Albert Einstein's Argumentative Analysis

With his statement, Bezos seems to put the focus on an individual’s effort to find a solution to a problem. It is a picture of the individual’s expertise and the mastermind coming up with the right solution. Albert Einstein is often cited as an example of a lonely mastermind, having an ‘aha’ moment (Hill, 2014). This example suggests that certain characteristics and identities account for an individual’s creative accomplishments. However, Einstein had a whole team of people who helped him to come up with ideas. Weisberg (1993) refers to this discussion as ‘the mythology of the genius’. Many early approaches and research related to creativity focused primarily on the individual (Hardagon & Bechky, 2006). According to Bilton (2007), this myth

For example, within global design company IDEO, the lack of specialisation is in fact their key to success (Hardagon & Sutton, 1997). While specialisation is sometimes inevitable, it is not always desirable (Bilton, 2007). One may wonder whether specialisation here reflects the narrow definition of creativity, based on the lone individual. According to Hill (2014), too many experts might mean having too many cooks in the kitchen. Further, because of specialisation, a certain thought world is likely to very well understand certain issues, but also to ignore information that may be equally essential to the entire task. This would also reduce the possibility for creative joint learning, since experts in a certain field or of a department may think that they already know everything (Dougherty, 1992). Sometimes individuals do not have the necessary expertise or ability to generate the creative solutions alone, through moments of collective effort they might be able to achieve the desired outcome. One can conclude from this that a certain expertise is not always necessary, according to Hagardon and Bechky (2006). One can also take into account here the concept of know-who instead of know-how (Bilton, 2007). As a technology manager notes (cited in Schaefer, 2017): “We are engineers and it is very likely that engineers develop products for other engineers. They know their own needs. We all go to the same school where we all learn the same type of thinking. We are all too homogeneous”. As this example also shows, an important reason for the focus on specialisation within functions is already created within the education system (Bilton, 2007). The specialisations and separations in education and training have a knock-on effect in terms of already placing people in highly distinctive and specialist job fields. All in all, when seeking a solution to a problem, one should take into