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When the Best and Brightest Are Wrong
Perhaps you have heard of Garrison Keillor’s popular publicradio show, “A Prairie Home Companion.” In each show, he references Lake Wobegon, a mythical town in Minnesota. At the end of each broadcast, he signs off from Lake Wobegon, “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”
THE LAKE WOBEGON EFFECT
The so-called Lake Wobegon effect has become increasingly present in schools and businesses, to the extent that many people actually believe that their entire organization is, in fact, above average. Such scholarly publications as The Harvard Law School Forum and the Journal of Financial Economics have reported on the impact of Lake Wobegon thinking.
The most common form of the Lake Wobegon effect can be recognized in the narrow thinking and hubris of key players in some corporations. Somehow, the notion that only the best ideas come from within seems to surface all over the place. Even an internally generated idea can run aground if it comes from the wrong person or group. This phenomenon has also been called the Not Invented Here (NIH) syndrome by many.
Over the course of my career, I have had the privilege of consulting for some of the most amazing companies on the planet. They all have at least one thing in common: all say they hire “the best and the brightest.” No doubt the list of other companies that also claim to hire the best and the brightest is long and growing. Could the Lake Wobegon effect have any basis in the truth? How could everyone hire only the best and the brightest? How would you work around the hurdles that are inevitable when everyone is the rocket scientist’s brain surgeon?
The road to ruin is laden with examples of what happens when hubris or NIH thinking runs the show. Here are just a few of them:
• Ken Olsen, founder and CEO of Digital Equipment Corporation, said in 1977: “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.” I guess we can imagine what that mind-set did for internal innovation and product development.
• In the 1970s, the Swiss watch industry controlled 90 percent of the world watch market, utilizing mechanical movements made in Switzerland. In 1967, a Swiss research organization (Centre Electronique Horloger, in Neuchâtel) came up with the first quartz movement and offered it to the Swiss Watchmakers’ Guild, an association of Swiss watchmakers. The Swiss watchmakers turned down the idea, and it eventually took hold in Japan instead. Seiko thought the idea had promise and used the quartz movement to assume a dominant position in the industry. One storied Swiss company went so far as to proclaim it would “never make a watch with a quartz movement.” It later had to eat those words and now offers quartz movements. As the market gradually changed direction, the number of employees in member companies of the Watchmakers’ Guild fell from some 90,000 in 1970 to a little more than 30,000 by 1984, while the number of companies decreased from about 1,600 to about 600 in the same time frame.
• In the early 1990s, Motorola was looking for opportunities within the cellular business as part of its technology growth strategy as well as examining possible competitive threats. Someone raised the question of how the company should view Nokia. The conversation quickly dissolved into snickering and jokes about this no-name company from Finland with a history of making everything from forestry products to bicycle tires to children’s raincoats. By the mid-1990s, Nokia had divested itself of most of those businesses, choosing to focus exclusively on telecommunications. The snickering probably stopped by the time Nokia had surpassed Motorola as the global leader in mobile phones. By 2009, Nokia had a 38.6 percent market share, compared with 8 percent for Motorola. The snickering definitely stopped in July 2010, when Nokia acquired Motorola’s telecommunications network equipment business. Oops.
It may well be true that “pride goeth before the fall.”
“I WROTE THE BOOK ON THAT”
What do you do when you are stymied by the world’s smartest person? What if the guy who wrote the book on the topic is convinced that he is right and you are wrong? Engineer Armando Martos found himself in exactly that situation once, and his story illuminates what happens when your great idea runs counter to that of the icon on the hill.
Armando was a freshly minted engineer when he landed a job at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories. His very first assignment was to develop a design for a large (one meter in diameter and weighing 900 pounds) mirror mount. To help him through the process, the lab hired a well-known professor of kinematics from a major university as a consultant. Kinematics has to do with motion and the forces required to create the motion.
Armando studied the mirror mount requirements along with known challenges and then met with the professor to exchange ideas. When he returned a short time later with a few preliminary thoughts, the professor listened for a minute and then dismissed the ideas as unworkable due to some “basic” principles of kinematics.
Back to the drawing board, as it were, and after more study, Armando returned, still convinced that his ideas would work. The professor was not amused and this time gave Armando a copy of his well-regarded kinematics textbook to study. I’m sure you can sense the implied message here: Look, I wrote the book on this— pay attention. Armando dug into the book but, not being an expert in kinematics, did not see how to apply some of the formulas. After a couple more back-and-forth trips to the ivory tower, the advice was reduced to something painfully simple: “If you don’t understand, just take my word for it. What you are proposing is the kinematic equivalent of the perpetual motion machine in physics. It’s just not possible.”
About this time, Armando’s boss approached him to see how he was doing on the design. After sharing his frustrations, Armando learned that his boss had been getting the play-by-play all along from the professor. His boss offered two contrary thoughts: perhaps the professor was right, and he should give up; however, if Armando felt strongly about his ideas, he should go ahead and build a model to prove the concept.
Armando assured his boss that he knew the difference between stubborn and persistent. He also told him that if his idea worked, it would solve some of the most intransigent problems people had been experiencing for decades trying to come up with a stable yet unbinding design for large optics. His boss then told him to build the model and said he’d pay for it. Being a frugal tinkerer, Armando proceeded to build a crude prototype using door hinges, turnbuckles, and ball joints—the kinds of stuff he was used to seeing around his dad’s truck repair shop (which is where he got the idea in the first place). And it worked!
