Not only the young say it:
The old ways are often not good enough,
sometimes lethal.

So innovate.
Innovate or perish.
People. Companies. Schools. Countries.
You.

And soon.
Luxury of leisurely adaptation long since gone.
Goodbye Darwin.
Someday is never.
Urgent.

But change is frightening.
Ambiguous.
Unfamiliar.
Strange.
A bereavement.
(It tool us so long to get almost comfortable with the way it is. Oh, so sad.)

We are the greatest obstacle.
You and I.
Can we learn about the future from the past?
Can we learn by studying resistance to change?

Often very funny.
Enjoy.
(But not too much, friend.)

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends upon the unreasonable man."

G. B. Shaw

"All human institutions since the dawn of prehistory or earlier had always been designed to prevent change--all of them: family, government, church, army. Change has always been a catastrophic threat to human security."

Peter R. Drucker

"The disturbing fact is that the vast majority of people, including educated and otherwise sophisticated people find the idea of change so threatening that they attempt to deny its existence. Even many people who understand intellectually that change is accelerating, have not internalized that knowledge, do not take this critical social fact into account in planning their own personal lives."

Alvin Toffler

"The difficulty with these rare geniuses is that they can be recognized only in retrospect, never in prospect. You never know for certain that your present-day tormenter, who you think is a crank, may not turn out to be another Goddard..."

Donald A. Schon

"At every crossway on the road that leads to the future...each progressive spirit is opposed by...a thousand men appointed to guard the past."

Maurice Maeterlinck

"...invention demands men with fanatic faith in their ideas, men willing to ignore the experts who say it cannot be done, men unafraid to butt heads with established authority..."

Richard Stillerman

"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong."

Author C. Clarke

"...the innovator who develops an invention into a commercial product or process and tries it in the marketplace contributes as much or more to technological innovation and economic growth that the originator of the idea."

Harvey Brooks

"Given the underground resistance to change...the new idea either finds a champion or dies."

Donald A. Schon

"Persecution of great discoveries was due partly to mental resistance to new ideas and partly to the disturbance caused to entrenched authority and vested interest, intellectual and material. Sometime lack of diplomacy on the part of the discoverer has aggravated matters. Opposition must have killed at birth many discoveries."

W.I.B. Beveridge

"...the process of innovation is not simply an act. It is not just design, or market analysis, or investment, or entrepreneurship, or the intricacies that intervene between the concept and the marketplace. It is all of these, a complex sequence of steps. And it is all the more complex because there is nothing automatic about it. The engines of innovation are human beings."

Daniel V. De Simone

"Do you know that all great spurts in...progress came just after some unorthodox ideas or exotic impressions had penetrated into a closed system?"

Anatol Rapoport

"In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs."

Sir William Osler

To prophesy is extremely difficult--especially with respect to the future.

Old Chinese Proverb

"I watched his countenance closely, to see if he was not deranged... and I was assured by other Senators after we left the room that they had no confidence in it."

Reaction of Senator Smith of Indiana after Samuel Morse demonstrated his telegraph before member of Congress (1842)

"...as far as I can judge, I do not look upon any system of wireless telegraphy as a serious competitor with our cables. Some years ago I said the same thing and nothing has since occurred to alter my views."

Sir John Wolfe-Barry, at a stockholders meeting of the Western Telegraph Company (1907)

"...we hope that Professor Langley will not put his substantial greatness as a scientist in further peril by continuing to waste his time and the money involved in further airship experiments. Life is short and he is capable of services to humanity incomparably greater than can be expected to result from trying to fly...for students and investigators of the Langley type, there are more useful employments."

New York Times advice to Samuel Langley in 1903 one week before the successful Wright Brothers flight at Kitty Hawk (Langley is credited with the first unmanned airplane flight on May 6, 1896)

In 1913 Lee De Forest, inventor of the audion tube which made broadcasting possible, was brought to trial on charges of fraudulently using the U.S. mails to sell stock to the public in the Radio Telephone Company, "a worthless enterprise." In the court proceedings, the district attorney charged that "De Forest has said in many newspapers and over his signature that is would be possible to transmit the human voice across the Atlantic before many years. Based on these absurd and deliberately misleading statements, the misguided public...has been persuaded to purchase stock in his company..."

De Forest was acquitted, but the judge advised him
"...to get a common garden variety of job and stick to it."

In 1876 Chauncey M. Depew asked his friend, the president of Western Union, whether he thought he ought to acquire a 1/6-interest in the Bell telephone patent for $10,000. His reply: "There is nothing in this patent whatever, nor is there anything in the scheme itself, except as a toy."

"Mr. Bell, after careful consideration of your invention, while it is a very interesting novelty, we have come to the conclusion that it has no commercial possibilities."

