In the mythology of the Networked World, Xerox PARC was Camelot. And King Arthur was John Seely Brown.

Yesterday, my partner, Dr. Virginia Kuhn, and I saw ‘J.S.B.’ as he is widely known, speak at USC, where he is an Annenberg Fellow, about the conditions that led to the breakthrough work by the barefoot geeks at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) from the 1970s through the 90s. Much of what he talked about had a familiar ring, and not just because PARC is legendary. Turns out their work, and their culture, were highly improvisational in nature. I grokked it like crazy.

When I pulled out a pad to take notes, I discovered that all I had to write with was a Sharpie, so I Elphed some of J.S.B’.s slides instead. (I still have to get his permission to do this, so make notes while you can, he may ask me to yank them down tomorrow.)

J.S.B. noted that PARC had no ‘adult supervision’. By this, he meant that they were not required to predict what their output would be in the course of a year. The lack of oversight meant that the PARC team put extra pressure on themselves to turn out viable product. Their very existence was at stake, and the fear of failure drove them. (Sometimes it drove them mad.) At the same time, failure was honored as a learning opportunity. The lack of project oversight enabled them to re-purpose the learning from their failures into new projects.

PARC was only possible because other engineers and designers in the company did have to be predictable, and stay on plan, budget and schedule. The predictability of other departments at Xerox was a necessary condition for the existence of PARC. It’s like this (my wording not his): Monkeys need trees. Without them, things get ugly in monkeytown.

They had white boards by all the coffee pots, and all the coffee pots were wired to the ethernet. When coffee was on, people would congregate, and when they’d congragate, they’d white board some ideas.

Teams were always cross disciplinary, with artist/physicist/philosopher types co-mingling with designer/scientist/engineering folks. Poaching members of other teams was allowed. Poaching was the term he used, but J.S.B. described it more as a kind of seduction, which is very much in the spirit of improvisation. (One of my favorite improv sayings is Elaine May’s “When in doubt, seduce.”) J.S.B. finds it interesting that Google permits poaching while Yahoo does not.

He noted that the interesting stuff always happens on the periphery. Where things are riskiest and most fragile, of course.

One of the most intriguing things about the PARC story is how much of their development work they basically gave away to people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. The 250-person team was a key enabler of products that, in J.S.B.’s estimation, today generate $14 billion a year in revenue, and whose combined market value he estimates at $41 billion. He further notes that innovations by the PARC team helped Xerox survive when inexpensive Japanese-made copiers hit the U.S. market in the early 90s, and have enabled it to prosper mightily since then.

He says the talent in Singapore, China, and the next generation of scientist/artists from other Asian countries are today fully capable of doing the kinds of breakthrough work that happened at PARC from the 70s through the 90s.

After his talk, I gave him the very first advance review copy of my book, which had arrived in the mail that morning. I signed it, “To J. S. B., Who lives it!” I consider it a very good omen that King Arthur accepted an offering from this humble scribe…