Chapter 14
The Logic of Being Logical
I’m unreasonably logical.
I don’t mean I’m irrational—because that’s something you never want to be. Rather, logic is when you look at all the facts and they lead you to the conclusion that something makes sense.
And unreasonable logic is when you stick to facts and sensible conclusions when others are giving in to emotion or distraction.
One of the areas where that has been particularly helpful is in our foundation’s support of biomedical research. Over time I had become convinced that our family’s philanthropy ought to approach medical research the way a venture capitalist approaches investment—look for promising new ideas and put up seed money that can be leveraged. It’s a concept that produced exceptional results when we got involved in creating a genomic research institute in 2001.
For years one of our sons had suffered from Crohn’s disease, which has no known cause or cure. As a parent you never want to see your child suffer, and Edye and I were beyond frustrated with our inability to help. We decided to start The Broad Medical Research Program to fund small seed grants for PhDs and other nontraditional researchers doing innovative and early-stage research into inflammatory bowel disease, which includes Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis. Their work, however innovative and ambitious, generally wasn’t far enough along to qualify for traditional funding sources such as the National Institutes of Health. One of our early grantees was Eric Lander, who was working to decode the human genome and studying a gene related to Crohn’s disease at the Whitehead Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In October 2001, when Edye and I were in Cambridge for my induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, we called Eric and asked to see his lab. He’s an impressive researcher with an eclectic and high-achieving background: a math PhD from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and a professorship in managerial economics at the Harvard Business School. When we visited him, we saw an ideal work environment, packed with young scientists and humming with the sound of robotics. The scientists were working on the weekend because they loved what they were doing. It seemed like no one wanted to go home.
We asked Eric how long his work would take and what he planned to do when he was finished decoding the human genome. We were fascinated when he told us about his idea to start an interdisciplinary institute to take what he had learned about the genome to bedside application—so it would benefit patients by helping to treat and even prevent disease. Eric had a vision for a new way of conducting science, breaking down the silos that usually keep medical researchers, biologists, and engineers from collaborating on common projects. I was intrigued, but when Eric told us he needed $800 million to start it, I just wished him luck.
Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about the prospect of creating a new sort of institution whose work could make such a difference in the lives of so many.
Some of my initial inclinations were emotionally rather than logically based. I thought such an institute ought to be in our hometown, Los Angeles, as a joint effort of USC, UCLA, and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech)—where I was on the board and close to its then president, the Nobel Laureate David Baltimore. But Eric wanted it in Cambridge because, as he logically argued, moving everything to the West Coast would be extremely costly and would add several years to the project.
We talked about creating a partnership between MIT, which operated the Whitehead Institute, where Eric worked, and Harvard University. That would be a problem. The two schools never had collaborated on anything—let alone an enormous, cutting-edge research institute—and it was unclear whether they could be convinced to work together. Their students and staff were too accustomed to thinking of each other as competitors.
However, they also were a group for whom logic was likely to be persuasive.
A Logical Idea Is One That Makes You Say, “Why Didn’t I Think of That?”
The logic of our idea for a new scientific institute was clear to anyone with an open mind. I proposed that Edye and I put up $100 million in seed money over 10 years, provided Harvard and MIT would come up with matching sums.
The next step was to meet the presidents of both universities. MIT saw the potential and was on board almost immediately, but then Harvard President Larry Summers told us initially that Harvard didn’t have the money.
After the meeting, Eric and I agreed that, despite whatever Larry said, there was no way Harvard would want to be left out of something so big, an institute that would draw talent and attention from around the world. That appeal to Harvard’s self-interest was our leverage—and we were right. Today, the institute is a powerhouse in the vital field of basic biomedical research. Edye and I believe so strongly in the institute’s potential for improving human health—and were so impressed by its early work—that we put up a second $100 million two years after the institute got off the ground and $400 million three years later for an endowment.
The Broad Institute had a logical clarity. Eric wanted to take the knowledge from decoding the human genome and apply it to treating and even preventing disease. He wanted to make all of The Broad Institute’s discoveries available for free online to further advance research worldwide. And most of all, he wanted to create a new way of conducting science, thus revolutionizing medical research. With Eric’s leadership, the institute we helped MIT and Harvard create is accomplishing exactly these goals.
Like Wine, an Idea May Need to Age
Sometimes you’ll have to admit that there are things even sound logic can’t overcome. I’ve encountered a few of those while attempting to help turn Los Angeles’s Grand Avenue into the region’s primary civic and cultural district.
Ever since our family moved to Los Angeles in 1963, I’ve heard complaints—make that sneers—about L.A. lacking a center. Heck, when I wanted to move our business to L.A. in 1960, I found the place too physically confusing and initially opted for Phoenix instead.
People have been trying to rebuild L.A.’s downtown since it slipped into decay in the years after World War II. By the late 1960s, the city had razed the Victorian homes and boarding houses on historic Bunker Hill. Development happened piecemeal, leaving much of what could have been a great pedestrian boulevard looking like a desert highway. The city’s main concourse remained Wilshire Boulevard, which was the world’s first great processional avenue designed with the automobile specifically in mind. That meant parking lots behind buildings, entrances from the parking lot rather than from the sidewalk, and big windows with displays made for viewing by drivers, not pedestrians. L.A. pushed west, developing along Wilshire, and just kept on going. Downtown grew increasingly desolate.
While working on Disney Hall, I began to see how badly downtown needed smart development. That’s also when I realized how hard it would be to do. The parcels along Grand Avenue were owned separately by the county and the city, and those governments had never come together to develop an overall plan.
But the logical thing to do was exactly that, to make something cohesive and centered. I knew it would need businesses, retail, restaurants, housing, and inviting spaces to gather and for pedestrians to walk.
We had to convince the city and county to work together by creating an entirely new administrative structure to cut through the bureaucracy. We started by creating the Grand Avenue Committee, a public-private partnership of civic leaders, developers, and urban planners, with real estate developer Jim Thomas and me serving as co-chairs. After a dozen drafts of by-laws and a lot of negotiation, the city, county, and Community Redevelopment Agency agreed to form the Joint Powers Authority, composed of city, county, and state officials. The JPA, in turn, charged the Grand Avenue Committee with finding a financially sound and cooperative developer that would bring to life the vision of Grand Avenue as a vibrant center of our region of 15 million people. The nine-acre, $2 billion development would include 3.6 million square feet of development, 450,000 square feet of retail, a 16-acre park, a 275-room luxury hotel and up to 2,600 residential units. We found an ideal partner in the Related Companies, best known for building Time Warner Center in Manhattan. We needed to make sure Related had skin in the game so they couldn’t walk. I gave them this unreasonable request without budging: If they wanted to be our developer, they had to put $50 million down. Nobody thought they would agree, but they did—because I stuck to my guns, didn’t get emotional, and reminded them that $50 million was a tiny fraction of the project’s $2 billion price tag.
Unfortunately, a crashing economy trumped logic. For years, the project has been delayed. But Related has been a strong partner throughout, and thanks to that deposit money and interest, the city has started the first phase of the Grand Avenue Project: the construction of a civic park from City Hall to the Music Center, set to open in the summer of 2012.
Sometimes logic dictates that the moment for a good idea hasn’t quite arrived. If that happens, move on to the next thing, bide your time, and return to your idea when the time is right. Patience can be the most logical course.