J. P. Morgan's comments on behalf of the officials and engineers of Western Union after a demonstration of the telephone.

There has been a great deal said about a 3,000 mile high-angle rocket. In my opinion such a thing is impossible for many years. The people who have been writing, these things that annoy me, have been talking about a 3,000 mile high-angle rocket shot from one continent to another, carrying an atomic bomb and so directed as to be a precise weapon which would land exactly on a certain target, such as a city."

I say technically, I don't think anyone in the world knows how to do such a thing, and I feel confident that it will not be done for a very long period of time to come...I think we can leave it out of our thinking. I wish the American people would leave that out of their thinking."

Vannevar Bush (1945)

"That is the biggest fool thing we have ever done...the [atom] bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives."

Admiral William Leahy to President Truman (1945)

"...a pretty plan; but there is just one point overlooked--the steam engine requires a firm basis on which to work."

Sir Joseph Banks,
President of the British Royal Society (early 1800's)

"Even if the propeller had the power of propelling a vessel, it would be found altogether useless in practice, because the power being applied in the stern, it would be absolutely impossible to make the vessel steer."

Sir William Symonds,
Surveyor of the British Navy (1837)

In 1908 Billy Durant, in trying to raise money to create an automobile trust, boasted to J.P. Morgan & Co. "that the time would come when half a million automobiles a year will be running on the roads of this country." This annoyed Morgan partner George W. Perkins who said "If that fellow has any sense, he'll keep those observations to himself." Unable to raise capital in Wall Street, Durant went home and put together something called General Motors.

"The Edison Company offered me the general superintendency of the company but only on the condition that I would give up my gas engine and devote myself to something really useful."

Henry Ford (1922)

"The actual building of roads devoted to motor cars is not for the near future in spite of rumors to that effect."

Harper's Weekly (1902)

"There is no plea which will justify the use of high-tension and alternating currents, either in a scientific or a commercial sense. They are employed solely to induce investment in copper wire and real estate."

Thomas A. Edison (1889)

"Good enough for our transatlantic friends...but unworthy of the attention of practical or scientific men."

A committee of the British Parliament in 1878 reporting on Thomas Edison's ideas for developing an incandescent lamp.

"...the advancement of the arts from year to year taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when further improvements must end."

The U.S. Commissioner of Patents (1844)

Concept and Implementation by Maimark and Barba, Inc.

Folio 12 was conceived and executed by Maimark and Barba, Inc. This your advertising/marketing agency has been particularly adept at presenting complex and esoteric concepts and products in exciting and eminently understandable ways. Indeed, this group often functions in product areas that would seem to defy attempts to create simple yet powerful communications. but even with difficult subject matter. Maimark and Barba manages to generate excitement with imaginative, effective presentations.

Sanders asked this agency to pick a subject, any subject for Folio 12 and to develop it in a way that might demonstrate their abilities. Their response to this challenge was to make us all face man's tendencies to resist change and to misjudge our ingenuity in solving impossible problems. Folio 12 is certainly a fine example of Maimark and Barba's ability to deliver a high impact message.

Maimark and Barba, Inc., 185 East 38th Street, New York, New York 10016, 212 LE 2-4566.

Photography by Ed Issacs

All of the photographs in Folio 12 were made by Ed Isaacs, a perfectionist behind the cameras and in the darkroom, whose ample and versatile talents have been utilized by magazines (House & Garden, Seventeen, American Home) and agencies (Doyle Dane Bernbach, Young & Rubicam, J. Walter Thompson, Benton & Bowles, BBDO, Ted Bates) for a wide variety of clients (Air France, Clairol, DuPont, Texaco, IBM, Squibb). Ed Isaacs has a unique ability--as his stirring photographs for Folio 12 clearly demonstrate--of infusing drama into even ordinary subject matter. Mundane, overphotographed objects become distinctive and exciting when Ed Isaacs is doing the shooting.

Ed Isaacs Studio, 18 East 17th Street, New York, New York 10003, 212 MU 5-5620

Typography by Graphic Arts Typographers, Inc.

Typography for Folio 12 was the work of Graphic Arts Typographers, Inc., a high quality full service typographic organization whose clients include such names as: Doyle Dane Bernbach; Wells, Rich & Greens; Ketchum MacLeod & Grove; and BBDO.

Graphic Arts Typographers, Inc., 401 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10016, 212 889-6060

Mechanicals by William Reduto

With an eye for the appropriate and the motivation and execution of true craftsman, William Reduto turns out work that ranks with the best. If you want to judge the quality of a man's mechanicals, ask a printer. Ask Sanders about William Reduto.

