Transcript: Well I guess, you know, it’s a very . . . it’s a very, very hard question. Some people think about things like that. Unfortunately I’m an engineer. I’m always thinking about, you know, what’s the task and how do I get it done? And some of my tasks are pretty broad, and pretty fuzzy, and pretty funky, but that’s the way I think. I guess the way I would think that through . . . Let me answer your question. I don’t have an answer, so let me think about how I would have an answer. It would be I would ask myself, “What are the real puzzles that I truly don’t understand and I think are really, really important?” So you know let’s just go back to those big issues that I described earlier. So I’m really puzzled by why people in societies find it difficult kind of to work collaboratively together with other people in societies. So I’m not sure I know who the right name is to pick to interview, but I think . . . I don’t know whether it’s religious leaders, or whether it’s some of the few political leaders that have risen above the kind of special interest politics. I mean I’m bad at coming up with names, but I think that would be . . . that would be one of the interviews. And you know I’m also fascinated by the sort of deep psychological roots of how a lot of these phenomenon that I’m interested actually play themselves out. So you know, I recently came across a body of work of a guy named Daniel _______, I think is his name, at Penn. And his work is labeled under the phrase “positive psychology”. And his whole body of work is how you can get people to kind of pursue their positive interests and work constructively. And so you know, there’s a great interview. What have you learned about how to get people . . . to bring out people’s positive side, and their better side, and their constructive side as opposed to their fearful side, or their jealous side or their . . . (whatever kind of) side? So those are just a couple of examples. One specific, the other more of a kind of generic category. But you know I gotta tell you. Even for somebody like me who is very broad in my interests, and I truly engage in many parts of the world, there’s so much to know these days that it’s hard to keep exposing yourself to these new bodies of thought and fields that are . . . But I think over time as my work develops, I suspect that to make the next set of breakthroughs, one’s gonna have to integrate some of these very human and psychological theories, and thinking, and understanding with some of the more, if you will, rational, and organizational, and economic in order to address some of the very vexing questions that I asked earlier . . . that we talked about earlier.

Recorded on: 6/11/07

Transcript: If you look at the volunteer programs, what you find is that a lot of the times people are really volunteering their labor and their caring, but they’re actually not utilizing their real skills. So the example I like to use – and I don’t want to pick on them – ________ . . . you know, the U.S. branch of Shell has wonderful volunteer programs. And they’ve got these PhD petroleum engineers out raking trash on the beach as part of the environmental cleanup campaigns and so forth. Okay on one level that’s very, very laudable. These people are being generous. They’re donating their time; but are they really using their professional talents? Do we really want petroleum engineers raking the beach? Or do we want petroleum engineers and others thinking about how, in their areas of unique expertise . . . in their areas of knowledge, and contacts, and relationships, how they can impart that towards addressing the needs of the disadvantaged community, or addressing some kind of social problems. So I think our challenge as individuals is to find ways where we can use our most precious talents and our most unique skills to actually add value to society.

Recorded on: 6/11/07

Transcript: And I mean I think the general principles of philanthropy are that giving the money is not what’s important. It’s actually what the money enables you to do, and the ideas that the money stimulates developed. So what we have to do is we have to invest these resources in solutions to these very difficult social problems that are . . . first of all, that are implementable and scalable. So you know, we don’t want to create little projects that are wildly successful but they cost $100,000 per person benefitted. We’ve got to find ways of doing things that are scalable. We’ve gotta find ways of doing things that can be implemented. And I also believe that the best philanthropy that could be invested is philanthropy that starts to work out and prove some of these models of value that I was talking about. So again, with enough resources, you can solve almost anybody’s problem. You can give them all the food they need. You can give them housing. You can give them, you know . . . You can even pay for their healthcare. You can provide free medicine. You can . . . But that’s not sustainable. What you’ve gotta do is you’ve gotta find ways of equipping people with the skills, and the talents, and the attitudes, and the orientations, and the access to create their own solutions to their own problems. And that sometimes . . . That means some different kind of investments. So I worry about philanthropists who are too caring and too focused on really wanting to help people and demonstrate that they’ve . . . you know, that they’ve fed this many children, or they’ve provided this many mosquito nets. And I think . . . The Gates Foundation, I think, is starting to come into its own in terms of understanding that its greatest contribution is about ideas. It’s not the money; it’s the ideas. It’s finding and validating some sustainable models that they can . . . they can scale, but others can join. So I don’t know if that answers exactly the question of how you give this kind of vast resource, but it’s certainly the answer that I would give. I would also say that there’s a tremendous tendency in philanthropy – for example, in healthcare – to give the money for the science. You know to fund that researcher who’s gonna come up with that cure for cancer. But I think equally we have to understand that some of the most important problems of human society are not so much about the scientific, or the technical, or the tools, but they’re about the application. And so I guess I’d like to see more. I would put more – if I had it – resources into those areas.

