Get Dumb and Grow Rich

Inc.'s executive editor spends some time with an entrepreneur who sells his ignorance, not his expertise.

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Most people sell their expertise. Richard Saul Wurman sells his ignorance

No one knows what to call Richard Wurman. He is, or has been, an architect of buildings, an entrepreneur, an author, a publisher, a mapmaker, a conference producer, a philosopher of communication, and a redesigner of everything (from desks to phone books). Also a pedant, a missionary, a party host, and a willful naf. Always, an innovator. And not least, an "information architect," the label that will make him famous even though it's based on an idea most people don't understand--until they encounter it in practice, at which mind-swelling moment they wonder where it's been all their lives.

The point of information architecture, the launchpad for all Wurman's vocations, is to make things make sense. Whether he's reinventing travel guides, conference content, or ways to consume the daily news, Wurman the information architect tries first to suss out what people want from a thing and second to design the best way for the thing to give it to them. He tries to make information understandable, to present it so it conveys the meaning it's supposed to. And in our present information-glutted, data-spewing, nonsense-rich age, that mission leaves a fellow with no shortage of work.

Which shows. Today, after "30 years of confrontations with unreasonably disorganized information," Wurman the businessman has got spoils. He works in his home on the water in Newport, R.I., in a stone mansion that would not be out of place as the backdrop for a Jazz Age party scene in an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story. (Think "The Diamond As Big As the Ritz.") Having started and sold several companies, Wurman still runs a conference operation, a publishing concern, and numerous smaller endeavors--all from an office overlooking gardens that carry the eye to the sea. Taken together, his various enterprises--though they employ a total of only two and a half people--amount to a business worth several million dollars a year. In short, Richard Wurman is living large. However, as he will tell you, things were not always thus.

"For most of my career," says 62-year-old Wurman now, "I was not successful. I couldn't glue two nickels together. At best, I kind of failed sideways my whole life." Though to call some of what happened "sideways" would be, he says, to give it a pretty face.

In 1959, Wurman graduated first in his class from the school of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, then the best in the country. "I was the fair-haired boy," he says, a protÉgÉ of the great Louis Kahn. Anything was possible.

Then he started an architecture firm with two partners, and for 13 years the firm "never made it." The two partners couldn't get clients, and Wurman himself "couldn't bear the idea of doing what somebody said to do; I was kind of an angry young man." Before the firm could go bankrupt, the three men closed it. "I had no idea what I was going to do. That was not a trivial failure. I mean, 13 years of struggling is not a trivial amount of time. I've had lots of other failures."

Through the 1970s he lived thinly, though he laughs now at the way other people always thought he was rich, "even when I was living in a third-floor garret over a restaurant kitchen in a bad part of Philadelphia and didn't own a car.

"People thought I was independently wealthy because I dressed badly and didn't care what I said at meetings. 'You must always have had money,' they'll say to me now. 'I mean, you always did what you wanted to do.' Yeah, and that's equated with money. It was the only way people could explain it to themselves." By 1981 all Wurman owned was a used five-speed Honda. ("Not so bad today, but it was funny then.") He didn't have a business. But then he founded Access Press--creator of the renowned Access guidebooks series--and that was the end of that.

The various and now hugely successful Access guides set out, as Wurman recounts, "to clarify the understanding of cities, sports events, and other complex subjects like financial investing and medical procedures." In 1987, Wurman founded the Understanding Business to continue "making things understandable" by inventing new formats for telephone books, road atlases, and airline guides. In 1990 he wrote Information Anxiety, the best-selling book about coping with "the ever-widening gap between what we understand and what we think we should understand." In 1991 he sold Access and the Understanding Business. (He continues to run TED Conferences, gatherings of leaders from the merging industries of technology, entertainment, and design, which he'd founded in 1984.) He moved to Newport, kept writing (he's produced more than 60 books), and kept turning ideas into enterprises.

A conversation with Wurman is an unusual adventure. He's a striking presence--a squat, prosperous Buddha with white hair, a clipped beard, a face that has found its true self, and eyes that betray him instantly as his disposition changes from merry to bluntly confrontational. Asked if he usually feels like an outsider, he laughs and says, "My wife claims I warm up only upon rejection." And then, "I'm a welter of insecurities. I'm insecure about not understanding what the next person does, about not being as smart as the people listening to me, about teaching in schools that I could never get into, about running conferences where everybody is sharper and faster than I am."

He's one of those people who somehow appear to be both hyperkinetic and unnaturally calm at the same time. It's as though when talking to him, even as he sits dead still, you can feel his racing pulse from across the table.

You believe Wurman when he says, as he so often does, "I could never bear working for other people"; as exciting as he is to be around, you're not sure how many other people could bear working for him. But as you discover his contradictions you realize that his gift for innovation is located precisely within those contradictions--in the gulf between his anxiety about not understanding and his conviction about following his instincts. Closing that gap is what motivates Wurman. How he closes it is the innovation lesson he has to teach.

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