Thawing a TV Dinner
When I was a kid, just starting in grade school, we moved from a remote tropical valley in Costa Rica to Madison, Wisconsin. It was January, which was the start of the school year in the one-room schoolhouse on the institute grounds where we lived. I had never seen snow and here I was in frigid 30 degrees below zero weather in the midwestern United States. The explanation was that I was a “trailing child” to a working mother who had decided to return to graduate school for her Ph.D. after fourteen years of working in international development in Latin America. Seems like a dramatic transition in hindsight, but at the time I was all-in on the move. Trading the tropics with its mildew, heat, humidity and daily rain showers for watching ice fishing on Lake Mendota was a fair trade. A spacious three-bedroom, two-bath house with a lush garden was exchanged for a rented two-bedroom one-bath cracker-box with a hardscrabble patch of lawn/dirt next to a vacant lot. A $12,000 salary for a $3,000 fellowship (the year was 1961), where $1,200 of that went for rent for three kids. A local maid to make and serve dinner every night for a freezer full of Swanson TV dinners that my mother explained to us we needed to make (remember, no microwave) for ourselves for dinner when she wasn’t home (which was pretty much every night).
There was a process to cooking and eating a TV dinner. There were three types I recall; Salisbury steak (personal favorite), turkey and Fried Chicken. They all had peas and something resembling mashed potatoes. Some ( the later variety) had a desert that was either some sort of cobbler and some sort of muffin. To keep these things from burning in the oven, you were supposed to partially defrost them. If you remember that scene from Risky Business, Tom Cruise hadn’t figured out the defrost protocol and he just sucks on the frozen TV dinner as one big unit. It was a fun scene for most, but for those of us who grew up on the stuff, sucking on a frozen TV dinner hits home and brings back a full range of memories.
We spent four years in Madison. There was the Master, the Doctorate and the post-doctoral work, all with some teaching duties thrown in. As a grade-schooler you might assume I was oblivious to where I was and what was going on around me. But I remember the gatherings my mother had with fellow students and professors. Whether they were working sessions (we got baby-sat in many different ways) or social gatherings, there was always a lively and noticeable debate with lots of yelling and pointing. I knew nothing about the subject matter, but I came away with a sense that the higher the education, the more adamant the disagreement.
Flash forward almost sixty years. I am running a scientific research business with half the staff carrying advanced science degrees. I have an MBA and one year of undergraduate engineering before switching into economics. I may be a quick study, but given that freshman inorganic chemistry had overwhelmed me, it would be fair to suggest that my ability to debate the science involved in the leading-edge electrochemistry we were pursuing was somewhere between slim and none. I sort of understood where we were headed, where we were and mostly what we had to do to get there (per the project plan). But every day there were new issues that came up that we learned from our experiments and that got debated among the scientists.
We had an R&D organization and a Chief Technical Officer. Life would have been easy if the CTO had been the sort to lead a team of scientists in a commercialization initiative, but we were not that lucky. Our CTO was a thirty-two year veteran of electrochemistry. Her theories had spawned a tome of research publications and a few important patents. Her theories were the basis of our entire mission, not because they were so brilliant (though they may have been), but because the end results would be world-changing in terms of addressing greenhouse gasses and setting the table for a new approach to global energy needs.
The trouble with the CTO was that she was a theorist and not a practical R&D manager and what the business needed more than anything now was the later. She had gotten out over her skis a bit and the team was having trouble catching up. The practicum in electrochemistry involves a scientific version of hunting and pecking a path to the answers. The team was feeling the heat and they wanted the CTO’s help. Most of the team members were either her ex-students or of that generation. Her ability to explain and their patience to understand went from bad to worse.
I’ve come to understand that scientists are mostly intellectually arrogant. It takes a certain type of person to go through 20-25 years of education to take a job in a lab at a salary that most MBA’s would sneer at. Intellectualism is the currency of scientists and is not that hard to understand why they get prickly over their theories and proofs.
And yet, the in-fighting rages and the team galvanizes to their respective corners. The problem with the team in different corners is that they can’t hear each other from there. If they can’t hear each other they can’t work together and if they can’t work together we are stalled. That’s where we stand.
My solution is to write a position paper on our scientific process and force the two sides to find common ground. Everyone thinks that this is a writer’s thing and a bit of a waste of time, but I disagree. The written word has great power. In academia (where I had the privilege of spending a decade as a Clinical Professor of Management) it is very clear that publishing is the hallmark of intellectualism. A paper gets written and then it gets critiqued. And so the intellectual process goes. So the CTO wrote a paper and the team wrote a paper and then we negotiated a merging of the two papers into one.
The process had me in the middle and it was a contest as to who was more annoyed by it. The team was as nit-picky as could be. I personally accepted or discarded each and every edit…of which there were many. Even with accepting 90% of the proposed edits, the cycles of the process went on and on with fewer edits each time, but old and new comments that went on and on. My personal favorite was the edit about a comma saying that “Oxford commas are antiquated”. Wow, that was a comma comment worthy of a literature grad student, not a material scientist…who attended Cambridge, not Oxford.
And then it happened. The Oxford comma guy needed a theoretical solution to a lab problem that was vexing him. He asked the CTO. She asked for data on his work to date. He provided it. It all happened naturally and politely. That wouldn’t have happened a few months prior when the team was in opposing corners. Now that they were all in the middle of the ring, working together again, the thaw was in process. Given the choice of sucking on a frozen TV dinner or figuring out how to thaw it and cook it properly, its worth some brain damage to defrost. Just remember that now that we use microwaves, it easier to thaw but also easier to blow up the kitchen.