Recorded on: 6/11/07

Transcript: Well I could probably say the most about healthcare because that’s an area where, again, I devoted approximately the last five or six years really intensively to kind of try and understand the puzzle of healthcare. And in healthcare I think we have every opportunity to truly transform the value equation in healthcare if we actually are able to go back and step back from the incremental changes to what we have today, and ask ourselves what would it take for us to create a dramatically higher value system. So again I’ve written a lot about this lately and talk about it incessantly now. But you know, things like just how you organize care; things like how you measure success. These things sound very, very simple, but our best guess is that we can get double the value from the amount of money we’re spending today. Or we can get pretty much the same value for half the money we’re spending. That’s the order of magnitude and transformation, and I’m very optimistic about healthcare because I now see enough grassroots, bottom up effort, and enough belief in the basic framework of that value as how we need to think. And the patient perspective is what we should care about. I can see a line in sight to a healthcare system that we’ll be proud of, and it will lead the world, and it will be affordable.

Recorded on: 6/11/07

Transcript: And we’ve prospered mightily. I mean the U.S. accounted for one-third of all economic growth in the world in the last 20 years. I mean . . . So we have been sort of the driver of the success of all these other countries. We’ve obviously had . . . On average, our standard of living has gone up. But what’s . . . The concern I have for the U.S. is that . . . it is that we are . . . that we’re polarizing into sort of “haves” and “have nots” that can cope with this new economy that we’re in. This issue of inequality I think is a corrosive issue. And unless someone approaches it in the right way, it can just get you on a downward spiral into society. This is the reason more than a decade ago that I founded the ICIC – the Initiative for Competitive Inner Cities – because I was desperately concerned that we had to create a way to get our citizens to prosper in this market system, not start with the presumption that they couldn’t succeed and needed subsidies, and set asides, and preferences and so forth. And I think intellectually, I think we’ve carried that debate; but I think as a society, we’re very much caught up in this question of really how to help all of our citizens prosper in a way that really deals with the fundamentals. I think our human resource issues in the U.S. are probably the most frightening issues – the fact that so many of our citizens are not really equipped to prosper in a knowledge-based economy. I mean if we were Hungary, it would be fine because the bar would be low. But to support the U.S. standard of living, you have to have enormous . . . you have to have enormous skill, you have to have enormous ability, and you have to have . . . and we’re not generating enough of those folks because we failed. We failed at reforming many of our institutions, and I think we failed on both sides of the aisle. You know, Democrats and Republicans have both failed. So I think many of the same general issues apply to the U.S. The U.S. has been relatively prospering in the new environment; but as we look forward there are some real challenges. I’ve recently led a 20-year review of U.S. competitiveness as an organization called the Council on Competitiveness that was founded some years ago as a reflection of the first real concerns about U.S. economy which first occurred in the ‘80s. And it’s been very interesting to look back and think about how we’re progressing as an economy. And I think the general answer is, for us, pretty darn well. But there’s some underpinnings that one starts to worry about at this point in our history.

