by Jean Case
MBA leadership courses now study Shackleton’s legacy, books and films tell his story, and generations of explorers have set out for fresh frontiers, inspired by the story of this truly fearless man. But in the years that followed his failed expedition, when asked about the extreme hardships he encountered, Shackleton would reply, “Difficulties are just things to overcome, after all.”
In our modern era we can experience such moments of courage in real time, not just as stories we read about. I’ve been lucky to have those chances. In 1981, I was privileged to be present at the launch of the first space shuttle, Columbia, at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The congressional delegation from Florida had been invited to witness the launch, and my then-boss, Congressman E. Clay Shaw, generously invited me to come along. At the moment of the launch, there was an incredibly loud rumble, along with a distinct feeling that the very ground beneath my feet might give way. I felt it in my bones. Watching the sleek shuttle rise into the air, I was deeply conscious that it held the fates of living astronauts, whose personal courage was beyond anything I’d ever imagined. I remember thinking, “If they can do this, what can I do?”
Throughout my life, I’ve seen firsthand that the world is filled with people with great ambitions. I have listened to their doubts and seen the discomfort in their faces as they talk about stepping on untrodden ground. Often, those who use that discomfort to propel themselves forward are the ones who come out ahead. They may not make it on the first try. But often, like Shackleton or the astronauts I saw hurtling skyward, they keep going.
I was reminded of this on my first day in Antarctica on a trip with National Geographic in 2017, as I was coming down from an icy hike up a steep ridge. Feeling relieved that I had only slipped twice to no consequence, I spotted a curious chinstrap penguin making his way toward us. This penguin was surely an expert traveler on ice and snow, but he was so caught up in his observations that he lost his footing and fell on his tummy. Unfazed, he simply righted himself and proceeded on. Some of us chuckled. But the truth is, everyone can slip up, no matter our level of competence. The key is to get right back up and keep going.
If you are anything like me, getting uncomfortable is, well, uncomfortable. We would all prefer to live in the comfort zone of life, but as the stories in this chapter show, nothing extraordinary comes from the comfort zone. Risk taking requires boldness—stepping into unfamiliar territory and trying new, often unexpected things. The very nature of breakthroughs is that they have never been tried before. Are you considering a possible action that requires you to get uncomfortable and step out into unfamiliar territory? The hardest part is the first step forward. Like the advice I received when I was teetering thirty feet in the air on a telephone beam, just keep telling yourself, “But I can try.”
SEVEN
EMBRACE RISK AS R&D
When I work with boards of traditional organizations, I can see the members squirm in their chairs if I ask a question about their appetite for risk taking. This happens even in organizations that are seeking to reinvent themselves. Few people are inclined to run toward risk. Instead, I often hear people ask, “How can we minimize or eliminate risk?”
But what if we substituted the term “research and development” for “risk taking”? When you change the image from a reckless act to an intentional, sometimes incremental process, the fear lessens. Rather than a matter of life or death, risk becomes part of the process of discovery.
Our brains are wired to avoid risk. In humanity’s early days, physical danger was ever present, so our brains adapted to tell us when we needed to fight or run away. Today we need to help our brains go through a different exercise, asking ourselves: “What’s the downside of the risk? What’s the upside of the risk? What’s the downside of doing nothing?”
Sometimes dipping a toe in the water is the best way to get comfortable with the idea of experimentation. In my work with more risk-averse organizations, I often suggest they think about making a limited investment, putting aside maybe only 1 percent of their budget for special projects to test out a new idea. In this way, risk stops being scary and becomes R&D.
Talk to private sector CEOs and they will be quick to point out that R&D is the lifeblood of innovative companies. Yes, some things will fail as you discover what works and what doesn’t. But as Einstein reportedly said, “You never fail until you stop trying.” This is true whether you’re launching a program, developing a product, or starting a movement. I’ve often heard people from the social sector protest, “But we don’t have funding for R&D!” My response is to remind them of the words of one of our greatest modern-day innovators, Steve Jobs: “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least one hundred times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.” You don’t need a big budget in order to experiment.
“You never fail until you stop trying.”
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
Realistically, budgets are often stretched and funding for programs “locked.” I see this especially with foundations or government programs, which can have rigid protocols. When nonprofits or governments experiment and fail, those failures are often labeled as waste or fraud or abuse, which discourages more risk taking.
Yet we all know about the value of experimenting early and often, because it’s a common way of making breakthroughs in science and medicine. No credible scientific or medical institution exists without a lab—a dedicated space where experimentation can take place. The same thinking can easily be applied to efforts led by individuals and nonprofits. No matter the sector, everyone should also feel empowered to experiment and test different ideas, market opportunities, or even twists on their business models.
Science and medicine also offer spectacular examples of outsized risks that have changed the world. Consider smallpox. In the late 1700s, when smallpox was ravaging villages, with a death rate as high as 35 percent, Dr. Edward Jenner observed that milkmaids who previously had suffered from cowpox did not later catch smallpox, even when exposed to the disease. So Jenner experimented with what seemed like a crazy idea at the time—injecting a small amount of cowpox into healthy individuals to test whether it could protect them from contracting smallpox. Today, more than two hundred years later, vaccines are commonly deployed against a great many diseases, and the vaccine Jenner discovered led to the eradication of smallpox around the world.
