DEO Profile: Chris Anderson
Curator for TED Conferences
Chris Anderson could easily hide in a crowd. His quiet demeanor seems more suited to a chemist or minister than the curator of TED, the wildly successful nonprofit media phenomenon devoted to “ideas worth spreading.”
We interviewed Anderson in his New York office, where modern furnishings and warm hardwood floors coexist comfortably. With the sounds of the city in the background, he described a career that only a DEO could have designed.
As a child, what did you think you’d be when you grew up?
I wanted to be a vet. My dad was a doctor. I wanted to be different and I loved my dog. That was about the logic. It didn’t last long though, and I kind of resigned myself to my fate and agreed that I’d be a doctor. Helping people seemed more useful long-term than helping animals.
Happily, when I was about 18, I had this exhilarating moment of clarity where I understood that I’d make a truly terrible doctor. I couldn’t remember all the detail needed and had no patience for patients. I was excited by biology, but the thought of training for three or four years and then dealing endlessly with individuals was actually quite, quite stressful.
Mass media seemed exciting, possibly because I’m an introvert and it meant less connecting with people one-on-one. The notion of journalism, of writing words once and — if they were good — having them seen by potentially millions of people through the magic of the printing press, was exciting. I’ve always been on this edge between loving language and loving science, and not really finding many careers that embrace both in an interesting way.
Home computers came on the market in the UK in about 1981, which is when I bought one and was completely hooked. I discovered my inner geek, which frankly never really went away. I did a few different journalism things at the start, but when the opportunity came to be an editor of a computer magazine, that was wildly exciting. I did that for a year and then leapt to the entrepreneurial side.
Was your move from editor to entrepreneur intentional or accidental?
It wasn’t originally intentional. There was no business in my family at all. The thought of being an entrepreneur had never crossed my mind. What attracted me was doing the job and seeing that it was suddenly becoming possible to make magazines on a much smaller scale. It was possible to print from computer-typeset copy, so suddenly three kids with a home computer could actually design a magazine and get it printed.
That’s how it started. I left my last magazine job as an employee, and three months later we had a magazine on sale in the UK. It still kind of amazes me that that happened. There was no Internet. There was just an explosion of interest in all manner of niche topics, especially around computers. We had the wild experience of a business that made money in its first year and then doubled in scale, in employees, and in profitability, every year for seven years after that. We had that wonderful experience of getting together a critical mass of amazing people who want to work for each other and who attract other great people.
What was most important to you at that time?
As a small company, we were obsessed with the idea of passion. The company’s slogan was “media with passion” and the idea was to be this rebel army taking on the big publishers. Our secret weapon was to know much more deeply and viscerally what readers actually wanted because we were the readers. We didn’t employ traditional journalists, per se. We employed people who were passionate about the topics, like computer geeks and video game aficionados. We taught them how to share their passion. The place was humming with that kind of excitement.
On one hand, it was the excitement of being the outsiders, taking on much, much bigger companies who had many more resources. We had the fire that all those readers connected to, and we had a couple of ideas that other people hadn’t thought of, like selling a magazine plus software packages. For us, it was completely obvious why readers would pay double the price for that package than they would for a traditional magazine. But it didn’t seem obvious to the other publishers for a surprisingly long time.
What was the first moment that you considered yourself to be a leader?
The moment of realization was a year after we had started, when we launched a second magazine that was successful. Seeing the reader response to that second magazine was a “holy cow” moment — I thought, “This is actually going to work, and by the way, there are going to be lots more magazines after this one.” So it felt like a passion at that point. It was wildly, mind-blowingly exciting because I had no idea that was going to be possible.
What was your leadership style?
I certainly didn’t lead with a command and control style. I try to lead through the power of enthusiasm. You know, the best idea wins.
I’ll say, “Guys, guys, guys, we could launch this!” or “This would be amazing, and here’s why!” or “If you did it this way, and this way, people would love that, they’d love it!”
Often those ideas would be barking mad, and I’d get pushback or they would fail. But the place was absolutely brimming with launch ideas. We launched, launched, launched. In that first seven years, we launched 32 successful magazines — I think we launched about 40 total, and I think about eight failed. Thirty-two made it and stayed pro table. It was just a thrilling culture to be part of. It was very much “go for it” and “try it.”
