The
University of Rhode Island and CVS/Caremark Corporation celebrated our
long-standing partnership last week in the new College of Pharmacy
building. It was abundantly clear
throughout the festivities that this has been an enormously productive and
beneficial partnership for both institutions.
Larry
Merlo, the CEO of CVS/Caremark, spoke with pharmacy students during the
morning. They were paying close attention, and one of Mr. Merlo’s
points seemed especially well received.
He said, in essence, “do not fear failure”. In order to innovate we
must, he pointed out, accept the risk that not everything we attempt will
succeed. Exactly right. Success,
and high levels of performance, are not equivalent to, and do not require,
perfection. Perfection is an unattainable goal, but success and leadership are
not. CVS/Caremark has
distinguished itself both by its success and its leadership within the
industry. There can be little
doubt that these achievements are related to the company’s willingness to
accept the risks of occasional failure in order to be consistently innovative.
I
learned a very similar lesson in a different way. As a first-year graduate student in chemistry at the
California Institute of Technology, I was privileged to join the research
laboratory of Professor Harry B. Gray – one of America’s (and the world’s) most
distinguished researchers in chemistry.
Harry had (and has) a global reputation for being one of the most
brilliant and innovative research scientists in the field of chemistry. As a 22 year-old I was certainly aware
of his success and leadership, but only later when I was starting my own career
did I fully realize what an honor it was to work with Harry.
Needless
to say, the standards and expectations in Harry’s lab were extremely high, and
largely self-imposed by the members of his research group. Harry had set an
extremely high standard for himself and all of us wanted our work to be as close to
that standard as we could possibly achieve. So I was very pleased when one of my first projects went
very well and led in a relatively short time to publication in the Journal of the American Chemical Society –
one of the world’s most prestigious journals for research in chemistry. Moreover, it was published as a “communication”
– a mode reserved for work deemed especially interesting and timely. It was my first scientific paper.
The
paper did receive a fair amount of attention, which, of course, made me even
happier. One reason for the
attention was that the experiments had been carried out on a unique instrument
(really, there was only one such instrument in the world at the time, if I
remember correctly) that existed in the Physics Department at the University of
Rome. The instrument in Rome (a
magnetometer, i.e. it measures magnetism) was based on one invented in the
Physics Department at Caltech and which utilized a SQUID – not calamari but a
“superconducting quantum interference device”. This sounds like something
Sheldon would say on the Big Bang Theory,
but I assure you it’s quite real.
Several
months after the paper appeared we got a call from a new company in San Diego
that had built a SQUID-based magnetometer and wanted us to come down and test
it. So, I prepared some new samples, drove from Pasadena to San Diego (a
distance considered minor in CA and nearly impossible to Rhode Islanders), met
my new colleagues, and started work. 36 hours later I knew, without any doubt
whatsoever, that the results in my first paper were simply, and completely,
wrong. It was a very long drive
back.
I
was embarrassed: my first published work was wrong and worse, I had let down my
mentor and PhD advisor. I needed
to tell Harry as soon as possible so I just walked into his office (his door
was nearly always open) showed him the new data, and summarized the analysis. I
started to apologize; he stopped me mid-way through. “Come with me”, he said.
He walked into his library, opened a file cabinet, and pulled out a reprint of
an early paper of his. “See this”,
he said, “it’s one of my first papers as an assistant professor at Columbia.
And it’s wrong. Worse, it was one of my scientific competitors who demonstrated
that fact.”
Then
Harry said, “Dave, you’ll never do anything important if you’re not willing to
be wrong.” I’ve never forgotten
that. It was, and still is, the most valuable piece of wisdom that Harry ever
shared with me – and I cannot calculate the value of all the knowledge and
wisdom he provided.
I
think it is simply true that unless you are willing to accept the risk of being
wrong, the risk of failure, you are very unlikely to do anything innovative or
important. This is true, I
believe, for individuals as well as organizations. We should always strive for excellence, but if perfection is
the goal, then neither perfection nor excellence will be achieved. So thank you Harry, and thank you,
Larry, for sharing that wisdom in 1977 and in 2013.
