again, necessary but not sufficient. Their creations are ultimately answerable to the customer. They have to pay their way. 

So thus far, we've established that they were 'architect-engineers' who recognised no crude distinction between the Arts and Sciences; they were hands-on managers; and they were businessmen. Which brings me to my fourth discovery: they were all self-made men. 

They were all of them bright; but probably not the brightest of their age. It was not pure intellect which got them where they were so much as native nouse reinforced by other - equally important - personal characteristics. As I mentioned earlier, they came for the most part from humble beginnings. Telford, for example, was born to a Scottish shepherd in the middle of nowhere. What's more, his father died before he reached his first birthday. His early years were spent not in school, but in the fields and on the moors: looking after sheep, scaring birds away from crops - generally scraping some kind of subsistence income to keep himself and his mother from the brink of starvation. 

He never went to university; instead, he started out as a journeyman stonemason, and worked his way up from there. He was later to credit his humble beginnings with his innate sense of what materials could and could not do. And, at least as importantly, what could and could not be expected of his men. In building an aqueduct more than 100 feet above Langollen Vale, for example, he amended his original plans, widening the channel at the top of the piers since: 



"I see the men giddy and terrified in laying stones with such an immense depth underneath them with only a space 6 feet wide and 10 feet long to stand upon." 



What's more, as Rolt remarks, his background made it possible for him to relate to his men, from mud-workers to managers. He knew them by christian names, and they knew him. And they knew, moreover, that there was no point trying to pull the wool over his eyes: he knew what he was about. In the course of his career he'd learned every trick they might be tempted to try, plus a few more besides. 

Perhaps even more importantly, because they had never been formally trained, they had truly alive intellects. Never having learned the formal rules, they'd never learned what was impossible. Like the bumblebee which, famously, is an aerodynamic impossibility, they proceeded in blithe ignorance of the theoretical limits of possibility, forging the world to their intent, rather than limiting their intent to the theories handed down by history. 

They learned, throughout their lives. They made copious measurements. They tested everything as they went along, and kept records of every failure, and every success. And they talked and listened constantly: to their forebears and their financiers, to their colleagues and their workers, and indeed to anyone in the world at large. Consider Brunel, for example, preparing to enter the competition to design a bridge at Clifton in Bristol: 

"Now he sought his father's advice and also consulted Maudsley's partner, Joseph Field. He visited the Menai and devoted two days to a minute examination of Telford's bridge, while, as we have seen, after his first designs had been submitted, he also visited the Scotswood and Stockton suspension bridges." 

'In this way,' writes Rolt, 'he learned what to emulate, what to improve, and what to avoid.' 

Nor, crucially, were his studyings and enquirings limited to those of a purely mechanical nature. As architect-engineers, they somehow found time in their busy schedules to visit art galleries, go to concerts, read voraciously on every topic under the sun, and bring back goodies from such intellectual treasure hunts to be incorporated in their work and their designs. Rolt highlights Brunel's extensive studies of, and pinchings from, those previous masters of civil engineering - the Ancient Egyptians: 



"In the span of a suspension bridge all is lightness and aerial graces; its strength resides in the suspension towers and anchorages which uphold it. To make this strength manifest and thus to point the contrast between the opposing towers and the slender webs of links and rods they bear, Brunel's native adaptation of an ancient monumental style was a stroke of artistic genius. 



"Every line of these squat towers which straddle the roadway with firm planted feet is eloquent of their purpose, a purpose admirably emphasized by the simple monoliths of stone atop the chain anchorages and by the sphinxes which, crouching above the chain rollers, eye each other over the depths of the gorge." 

And if anyone thinks there's something reprehensible in this plundering of a bygone age, I'd remind them of Sir Thomas Beecham's assertion that: 'Mediocre composers borrow; great composers steal'. 

So the fourth lesson we can learn from the greats is this: it's up to you. No one did them any favours: what they achieved they achieved off their own bats. It was drive, determination, perseverance and sheer unstoppability which enabled them to achieve the distinction they did. Again, their vision was necessary, but not sufficient. You need vision; but you also need balls. 

Which brings me to my fifth, and last, though by no means least, discovery about the architect-engineers. They did not believe in the word 'impossible'. For these men, there was no such word as 'can't'. It was never a question of whether it could be done, only how best to do it. In this, they were representative of their age; in many respects an easier and more straightforward one than our own. The Victorians believed implicitly in the idea of Progress with a capital P. And why not? Science was triumphant everywhere you looked. No educated man or woman in Victorian Britain would have questioned the basic premise that things were getting better: that disease was being conquered; that starvation would one day be a thing of the past; that men, through brain and brawn, would constantly improve the lot of mankind. 

