You Beat Your Head Against the Wall Because It Feels Good When You Quit
I don’t know about you, but it’s been rough recently
The best advice is to write for the reader. I apologize upfront that this is about me. Sometimes I write because it is cathartic. Maybe you relate to my tale of woe.
Harry Truman said,
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.
That is very true. It is also not how most people think. Most people care… alot.
For some insane reason, years ago I decided my community could make more progress if industry, academia, and entrepreneurs worked more closely together. These people live on different planets. They have different values, timelines, and incentives. It used to seem like a fun challenge to get them to play together well. Now I’m exhausted.
I started an annual conference years ago called InnoVenture. One of our first keynote speakers was Frans Johansson, author of The Medici Effect. His story was that high-level patrons bringing diverse people together and cross-pollinating their ideas sparked the Italian Renaissance. Lots of us wanted to spark a renaissance here where I live. Those in the audience clapped enthusiastically.
Then the next day attendees went back to their day jobs. The reality set in that they worked inside major organizations with entrenched systems, policies, and procedures to keep everything in the middle of the channel. Lots of people had invested much of their careers putting all that in place, and they didn’t take kindly to interlopers messing with it.
If one of the attendees had a brilliant idea about how to transform their organization, cultural antibodies would form to reject the invader. One person in a major organization stood no chance against the chorus of naysayers and doubters explaining in exquisite detail precisely why they were wrong.
Those who want to change have to win. All those who want to maintain the status quo have to do is not lose. It’s not a fair fight.
Pretty soon all who dare try to change understand that the reason you bang your head against the wall it is feels so good when you quit.
I have a company that makes a smartphone, at-home health monitor. A Harvard epidemiologist has been beating the drum as hard as he can since the pandemic started that when it comes to stopping the spread of infection, fast and frequent testing trumps accurate but slow testing. My entrepreneurial company’s health monitor is designed to test fast and frequent. That seems like a good thing.
A university near me tests everyone on campus once each week with a 100% accurate lab test. If you get tested on Monday and then infected on Tuesday, it is the following Monday before you know you are infected. By that time you've infected lots of other people around you. 25% of their students became infected in the fall.
If the university tests everyone on campus every other day with an inexpensive test that is only 90% accurate, every other day 90% of people infected are detected and can isolate. By the end of the week, this every other day testing identifies 100% of the people who are infected. It seems pretty clear that fast and frequent trumps accurate but slow. A Harvard epidemiologist with credentials off his sleeve says the same thing.
When presented with this, the university epidemiologist who designed the once a week protocol told me I wasn’t an epidemiologist and was wrong. I said I understood this was an emotional issue and I’d move on. Angrily he told me this wasn’t emotional, he was a scientist. The irony of angrily insisting he was a scientist was lost on him. What upset him is he saw me as a barbarian at the gate without the credentials to challenge the orthodoxy.
I've run into this before. Once I joined a small sporting goods chain that had lost about $1 million the year before. That was a lot of money for this small company. After numerous suggestions, I was told,
You're never sold sporting goods before, have you?’
My response was,
No, but you lost $1 million last year.
A decade later, I was the new executive on the block at a global electronic capacitor manufacturer. They had lost $200 million the year before. I got the same challenge to suggestions for how we should change.
You’re never sold capacitors before, have you?
The response was the same
No, but you lost $200 million last year.
I've written more about how even in the midst of massive hemorrhaging, it is fascinating how resistant leaders are to change. I've come to understand our forty years this is an emotional problem more than it is an intellectual problem. They can’t believe they get up in the morning and what has made them successful their entire career no longer works. When it comes to how to change that, they care a lot about who gets the credit.
In recent months, I've been promoting an economic development initiative to build around a public research university in my community. Public entities invested $230 million about fifteen years ago to get a graduate engineering school off the ground. The success of this school which was dirt not long ago is amazing. It is a global leader in its discipline. Our glass is half full though.
This school attracts top students from around the world. Most of them leave my community when graduating to find jobs elsewhere. I've been trying to get the university to collaborate with other organizations that can help more of their top graduates can find jobs in my community. I’d also like to see us use that pipeline of talent as a magnet to attract more industry innovation facilities to my community. This is a simple idea that has banged around for years. I’m not sure why this hasn’t been done much earlier other than it hasn't been the idea of someone who can do something about it yet.
One of the university leaders this week told me that the university wouldn’t support the initiative because they wanted to control their brand and the message around their research. Somehow the “public” in a public university has been lost. Beyond that, there is no top research university in the world, whether it’s Stanford in Silicon alley, MIT in Boston, or Technion in Israel, that exists outside of a robust regional innovation ecosystem. It’s in this university's enlightened self-interest to grow the regional innovation ecosystem around it. That idea needs to pop into the mind of the right person at the university.
Getting major organizations to change, much less getting them to work together to change, is really really hard.
It’s Friday afternoon and been a long week. I’m feels good to quit. I need a beer.