I’m very optimistic about the U.S. You know there are some things that we have that are so unique in this country. And thank God that we have them. And thank God that some smart people put in place a system that preserves it. So what are those things? We’re very decentralized. You know you go to other parts of the world and people are always looking to somebody else to solve their problems. Here in the U.S., if Boston is having trouble, then people in Boston feel responsible. And so we have a commission, or a council, or an effort or whatever to do something about it. If a community is doing badly, we have a sense of philanthropy in this country that people will give their time, and their energy, and their money. Whereas in other countries they’ve been taught to depend on government . . . on outside forces. We have the sense that we can change things in this country rather than be this fatalistic, “Oh my gosh, we’re doomed to this future forever.” We have this basic, competitive spirit in this country. We really do believe in competition as being a good thing. You’d be surprised how rare that is in other parts of the world. So we have some wonderful things which make me optimistic, but we have some very difficult problems that start with education and the basic education system that are the real scary things. Because all of this . . . these wonderful values and these wonderful institutions that we have won’t work unless the raw material is capable.

Recorded on: 6/11/07

Transcript: I mean I’m struck by the difference between the European Union and the U.S.’ efforts at economic development. So the European Union, by having a systematic process, was able to assimilate dozens of countries that were communist societies, and in the course of a relatively small number of years, really work with them to create a market system and a good society in Poland, in Latvia, in Lithuania, in you know, you name it. And yet the U.S., this wonderful economic power, was not . . . has not really been able to do anything remotely as effective with Latin America, or Africa, or some of the continents that we’ve had an interest in. And so I think we’ve brought some of this on ourselves; and I think . . . I can’t quite understand why the U.S. has had such a limited and narrow view of its role in assisting other nations and enhancing their societies, but I think we’re paying the price for that. The U.S. has actually been the extraordinary driver of many of these changes in the global economic system, certainly.

Recorded on: 6/11/07

Transcript: Well you know, I think the U.S. is caught up in these issues big time. I think that the kind of tragic thing about the U.S. situation right now is I think for a country where I think the vast majority of Americans have such good motives – and you know, try so hard around the basics of freedom and democracy, and helping other people, and being generous, and being philanthropic and all these things – that somehow the country gets demonized and attacked. And frankly I find it at the very grassroots level as I travel around the world, which I do a lot. I think there’s a tremendous level of respect for the U.S. But for whatever reason if you read the newspaper, you would think we’re the worst country in the world. And I don’t think that any of the folks that call us names have even glanced at themselves at the mirror, because I don’t know how you would come to that conclusion. So that’s troubling, and I think that’s partly our own fault; and I think it’s because of the way we’ve engaged the world lately. And I think we can do so much more.

Recorded on: 6/11/07

Transcript: I think the thing that scares me the most – and this is well outside my area of expertise – is this enormous conflict across societies and religions which seems to be sort of a battle for an ideology, or a set of values, or a way of living. And that’s very, very scary because I’m an inherently rational person. I mean I believe that we ought to be deciding to do things rationally. And you know there’s plenty of room for societies to prosper, and individuals to prosper if we make good choices. And yet we seem to be caught in an era where people believe so deeply in certain values or ideologies – or they just want to win; or they just want to be respected; or they just want to exert power – that we’re kind of careening in various different directions that are very unsettling. So I think that’s gotta be the big one. I mean there’s lots . . . There’s so many human needs that are complicated and difficult to achieve, like health, in various parts of the world where there’s only so many resources, and we have so many afflictions, so many problems, so many people suffering. So I guess I would say . . . I would say this international . . . this cross-group . . . I mean terrorism is just one piece of this broader issue of kind of the clash of societies, and values, and ideologies which we don’t have a good way of sorting through. I would say I’m just because it’s at the top of my mind, I’ve just been really, amazingly struck with how fundamental the issue of health is, and how to provide health to citizens, which is, I think, a very basic right. And then the just massive poverty, which I think may be the loop around that first issue. It may be that if there’s a lack of a sense of economic and personal opportunity in societies, then that leads us to these destructive kinds of activity where people are striving to give meaning to their lives because there’s no other way to get meaning. So there’s a loop here, but those are the things that, you know, really concern me as I look out.