The miracles of science, unlike their religious predecessors, were solid, lasting, and visible to all at first hand. Take as just one example Telford's bridging of the Vale of Langollen. What could be more miraculous than canal boats travelling 1000 feet at more than 120 feet above the valley floor? Boats in the air! It was a truly revolutionary concept at the time - nothing even vaguely comparable had ever been attempted before. Indeed many contemporary experts trashed Telford's proposals, insisting to the committee responsible for awarding the contract that his ideas were palpably unworkable, and that to go ahead would be to court disaster. Telford was unmoved. He proposed an unprecedented innovation: the use of a cast iron trough, thus massively reducing the load which would otherwise have had to be borne by the supporting piers. 

Remember that in these days - 1800 or thereabouts - iron was a relative newcomer in civil engineering - itself a discipline in its infancy. But Telford had the feel for it, and he had no doubts that it could serve the purpose. The contract was awarded; the building went ahead; and after a decade's hard labour, the first boats took to the air. As Rolt describes it: 



"As the procession moved out over the aqueduct a mighty cheer went up from the thousands of spectators who crowded the riverside meadows or watched from the hilltops, and the Vale of Langollen echoed and re-echoed the thunder of cannon as a detachment of the Royal Artillery Company fired a fifteen round salute." 



And if you go to the Vale of Langollen today, you can if you wish hire a boat and take to the skies, for the aqueduct survives to this day, perfect in every joint and mortice. 

This - I'd suggest - is the final lesson we can take away from this brief survey of yesterday's intellectual revolutionaries: that defeatism is for wimps. They had a burning faith in themselves and their abilities, and never doubted that if it needed doing, it could be done. 




These, then, are the key lessons I've drawn from the past: 



* That vision is necessary, and vision demands more than specialisation - it demands a wider awareness of life and what it has to offer. And vision, while necessary, is not sufficient. 



* That projects are brought to successful conclusions not by brilliant individuals, but by motivated teams. To vision, add leadership. 



* That no creation, regardless of innovation or creativity, can survive a thumbs-down in the marketplace. Creativity is, ultimately, in the eye of the customer with the cheque book. 



* That what you make of your life and your career is ultimately up to you. Greatness demands sheer brainpower, but it demands other personal qualities which have nothing to do with pure intellect. 



* That nothing is impossible. 




The implied demands on would-be intellectual revolutionaries represent an awesome array, I'll grant you: but who ever said that being a revolutionary was going to be easy? 

What's more, we have to contend with difficulties our predecessors, because of the very different climate of their age, never had to grapple with. It's harder for us to develop and maintain that breadth of vision, because we are - like it or not - the end result of the process of specialisation I've identified. We've been to the best schools; and we've been to the best universities; and we've been subjected to the best training; and if any of us has an ounce of genuine creativity left in our bodies it can only be a testament to the unquenchability of the human spirit. And what a battering the creative spark we each contain has to face day by day, just to keep flickering. 'See the whole picture?' Try doing that when you've been working on some nagging, stupid, infuriating little bug in a Portakabin on an industrial site outside Darlington for 36 straight hours and it still won't come right, and if I see another take-away pizza - with or without anchovies - I'm going to break down and weep..... 

It's harder still for us since, working in an invisible medium, our achievements all too often go unnoticed, unappreciated. The challenges - intellectual, emotional and even spiritual - that we face are no less daunting than those of our forefathers; nor, more contentiously still, do our achievements at their best lack the fundamental qualities of theirs: their elegance, their simplicity, their functionality. But we receive no public plaudits. No thousands of spectators cheer; no cannon fire marks our achievements. No bands play, no papers sing our praises. Nor should we underestimate the importance of this. Man is an animal hungry for the recognition of his peers: anonymity can be one of the hardest crosses to bear. 

Indeed, it is very difficult. We spend so much of our working lives with our noses pressed to the grindstone that it can get hard to remember that roses even exist - let alone take the time out to stop and smell them once in a while. But this, I'd suggest, is the great challenge of the information revolution. Because after a century of trial separation, Art and Science are coming to the conclusion that they must somehow re-learn how to co-exist or the world will become sterile, and stagnant, and cold. 

It's already beginning to happen. It's moulding the environment we live in, the commercial air we breathe. Think of the number of companies coming to the view that serving The Customer is their single fundamental business challenge. Or the way organisations are beginning to at least talk about the need to treat their employees as people - and not just a disembodied brain or pair of hands. Canon, in Japan, have it as one of their four key values that: 



"Defects are a waste of the world's resources." 



Not 'a waste of money' - a corporate folly; but 'a waste of the world's resources' - a much more profound criterion; a far more universal implied responsibility. 

