Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation
Innovation can’t happen without accepting the risk that it might fail. The vast and radical innovations of the mid-20th century took place in a world that, in retrospect, looks insanely dangerous and unstable. Possible outcomes that the modern mind identifies as serious risks might not have been taken seriously—supposing they were noticed at all—by people habituated to the Depression, the World Wars, and the Cold War, in times when seat belts, antibiotics, and many vaccines did not exist. Competition between the Western democracies and the communist powers obliged the former to push their scientists and engineers to the limits of what they could imagine and supplied a sort of safety net in the event that their initial efforts did not pay off. A grizzled NASA veteran once told me that the Apollo moon landings were communism’s greatest achievement.
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In the pre-net era, managers were forced to make decisions based on what they knew to be limited information. Today, by contrast, data flows to managers in real time from countless sources that could not even be imagined a couple of generations ago, and powerful computers process, organize, and display the data in ways that are as far beyond the hand-drawn graph-paper plots of my youth as modern video games are to tic-tac-toe. In a world where decision-makers are so close to being omniscient, it’s easy to see risk as a quaint artifact of a primitive and dangerous past.
Mediocrity is a vice of the doomed. Management obsesses on what is measurable instead of promoting what is important. (Ask K&E about the HP-35.) Discovery is insubordination toward management rewarded for enforcing process not creating product.
Management kills the future, for the only trusted employee is one whose sole marketable asset is loyalty. An abusive hegemony of beige suffers reality deficit disorder leading to deformed decisions causing economic cloudy days. Saepe errans, numquam dubitans is weapons-grade imbecility.
We lack rigorous characterization of the topology and function of cluelessness. Redirected stupidity is not intelligence. The confluence of overwhelming ignorance with overweening arrogance is a clown car of incompetence. God save us from the congenitally inconsequential.
The world will not end in fire or ice. More likely are paperwork and nostalgia.
Oh Uncle Al,
Your sentiments are touching and poetic. However your waxing dramatic soliloquy against mindless managerial manipulations misses the mark.
As beautiful and magnificent as a 100% open format may seem from behind the felt-padded cubicle cell walls, there are indeed those who are not suited for true creativity, be it due to lack of critical thinking skills, lack of focus, or simple ignorance in the subject matter which is the essential purpose of their employment.
On the other hand, management, and standards, and process all serve to ensure that product is actually of quality. In history, the go-to example is the Colt Revolver whose manufacturer decided that using standard parts from a well-managed production line would ensure that all revolvers going out the door were of acceptable quality, and would not render the entire product useless should one piece fail.
This is still just as true for the production of 0/1 products in the form of electronic reporting as it is for real durable goods.
The over abundance of mid-level management and conformity to process without consideration of purpose or efficacy IS a stifling factor that leads ever onward toward failure.
If you can do something better than the place you work, get out and do it! That is in fact what this country is all about.
A human implant subsidiary was given seven figures and a year by its parent company to make an entity that could not be made for two excellent reasons. Engineering held planning meetings. Uncle Al thought about it, ordered a free sample (part one), did three experiments (part two), had an hour with a janitor re preform assembly, and called in a favor from semi-works. Three weeks screwing around at incremental zero budget obtained six devices.
VP R&D, upon being presented with project specs exceeded, said “GODAMNIT, Schwartz, IT CAN’T WORK THAT WAY!”
But it does Uncle Al’s reward was being laid off – they wanted the money not the device. The company was gone in 18 months. Engineering does things, chemistry does stuff. Fabrication of oxide dislocation-pinned high temperature nickel superalloys also makes a Plexiglas variant, the free sample, that is cold sweat “I want my mommy” impossible.
One grows weary of little people wearing big pants at every level, industry and government, who reject “improper” solutions. And Suddenly the Inventor Appeared: TRIZ, the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving. Terrible leaden prose in translation. Read it.
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/comprom.htm
“it is not right that matters, but victory.”
Space Scuttle external foam insulation spalled off. A cheap bathroom vanity screams the obvious remedy. NASA, “this is not the solution we are seeking.” One Space Scuttle ended up in the toilet for a pittance chopped glass roving to bind the foam for four minutes.
of all problems I hear about this is the one I never believe exists.
I do not believe it exists because there is no discernible solution. therefore I prefer to believe that it is not a problem.
ps. hmmm…. sounds like a global warming denialist viewpoint lol
Historically, there are two parties that can afford to take risks that might fail. There’s the government, driving force behind the space race, the Colt 45, interchangeable parts, the telegraph, radar, vulcanized rubber, electricity, the computer and so on. The list is extremely long. The other is the heavily regulated monopoly which gave us things like Xerox PARC and Bell Labs.
Private enterprise can only afford to take extremely limited risks. Calling the typical CEO chicken-shit is an insult to poultry and to fecal matter.
We no longer have regulated monopolies, so the private sector is out of the innovation business except in extremely limited cases. Apple only accepted Steve Jobs when they were months from bankruptcy.
The only branch of the US government with the money to push innovation is currently the DoD, and they are doing some impressive stuff with solar and other power management. In modern warfare, the side with the best batteries wins. There are lots of other areas that can use some serious risk money. If we want innovation, we need to go back to basic principles, and let the government do what the government does best. Even when it fails, it comes out ahead.