Back to the ivory tower he went. Alas, not much had changed: the professor let Armando know how upset he was at him for wasting his time and the lab’s money and commented that the only reason the model worked was that it was so crude. He went on to lecture Armando, stating that a precision model would never have been able to support the mirror. By now, Armando was ready to give up, but before doing so, he went back to the professor’s book for one more careful read. This step yielded an incredible discovery: the professor was convinced the model wouldn’t work because the professor was actually misapplying his own formulas! He had not seen a whole new degree of freedom that the new design provided and that was accounted for in the professor’s own calculations. Indeed, the design worked both in theory and in practice.
Armando took this insightful discovery to his boss, telling him that he could easily prove that his idea worked, but not with his first crude attempt; it would require a more sophisticated model. His boss encouraged him to go for it and approved additional funding to produce the more refined model. Armando quickly produced a fully functioning model, and without even bothering to show his boss, he invited the professor to come down from the ivory tower and see the new model in action in his small office.
Ignoring the obvious signs of annoyance from the professor, Armando showed him how it worked and started to explain what he had learned from reading the professor’s book. At that point, the professor put his hand up and asked Armando to stop talking. He spent 20 minutes staring at the model on the floor (it was large enough to occupy most of the office) without saying a word.
Armando remained respectful and uttered nary a syllable while the professor crawled all over the model. Eventually, the professor looked up and told Armando that he could never have imagined that Armando’s model would work and asked him how he came up with the idea. As Armando took him through his thinking process and detailed how he had applied the professor’s theories, the professor began to nod his head. For the first time in months, the professor spoke to Armando in respectful tones and acknowledged that he had discovered a whole new mechanism.
For Armando, having earned the respect of the professor was more important than having proved that his idea worked. That evening, Armando’s boss caught up with him in the parking lot and asked how the meeting had gone. The expression on his boss’s face was yet another level of acknowledgment that has remained with Armando for the ensuing 20 years. His boss then confided that he’d let Armando pursue the idea even though he didn’t think it would work.
One year later, the professor called and asked if he could cite Armando in the third edition of his book; he was updating it and wanted to discuss the “Martos RSSR-SR Mechanism.” Had Armando taken a direct assault position on the professor, attacking his misunderstanding or misapplication of his own theories, he probably would have been chucked out on his ear. A great lesson in both humility and influence can be taken from how Armando approached this situation.
FINDING A SOLUTION IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN BEING RIGHT
If you run into the roadblock of “the guy who wrote the book,” try taking a page from Armando’s experience. Remain respectful, ask for input, and see if you can cast the other person’s idea in a form that allows him or her to maintain dignity. “Here’s what I learned from you and how I applied your insight” may work a heck of a lot better than “Clearly, you don’t understand your own area of expertise.”
If you’re more interested in finding a solution than appearing right or superior, you may well be able to apply the lessons that Armando so richly demonstrated:
• Intention. Armando has made a career out of several workarounds that work. First and foremost, he is a walking, talking affirmation of the power of intention. Get clear on where you are headed, and keep asking yourself what else you can do to get there. You may need to work around anything from self-doubt to the negativity or resistance of others.
• Henry Ford workaround. By staying resolute in his intention and his belief in the outcome, Armando was able to reach solutions. He is a living example of Henry Ford’s previously quoted statement, “Whether you believe you can or you cannot, you are right.” Despite the expert criticisms from the guy who wrote the book, Armando refused to accept “can’t be done” without giving it a go. Not everything is going to work out, but you can be almost 100 percent assured that if you don’t even try, it isn’t going to happen.
• Control and influence. Armando recognized the situation and saw that there were things he could do on his own (study, build models, and apply theories). He also saw that he would need support to negotiate the hierarchy, so he showed his boss his personal initiative as well as his willingness to learn. The combination produced support even in the face of doubt. Never underestimate the power of taking control of your own 10 acres first. You will almost always move up a notch in the eyes of others by acting rather than complaining.
• People do things for their reasons, not your reasons. While it was clear to Armando throughout the ordeal that he had something that would work, he also knew that he would need to enlist his mentor/adversary/roadblock in order to bring it about. His repeated attempts to engage the professor were all framed in understanding what the professor had to say, not in proving that the professor was wrong. Even when he knew the professor had muffed the ball, he kept framing things in terms of the professor’s theories. As hard as it might have been to accept that he had missed something, the professor could take comfort in the fact that his theories had worked after all.
WORKAROUND QUESTIONS
Here are some questions you should consider as you find your way forward:
1. What is the other person likely to think about your idea or approach?
2. How might the other person feel threatened or disrespected?
3. How can you use the other person’s ability, position, or experience to move your idea forward? Can you show how your idea builds on his or hers? (People do things for their reasons, not your reasons.)
4. Who in the organization might serve as your mentor, advocate, or supporter, someone who can coach you in ways to present your ideas or influence the other person?
Workaround tip: remember that how you frame the problem is the problem. Stay focused on the solution more than how the other person is in the way.