Limping Towards Greatness
We all want to believe that the path to success is about moving in a straight line towards our goal, gaining momentum as we go and charging across the finish line with a building sense of certainty and satisfaction. That may happen for some people, but I would like to meet them. Success is far more often a four-cushion shot or even a random walk. I have even seen people accidentally succeed and backing across a goal line by mistake. The nature of effort is that it is buffeted from all sides by forces of nature and must therefore constantly course-correct in order to keep moving forward in a positive way. Some of those countervailing forces can be predicted, but most of them are timed and directed such that they must be responded to on an impromptu basis.
I am not sure why success matters to me so much. I would argue that the kudos of success are what have driven me throughout my career. We are all told not to care what others think of us, but to be self-possessed enough to be happy with pleasing ourselves. I’m not alone in being unable to follow that advice. Once in my early career (this was 8-9 years in and I was flying high) an older colleague who was quite outspoken and opinionated called me out and told me I was a four-year-old little boy who wanted the approval of his absentee father. Even in the shock of that moment of denigration, I recognized the rebuke as quite valid. I did care too much about pleasing my superiors, but I have never thought that was necessarily a bad thing. So long as they did not want me to do anything unethical or unkind, I saw no reason why doing what was asked of me was anything but good. I would add to that observation that I also care a lot about how my subordinates perceive me. Again, I think that’s an important aspect of good leadership. Perhaps not to be loved by all, but certainly to be respected by all.
The need to succeed was more important to me in my young career than it is now. Don’t get me wrong, winning is still much better than losing. But I think I have succeeded in putting success into better perspective. I am far more inclined to value the way people feel that I have comported myself in how I treated others (employees, peers, investors, counter-parties, etc.). I will paraphrase Shutruk-Nakhunte who’s flagrant overstatement of his success symbolizes the view that “conquest without contribution is without significance.” In my world, success without respect is without significance. I often tell my wife that I get more from people we see that say that working with me on whatever project, was the best assignment they ever had than any success I may have had. When I am on my deathbed, those sentiments of respect and admiration are worth much more that mountains climbed.
When I was in Turkey the last few weeks, I was thoroughly enjoying seeing places along the Silk Road that had been caravanserai, or camel rest stops, in their day. I have had a thing about Marco Polo for a long time. The adventure and ultimate success he had traipsing along with his father and uncle to places East beyond the edge of the known world always sparked my imagination. Reading of his engagement with Kublai Khan, his learning four exotic foreign languages (Turkish, Arabic, Mongolian and Persian), taking on the Governorship of a major city for the Khan at a young age, then writing his tales (or more likely dictating them) while in a Genovese prison and inspiring Christopher Columbus two hundred years later to seek adventure to the West, all made me crazy with respect for the man. He succeeded without objectifying success. He just did what he did and gained immortality in the process. That is my sense of what success should be about.
In my current situation I have a bold and challenging mission. The mission is scientific, and the ultimate value of the technology is to alter the formula for a big part of modern life such that there is a less damaging impact on the environment. The education I have gotten over the past few years concerns the reality that much of the growth and advancement of mankind over the past century has hinged on chemical science predicated on using hydrocarbons to produce life-sustaining benefits. Most of us think we went from an industrial economy (think machines and assembly lines) to an information economy (computers and software). We all knew about the important role that transportation played and that transportation depended largely on burning polluting hydrocarbons (hence smoggy LA landscapes). The truth is that most of the past century has been predicated less on machines and computers than on chemicals, and those chemicals were largely utilizing hydrocarbons in multiple ways.
People who understand the world best and how things work know that playing with hydrocarbons not only made important goods for us but enabled the all-important production of sufficient food to feed the vastly expanding population of the earth. The world went from 190 million souls at the birth of Christ to 1.65 billion by 1900, or at a compound rate of about 0.11% p.a. In the 119 years since 1900 we have grown population to 7.7 billion or 1.3% p.a. That may not seem like a lot numerically, but some say the limit for the species on earth is 9 billion and at current rates that means we top out in 2030. Strangely enough, that is also more or less when the UN climate study says we are hitting a barrier as the irreversibility of climate change and thus the necessary reduction of Greenhouse Gases (GHG).
What I am working on is a change to the chemical processes such that we stop using hydrocarbons to create critical chemicals like ammonia and to store and generate energy. It is, literally, “save the world” science that hits us exactly where we live: our food, our energy and our transportation medium. And here’s the thing, we are fighting against a century of engineering that has driven the cost of using hydrocarbons to a low point that is challenging to get to immediately with these alternate, non-polluting means. Again, the cartoon of the TV announcer saying that the market traded off on news that a meteor was going to hit and destroy the earth only to add that the market traded up on news of the Fed cutting the discount rate. Short term thinking is the ultimate bitch.
There are others aiming for this goal, but we are under incredible time pressure to succeed, as a company, but mostly as a world. The governments of the world should be throwing all the money they can at all the solutions that could possibly work. We are somewhat unique in our specialty science and we have a great lab and testing facility (located in remote and lovely Scotland). But here’s the thing, we struggle with funding because it is slow to come and is constantly under threat of fatigue. The goal is no less than greatness and salvation for mankind. Yesterday we got a bit more funding. We limp forward when we should be racing forward. But such is the nature of all paths to success. This greatness is not about personal glory, it is about giving all humans and, indeed, the earth itself, the respect it so greatly deserves. No straight or easy shots and lots and lots of limping to greatness.