In short, the notion that companies exist in a sort of ethical and aesthetic vacuum is obsolete. The idea that their roles and responsibilities, their missions and visions, can be contained within the parameters of the spreadsheet, is falling into disrepute. First, because it doesn't seem to work - even when judged solely by its own, limited, criteria: the companies which manage to achieve sustainable, long-term profitability are not the most rapacious, but the most ethical. Second, and more profoundly, because we are increasingly aware that we live on one planet: that we are, in some real sense, all in this together. 

Nor am I just getting in some kind of knee-jerk reference to the environment. The environment is an important part of the legacy we have to help maintain for future generations. But I'm also referring to things like the vital role we play in helping people on the two sides of the business equation comes closer together - to their mutual benefit. You can't see or count the enhancement to 'quality of life' when employees enjoy what they're doing, and have good and positive encounters with their customers; but you only have to be an employee or a customer to know how important and worthwhile it is. 

But to play a lead role in this more 'value-laden' future that lies ahead for business, we all have to learn to think in fundamentally new ways; indeed, to live in new ways. 

Think of one of the most basic problems we, as what I've dubbed the intellectual revolutionaries of the information revolution, have to grapple with: simply communicating what we are doing to the outside world. We have gone so far down the specialisation route that, very often, we are simply out of sight to the rest of mankind. I heard recently about a presentation given by some of our experts to a team from an ad agency, at the conclusion of which one of the visitors said to another 'did you understand a word of that?', to which the other replied 'do these guys have the same bodily functions as regular people?' 

But what does it mean, 'to think in a fundamentally different way'? In my view, it means, essentially, try not to get too close to the trees to see the wood. Don't just read computer manuals; read books. Don't just go to conferences and seminars; go to the theatre. Don't just sweat over your work; work up a sweat on the football pitch, or the squash court. Don't just listen to tedious speeches, listen to good music. And - most importantly of all - try not to let all your friends and acquaintances be those from your professional life. It's not easy to maintain 'cross-functional relationships' in our over-specialised world, but it's worth the effort - both for personal and professional development. 

Because as we all know, the really successful solutions are invariably the elegant solutions; the ones which, to the mind that can grasp them, resemble the Clifton suspension bridge in their classical simplicity. 

And to arrive at 'elegant' solutions demands more than merely engineering expertise; it requires sensitivities and a breadth of vision which lie beyond the scope of any formal training. Formal training imparts yesterday's knowledge, but is in its very nature prescriptive. It tells us what we should and shouldn't do; what's possible, what's not. It serves many worthwhile purposes: driving out risk and preventing the re-inventing of wheels. But it also keeps us pinned to known territory: and that's clearly a tricky place to be rooted, if you are, as we are, engaged in breaking new ground, in boldly going where no systems designers have gone before. 

The genuinely original, innovative, creative solutions tend to come - as the Americans would put it - 'from out of left field': and to create them you have to spend at least a part of your time there. What's more, the truly great solutions, whatever the discipline, always reverberate to the harmonies of some kind of holistic vision which transcends and unites the whole. Telford puts it less tortuously: 

"I hold,' he once said, 'that the aim and end of all ought to be not a mere bag of money, but something far higher and better." 

As a 'high value-added' organisation, we have to do things that no-one else could do. We have to express our individual capabilities in what we create. We have to be able to look at each finished solution with pride, thinking 'no-one else could have done that, quite like that: that's our piece of work, and no-one else's.' It's classic; it's elegant; and it works. 

We have, in brief, to be the 'architect-engineers' of the new age. 


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We genuinely do stand at a crossroads. Henry Ford achieved success in the early years of the century by ignoring humanity; by avowedly and deliberately squeezing humanity out of the workplace. Japan seized the high ground in the post war period by, it seems to me, subordinating the humanity of its people to the achievement of some corporate goal which was deemed to be more important than any individual one. Now I think we've come full circle, and are returning to the larger, loftier, more all-embracing values of an earlier age. The essential challenge for companies in the new age is that of harnessing the humanity of its people, and focusing its expression on meeting the needs of those other people - the customers - on whom all our personal and professional fates ultimately rest. 

We are in the forefront of the information revolution. We are creating the infrastructure of the new age. And we will continue to maintain our place in the vanguard. We will do it as our predecessors did it: by matching their determination and perseverance; by learning from each other, and working together, with our colleagues and our clients, in a climate of mutual respect; and by maintaining our faith in ourselves and our capabilities, and living and working the basic conviction that nothing is impossible. 

But above all else, we have to develop a sense of mission, a breadth of vision; an ability to 'see the whole picture'. We must re-learn how to learn, we must learn to live in new ways, we must learn to love life and all that it has to offer. Because, to close as I began, with a quote from the intellectual revolutionary of our century, Einstein once said: 

"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." 


Thank you for listening.