William Reduto, 527 Lexington Ave., New York, New York 10017, 212 PL 5-0368

For further reading resistance to innovation:

• "Technological Innovation" Its Environment and Management." U.S. Department of Commerce, Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. 20302 $1.25 (1967)

• "Concentration, Invention, and Innovation." Hearings before the Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly (May, June 1965), Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. 20302 $1.25

• "Technology and Change," Donald A. Schon, Dell Publishing Company, Inc., New York (1967)

• "Erroneous Predictions and Negative Comments Concerning Exploration, Territorial Expansion, Scientific and Technical Development," N. T. Gamarra, Legislative Reference Service, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20541 (1969)

• "Managing Technological Innovation," Donald R. Schoen, Harvard Business Review (may-June 1969)

• Technology, Management and Society," Peter E. Drucker, Harper and Row, New York (1970)

• "Future Shock." Alvin Toffler, Random House, New York (1970)

Published and printed by Sanders Printing Corporation

Folio is published by Sanders Printing Corporation for two reasons: It provides a showcase for the talents of individuals and organizations whose work in graphic communications is outstanding while also serving as an example of the printing we do.

For other examples of printing by Sander, for insight into our performance, professionalism and prices--or adherence to tight schedules--speak to some of the 50 typical Sanders customers listed below. Then speak to us.

Companies and Museums

American Broadcasting Company; American Museum of Natural History; Babcock & Wilcox; Brooklyn Museum; Chase-Manhattan Bank; Ciba-Geigy Corporation; Colt Industries; GAF Corporation; Great Northern Paper Company; Mead Papers; Metromedia; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art; Oxford Paper Company; Perkin-Elmer Corporation; Picker Corporation; Simmonds Precision; Simon & Schuster, Inc.; J.P. Stevens & Co., Inc.; Thonet Industries; U.S. Industries; USV Pharmaceutical Corp.; Western Electric Company; Westinghouse Broadcasting; Westvaco.

Graphic Designers

Aron & Falcone; Peter Maxwell Barlow; Bordnick & De Carlo; Chermayeff && Geismar Associates; Richard Danne (New Center); Al Ross (Design Organization); Eisenman & Enoch; Philip Gips; Graphics Institute; Incentra; Marvin Israel; Mo Lebowitz; Mayo-Infurna Design; William McDade; Nick Mielcarek; Tomoko Mibo; Phil Miller; John Morning; Page, Arbitrio & Resen; Bennett Robinson; Arnold Sakes; Sheldon Seidler; George Trivellini; George Tscherny; James S. Ward.

Postscript:

That prestigious listing might suggest that printing by Sanders meets the needs of sophisticated buyers. (And that would be fine.) What would not be fine, however, is the reflex response: "We can't afford Sanders quality." Before you reach that point and settle for something else, ask us to prove that Sanders' prices are indeed competitive. That doesn't cost anything.

Sanders Printing Corporation, 350 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, 212 691-1070

Folio 12

Folio is presented as a tribute to individuals and organizations whose work in graphic communications merits acclaim.

Candidates for inclusion in Folio are considered whether or not they have already achieved widespread recognition.

Selection of those to be saluted is made on the basis of outstanding talent and unique accomplishment, demonstrated over a sustained period of time. Earnest consideration will be given to all candidates suggested. Previous issues of Folio were prepared by Chermayeff & Geismar; Louis Silverstein (New York Times Promotion); Papert, Koenig, Lois; George Tscherny; CIBA Design Staff; Gaynor & Ducas; School of Visual Arts; Push Pin Studios; Mo Lebowitz; Herb Lubalin.

Production Data

Camera-work and Plates

Cover: Color separations made form 35mm, chrome by indirect screening method. Printed from negative-working plates.

Text: Sanvure II halftone negatives shot with special ranges required for that process. Printed from negative-working plates.

Presswork and Ink

Cover: Printed on pair of Miehle "38" tow-color presses running in tandem. Standard process color inks.

Text: The Sanvure II process requires one pass on a two-color press. A Miehle "49" two-color was utilized for this job. The nonreflective ink essential to the Sanvure process was developed and is manufactured by us.

Finishing and Binding

Outside corers liquid-laminated for added luster and protection. Cover blind-scored prior to folding to minimize cracking. Text pages parallel-folded for optimum line-up of facing pages.

Assembled as cover and three eight-page signatures; saddle-stitched.

Paper

Cover: Mead Mark I Cover, 10pt.

Text: Mead Black & White Dull Offset Enamel Text, Shade 1070 White, Sub. 100.

ENDNOTES

* Doug Engelbart was gifted this booklet by colleague Bob Probst, then President of Herman Miller Research Corporation, whose team led by Jack Kelley collaborated with Doug in 1968 to design the workstation of the future, from which Doug presented what became known as the Mother of All Demos that December [ learn more | watch Doug sharing selected quotes].

** Appreciation to Bill Daul, who transcribed the booklet for online preservation Sep 24, 1997 [source].

©1971 Sanders Printing Corporation