Another great example of this is the work of National Geographic explorer Jane Goodall. I still treasure the memory of the first time I met her. She had come “home” to National Geographic as part of the annual Explorers Symposium. As she gracefully took the stage and spoke of her important work in an unforgettable British cadence, the audience sat mesmerized. Indeed, long before the 2017 hit movie Jane that chronicled her important work in Africa, she was well known to the world. It was in 1965 that National Geographic produced a film about her and her work in the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania entitled Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees. And photographs of Jane’s early work in the field with chimpanzees are considered by many to be among the most iconic National Geographic images.
Jane’s life has been a model of fearlessness. It was her love of animals and her interest in working with them that first took her to visit a friend in Africa when she was twenty-six. At the time, the famous paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey was doing groundbreaking work on early human origins, and Jane boldly asked to see him. Upon meeting her, Leakey hired her as a secretary on the spot. She had no college degree, but he planned to mentor her. Within months, Leakey, who was married and thirty years Jane’s senior, told her he was in love with her. She has spoken of being horrified by this development and very worried that her constant rebuffing of his advances would spell trouble for her future in the scientific work she had dreamed of. But, despite her lack of interest in him, Leakey continued to be her champion, and he raised the necessary funds to enable h
er field work with chimpanzees.
Since Jane had not been schooled in traditional protocols of animal behavior observations and research, she developed her own unconventional methods for observation of the chimpanzees. Over time, she assigned the chimps personal names and carried sketchbooks to make notes and drawings of their behaviors. Soon the chimps routinely came to visit and began to interact with her in the field. Jane’s research led to dramatic breakthroughs. Her observation that chimps weren’t just using tools but making them out of found objects challenged conventional wisdom that only humans were capable of such complexities. Leakey, for one, was inspired to send a telegram that read, “Now we must redefine ‘tool,’ redefine ‘man,’ or accept chimpanzees as human.”
Later Jane received a PhD from Cambridge University. Her work in the field has spanned fifty-five years of research, and she is widely recognized today as the foremost expert on chimpanzees. She formed the Jane Goodall Institute in 1977 and has won recognition and accolades from around the world, including being named a UN Messenger of Peace in 2002 for her life’s work.
Jane’s story reminds us that sometimes approaching the unknown without a traditional set of research protocols or expected outcomes can produce remarkable results. Jane was successful and saw things that other scientists didn’t because she did not have bias or preconceived notions about the world of chimpanzees. This enabled her to be bold, build her own method of R&D, and change the world in the process. It was a huge risk to travel to Africa, to go into the field without proper training, and to publish findings that were contrary to the scientific understanding of her day. She was undaunted and fearless, and embraced the idea of risk as necessary R&D. In 2017, when Jane came back to National Geographic and we proudly gathered for the premiere of the Jane film, I looked on with some awe as she greeted each guest patiently and graciously. I was struck anew by her powerful inspiration, and by the extraordinary contributions she has made to her field and to the world.
• • •
Jonas Salk took a big risk too. In 1947, while in his early thirties, he became director of the Virus Research Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh, where he was charged with developing new tools to fight polio, a life-threatening disease that resulted in half a million cases of paralysis or death each year. Salk’s work is of special significance to me since I had a close family member who contracted polio in his twenties. My dad’s brother, a tall, strong, and handsome young man, came home from World War II with dreams of the life he wanted to build. When polio struck shortly after his return to the States, it paralyzed him and he spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair.
At the time my uncle contracted polio, scientists believed that vaccines needed to contain some kind of “active” virus to be effective. Salk wanted to experiment with a vaccine that contained an “inactive” virus, hoping that this approach would generate the much-needed protective antibodies in those he vaccinated without putting them at risk for developing the disease. He so believed in the safety of his vaccine that he administered it first to himself, his wife, and their children. Today, thanks to the contributions of Jonas Salk, there are very few cases of polio reported anywhere in the world. Like Jenner before him, Salk’s commitment to experimenting early and often has saved tens of millions of lives.
The good news is that the lab approach isn’t just reserved for scientists. Because of advances in technology, the process of testing and validating new ideas can be streamlined, limiting the risk up front. Testing a plan or product quickly and with limited resources isn’t a new idea; focus groups are commonly employed to determine a product’s appeal, and beta tests have been used for decades. What’s different today is that it’s possible to put your concept in front of the market and start absorbing market signals before there is a real product, and in some cases before a company or organization is even formed. This, in turn, creates a new egalitarian landscape that spreads the opportunity.
In his celebrated book The Lean Startup, Eric Ries calls this early prototyping process “build, measure, learn,” and he promotes the idea of doing so with a “minimum viable product,” or MVP—that is, using the least amount of time and effort required to establish the viability of a product, service, or idea. Rather than testing a product repeatedly until it’s perfect, Ries and the companies that have employed this strategy push out new products as soon as they’re workable, typically to a small subset of loyal customers, and then gather feedback about how to improve them.