What are your strengths at work?
I let the power of the idea be the spark. I don’t think it’s me on a personal or social interaction level. Almost everyone in the world could do a better job than me. But at the level of “Here’s a really great idea and here’s why it’s great,” I can get people excited.
There’s often a moment when an idea snaps into place. Several words fit here: adventure, design, imagination. It’s the human skill of being able to play with the future, and model it and rapidly iterate lots and lots of different combinations in your mind until one snaps into place, and for whatever reason, you say, “This is it. “
One of the benefits of being an introvert, or at least being inward-looking, is that you spend more time in that place, in your inner world playing with the future. I’m very future oriented. I’ve always been someone who looks forward rather than back, and when something feels right about the future, it feels very right. Typically that comes from pulling together ideas from several different sources. These different things sort of play around and some don’t feel right. Then suddenly something can feel very, very right and it sort of snaps.
You wake up at three o’clock in the morning wild with excitement. You go and explain it to people and even though you explain to them stuttering and in a very non-charismatic way, you do it with passion and excitement, so the idea wins. People go, “Oh, that really would work, that’s cool,” and then a critical mass of people gets excited and you can make it happen.
How do you sustain that kind of creativity?
The more you open yourself up to unexpected sources of stimulation, the more likely you are to have that big moment. Steve Jobs, you know, credited a lot of his success to a course in calligraphy at Reed College.
Certainly some of the best TED moments are when you hear something and think there’s no way this person could be interesting and then — zing! — it really connects with you. I had that experience a couple of years ago watching
a dance troupe perform and hearing these guys say, “Yeah, dance is morphing now. Kids are learning from each other across the other side of the world courtesy of YouTube.” I thought, “Holy cow, that’s exactly what’s happening with TED speakers.” People are learning from each other. This insight came from a completely ridiculous source. You’ve got to put a lot of ingredients into the pot before you stir it up.
Is there a process you follow?
I would say that it happens more by bringing together creative people. When we gave away the talks, June Cohen was very much involved with that and there were external people who suggested that we try some stuff online. It started out as an experiment. The big aha came when I saw the intensity of people’s reactions to those first six talks online. When people responded passionately, we got really excited. And so on the basis of their emails, we sort of flipped TED from being just a conference to anchoring it around the website.
If you were a traditional control-oriented person who wanted everything to be measured and known and risk free, you just wouldn’t do this. It’s not worth the stress. So, the core of what you have to do, in a sense, is embrace the chaos and just realize that we’re in a time when an element of letting go can be unbelievably powerful. You let go in order to get back. There’s the occasional embarrassment here or there, but you embrace it.
Ladies and gentlemen, if you want a Wikipedia that’s error free, you won’t have Wikipedia. Embrace it and move on. I mean, yes, have rules; make them as public as possible. Enlist the community to help enforce them and keep iterating. People don’t need to be told what they can’t do; they need to be shown how to be great. We help people understand how to do a great job creating and how to do a great job coaching speakers. We pass on knowledge as fast as we can and allow people to learn from each other as well.
Have you had any failures?
The whole TEDx experiment was born out of failure, or a form of failure. We had Pangea Day that involved people around the world gathering to watch films at the same time. It was a fantastic event. It was beautiful in many ways, but financially, it was a painful failure. We didn’t get enough sponsors and it was incredibly expensive. But one of the things that wasn’t expensive and was successful was this self-organized program of allowing people to create their own little gatherings. Fifteen hundred people did that.
Paying attention to that made us think we could tap into the TED experience at a grass-roots level, but that would involve giving away the brand, which we couldn’t do. So we pulled people together and we brainstormed. There was a moment when the idea snapped and we came up with TEDx. It felt close enough to TED that people would die to do these events, but distant enough that we could say these are self-organized. That just felt right and it felt very clear that we had to try it.
What three things do you want to be known for?
I would like to be known as the person who didn’t retire. You can stay engaged in the world of ideas until you die. And when you can’t, you should die. I would like to be thought of as generous. In the connected world, you can argue it’s the smart thing to do because a lot of things can get passed around very, very quickly. Generosity tends to be its own reward. It’s infectious and I think it’s been core to TED’s success. Every time we’ve given stuff away, it’s benefited us. Finally, I’d like to be known as a dreamer, as a guy obsessed with ideas.
