> This brings me to my staple question again: "How in the world those intelligent people with all those qualifications fail to understand something, well, dumber than paint?"
Dumber than paint, but usually not totally irrational
for the managers who do such things.
Generally if such dumb behavior is made sufficiently
'public', then nearly everyone will fall in line and
agree that, yes, sure, it was dumb and we don't want
anything like that going on here.
Otherwise, dumber than paint is common, and here is
some of why: You are a manager, at some level,
but not CEO, with
several subordinates, managers and/or worker bees.
One of your subordinates comes to you with a new
'idea' X. Maybe all X is is 'blue sky', back of the
envelope, 10 pages of manuscript descriptions and/or
mathematical derivations, a carefully prepared paper
of 50 pages with technology, market analysis,
cost and revenue projections, running prototype
software, breadboard hardware, joint research
with some leading customers, or some such.
Your mission, and likely you have to accept it,
now, is to decide what to do about
project X.
Suppose you investigate project X. Okay, that's
time and energy away from your assigned duties
that count with your manager. So, maybe you put
in some weekends investigating project X -- now
your spouse is unhappy.
Suppose from your investigation you decide to
try to support project X. In simple terms, there
are two cases:
Success. Suppose project X is a success in
some significant sense, say, the project
grows in headcount, budget, floor space, etc.
Suppose project X gets some publicity in the
company and/or outside. Suppose some major
customers hear about project X and tell your
marketing people and/or CEO that they want
to try X. Etc. Now you can be seen as a
bright, rising star, and your management
chain from your manager all the way up to
but possibly not including the CEO and COB
feels threatened by you and will, all
together, at the first opportunity,
hang you by your toes from a lamppost in the
employee parking lot.
Failure. Suppose project X is a failure.
Then all the resources you devoted to it
will be considered a waste for the company.
You will be painted as an incompetent, loose
cannon on the deck, and chastised, ostracized,
put on the slow track, have a black mark
on your career, or just moved out the door.
Commonly there is only one person in the
company who can push project X, put up with
the blame if X fails, and really benefit
from the credit if X succeeds, and that
one person is the CEO.
If the CEO sees that you got dumped on for
your efforts with project X, then he may
shake a finger at the managers in your
management chain, but likely you still don't
report to the CEO who still needs your
management chain for the responsibilities
they have been assigned to do.
On the other hand, suppose you decide just
to get a list of excuses, that you release
only one at a time as needed, for just
why project X is 'not appropriate' for your
group. That is, you pour cold water on
project X and work to kill it. Here you
are likely safe from any blame or attacks
and don't have to lose some weekends
on project X.
So, net, nearly never does anyone get
blamed for not innovating.
Really, usually in an organization,
there is work to be done, and the
management tree is a partition of that
work to get it done. No one is holding
their breath waiting for innovation to
save or even help the company.
The company and its existing products/services,
customers, revenue, earnings, stockholders,
etc. is a valuable bird in the hand,
and any innovation is seen as at best
two birds in the bush.
So, possibly one reason for the old
20% time of Google was to let everyone
in the organization pursue their case
of a project X without blame and, also,
to get a hearing, without much risk,
in case their project
X looks good.
Why stop 20% time? Maybe not much good
was coming from the 20% time. Maybe
a lot of middle and upper managers got
tired of having to evaluate projects
they really were not interested in --
a VC can get 2000 contacts from entrepreneurs
in a year and invest in 0-3 -- so, that's
about 2000 contacts a year tossed in the
trash, and maybe Google managers didn't
want to evaluate such projects. Maybe
the Google top management was concerned
that the main work was not getting done
fast or well enough. Maybe the 20%
time looked like chaos. Whatever.
As we know, Jobs or Woz was at HP,
presented to a manager at HP the idea
for, say the Apple I, and secretly
smiled when the manager said that
HP would not be interested.
It remains that some of the most important
ideas in computing are authentication,
capabilities, and access control lists.
These were in good form in the MIT
Project MAC computer Multics. Also
processor architecture with gate segments,
since in Intel's x86 architecture.
Well, Multics was done on a computer
from GE, expensive. GE sold their
computer division to Honeywell, so
Multics was on a Honeywell.
Honeywell didn't like selling Multics,
and not many were sold -- one sale
was in basement of a five sided
building on the west bank of the
Potomac River. Some engineers
at Honeywell saw 'bit sliced' hardware
and microcode and concluded that
with those two, some extra register
sets, a tweaked Fortran compiler,
and the Multics hard/software ideas,
they could bring up Multics on
a single board super-mini computer,
sell it, and make money. The story
went that the Honeywell managers said
that they didn't believe that there
could be such a computer, that if
there was it wouldn't sell, and even
if it did Honeywell would not be
interested. So, the engineers
started Prime computer, one of the
three, along with DEC VAX and
DG 'Soul of a New Machine' MV8000,
on or near Route 128 in Boston. As I recall,
in 1980, Prime yielded the best ROI
of any stock on the NYSE. Later
Prime got a CEO from a big computer
company and went down, down, splash!
It's a very old lesson: Big companies
do not, not want to innovate. An
explanation doesn't really need the
book 'The Innovator's Dilemma' and
is simpler -- people acting dumber
than paint and, the real cause, getting
away with, and even benefiting from, it.
Why? Because nearly no one can be sure that a
project X would work. So early on,
dropping project
X into the bit bucket is not proven to
be a disaster. The short term cost is
easier to see than the long term gain.
Why? Because accurately evaluating
a project X is commonly a lot of work
and still needs some judgment and with
results that
really cannot easily be communicated to
others, say, higher mangers, the CEO,
the Board, security analysts, the
tech trade press, or the stockholders.
So, dumber than paint is accepted as
okay.
Then one of the big opportunities, especially
now with the fantastic price/performance
of computer hardware, Internet bandwidth,
and infrastructure software, is information
technology entrepreneurship. Broadly in
economic terms we want to automate
everything in sight to give higher
economic productivity. There should
be lots of opportunities, better than
wheels, bronze, iron, open ocean sailing,
steel, steam, electric power, motors,
and lights, internal combustion engines,
oil, radio, TV, chemical engineering,
"plastics!", etc.
But a bootstrapped entrepreneur can't do
a 13 nm microelectronics fabrication
facility, an iPhone 10, a Tesla, etc.
So, a company with everything in place --
HR, legal, finance, floor space,
and cash -- should have a big, huge
advantage in innovation, i.e..
powerful, valuable new products that
will make a bundle but that small
entrepreneurs can't do. So, maybe
it's the first HP scientific
pocket calculator, the first HP
laser/ink jet printer. The Apple
iPad, iPhone, etc.
Still, apparently to be good at such
'internal innovation' takes a Jobs.
For a Steve Ballmer, John Chambers,
Marissa Mayer, Larry Ellison,
Page/Brin, maybe the best they
can do is to buy a HotMail,
YouTube, Tumblr, and just hope
not to kill it right away.
Back to my startup!