To make this point, Ries highlights the story of Zappos, the highly successful online shoe seller. When Zappos founder Nick Swinmurn had the idea for the company, people told him that buying shoes online was crazy, because you have to try them on. But Swinmurn wasn’t convinced. He went to retailers and asked if he could take pictures of their shoes and put them online. Then he built a one-page site with the pictures and included a way for people to order them. When somebody ordered shoes, Swinmurn would go buy them and ship them off. He obviously couldn’t do this for long, but he did it long enough to learn where the challenges would be and what customers wanted. Then he launched his company. There are many examples like Zappos of building improvement measures into the design process and inviting customers to take part in innovation. In this way, risk becomes R&D, and opportunities flourish.
The stories and underlying data in this chapter highlight a mind shift, from thinking of risk as a big, scary leap, to seeing it as essential to advancing an idea or initiative. We no longer can afford to stand still in a fast-changing world filled with so many needs. Each of us should embrace the concept of constantly trying new things and figuring out different ways to solve old problems. In the process, let’s shift our minds to recognize that the risks we take represent our own version of necessary R&D—part of the process toward great achievement.
I’m not sure why research and development isn’t something we are all encouraged to build into our lives. Long before the pursuit of a Big Bet, R&D can play a role in helping us avoid stagnation by constantly calling us to go back to the drawing board. And as this chapter makes clear, it doesn’t require a big budget or a physical lab. The key is the willingness to commit time and energy to the process. Can you identify a few things to test to advance your big idea to the next stage?
EIGHT
PICK UP WHERE OTHERS LEFT OFF
So much of my lifelong learning has come from books. I use the wisdom gleaned from many of them in my work. A few years ago I read a book that so resonated with our work at the Case Foundation that we made a vow to read it together as a team. Then, with the benefit of after-work wine and cheese, we gathered to share our reflections and to discuss how we might apply the book’s lessons to our own work in the days ahead. It was a transformative moment that we all vividly recall. That book was How We Got to Now by Steven Johnson. In it, he sets out to dispel the myth that innovation requires an individual genius with an “aha!” moment, as we referenced earlier. Johnson writes: “Big ideas coalesce out of smaller, incremental breakthroughs.” He goes on to tell the story of Thomas Edison, a man we so associate with genius that we often refer to the “aha!” moment as the “lightbulb” moment. But Johnson makes it clear that it wasn’t that simple. Edison wasn’t even first. Early patents on the lightbulb preceded Edison’s by the better part of a century, and dozens of others received patents for portions of the invention we credit Edison with today. What Edison was good at was being a fast and effective follower—taking nascent ideas that had already been tested and bundling them with new insights and a fresh team.
Johnson’s point about Edison is this: he didn’t just invent technology, he invented an entire system for inventing. Edison himself understood that innovation and iterative development often go hand in hand, openly acknowledging that he borrowed from the work of others. “I am quite correctly described as more of a sponge than an inventor,” he said. It is the wise entrepreneur who understands this. And if you look at the team systems used at Bell Labs, Xerox, and some
of the later classic innovation labs, you’ll see they took Edison’s approach and applied it.
Perhaps I have a special appreciation for picking up where others left off because I spent my early career helping to build digital online services—the companies that gave many of us our first experience of the Internet. I started with the nation’s first pure play online service, The Source—a text-based information utility for consumers that featured early versions of email, conferencing, and content ranging from an encyclopedia to stock quotes. The fatal flaws that would limit scale and mainstream acceptance weren’t so obvious back then. For example, these exciting services came across the telecommunications wire at the speed of 300 baud. What’s 300 baud? The equivalent of 300 bits of data passing per second. Content today comes across at 100 million bits per second. So it was S-L-O-W. How slow? It would have taken forty hours to download the average song back then. And it was expensive. Accessing the services required a $100 subscription fee and hourly charges that ranged from $7 to $20, depending on the time of day.
Still, underlying this slow, expensive service was a really powerful idea‚ democratizing access to information and communication. And it was that idea—never mind the kinks—that attracted followers. These services had the potential to level the playing field in a way that could change the way people lived, worked, and played. But some iteration was needed.
I landed at one more (failed) online service before I found myself at a start-up that would introduce something new to the world. Led by a founding team of three—Steve Case, Marc Seriff, and Jim Kimsey—this start-up set to work picking up where others left off. Steve, who would become CEO of AOL, was brilliant at understanding the shortcomings of the other young companies around us, and he led the team to experiment in areas that had previously limited growth for our competitors. This included consumer-friendly pricing, appealing graphic interfaces, and a “membership” approach that encouraged engagement, feedback, and a sense of community. And it worked. After early struggles, we hit a tipping point and people jumped on—a lot more people. At its peak, AOL had nearly 30 million subscribers, and was the first Internet company to go public.
