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Founders: #132 Edwin Land (Steve Jobs's Hero)

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What I learned from reading The Instant Image: Edwin Land and the Polaroid Experience by Mark Olshaker. ---- [1:42] The word “problem” had completely departed from Edwin land's vocabulary to be replaced by the word “opportunity”. [2:01] What was it about this man and his company that allowed such confidence and seeming lack of concern with the traditional top priorities of American business? [2:38] There is something unique about Polaroid having to do both with the human dimension of the company, and with a unity of vision of its founder and guiding genius. [3:36] Perhaps the single most important aspect of Land's character is his ability to regard things around him in a new and totally different way. [4:14] Right from the beginning of his career Land had paid scant attention to what experts had to say, trusting his own instincts instead. [4:49] Land has always believed that for any item sufficiently ingenious and intriguing, a new market could be created. Conventional wisdom has little capacity with which to evaluate a market that did not exist prior to the product that defines it. [5:21] He feels that creativity is an individual thing. Not generally applicable to group generation

[00:00:00] High technological drama was the way Edwin Land described his company's situation in the spring of 1971. This phrase impressed me more than any other single thing I had read from him, perhaps because it was so characteristic of his entire outlook and approach. At the time he said it, the SX-70 camera system, one of the dreams of Land's life, had already cost millions of dollars and had not yet turned back a dime. The company was establishing manufacturing capability and experiencing wrenching growing pains in the process. And the solutions to the myriad of scientific issues…

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