Recorded on: 6/11/07

Transcript: See the economic system of the world is not a zero sum game. Everybody can get richer. Everybody can get richer if everybody is more productive. There’s an unlimited amount of human needs to be met. It’s like there’s thousands and millions and billions of needs for housing, healthcare, better living standards, more this, more that. It’s not like there’s some fixed pool of demand, and there’s a question of who can compete to serve that demand. There’s this giant pool of needs, and if we can get more productive, everybody can get wealthier in serving those needs. And we’ve got this capacity to . . . I mean it used to take 50 years for an economy to learn, and develop technology and sophistication, and therefore be able to venture out into the international arena. Now we have massive flows of capital, and knowledge, and management, and technology. And you know my friend Jeff Sachs kind of stole a title for . . . I gave a lecture at the Kennedy School about six or seven years ago which I think . . . I think the lecture was titled “The End of Poverty”. I think he used that title. And I think we have in our reach the capacity to eliminate these tremendous disparities in different parts of the world if we can harness these forces. So I think these changes are epic changes.

Recorded on: 6/11/07

Transcript: Well in terms of, you know, sort of goals, I guess I’m again drawn to the notion that the . . . that there’s certain principles of justice, or fairness, or societies where people can treat each other well, and be constructive, and be part of a community. And the highest calling that anybody can have is actually to do something that improves the lives of the community and of others. And so again, I’m sort of repeating a theme that I’ve raised already; but it seems to me that what we’re trying to do ultimately is make people have better lives to give them more opportunities to do whatever they want to do to meet the needs that they have for housing, and healthcare and opportunity. How do we get the rules right? And how do we get the ways of thinking right to enable that better quality of life and standard of living? I guess that’s the . . . that’s what . . . that’s how I kind of measure in some sense the underlying values. Now there’s some people that would say that . . . say to kind of make a kind of a crisper formulation of that, they would say that the way to measure your success or to measure society’s success is what happens to the least fortunate – the people that have the least money, or the least power, or the least of anything. And can you create a society that works for the least fortunate, not others? And again I subscribe to that as well. I’ve been very, very interested in the question of really creating opportunity. And I’ve been struck with how that often happens at a very grassroots level. And some of the stuff that I’m working on and thinking about now is really . . . it’s complimentary to all the other work, but it’s really some of the most exciting, and memorable, and powerful examples one sees in economic development are not grand government policies; but stuff that’s at the very grassroots level where some people in a community can find a way to work together to create something of value against all odds. And I think we need to think and understand more about how communities can work together constructively along these lines. The thing I’m panicked about in terms of the times we live in now are sort of the inability of people in different groups and segments of society to work constructively together on any legitimate social aim. Instead everybody seems to be out for their own values, or their own ideology, or their rewards -- economic rewards – or their job security or whatever. We have this kind of adversarial, you know, view of how society works now where “it’s us or it’s them”. And one of the central themes in my work is that there are these gigantic win-win opportunities where you can benefit the environment, but you can benefit the company. You know you can make the patient be better off, but also the health plan will benefit. There’s these win-win opportunities; but for some reason now we’re in a zero sum world where everybody’s kind of fighting with a perspective that, “My win is your loss.” And again that troubles me a lot.

Recorded on: 6/11/07

Transcript: I’ve developed the worldview that actually most wealth, you know, and good is really created by organizations who are sort of at the micro level. That is it’s entities that can create products and services and add value through doing that profitably. But I’ve come to understand that in a sense, the market and the organizational entity that competes in that market is the ultimate source of really good, and wealth, and prosperity, and a good standard of living. One of the things that I like to tell my government friends when we’re doing economic development discussions is government doesn’t create wealth. Government is pretty good at reallocating it, or spending it; but ultimately wealth can only be created by firms that actually create valuable products and services, or other entities that create valuable products and services. And so I’ve come to have a real reverence for, if you will, the economy and economic development as really the most basic of the success factors. If you can get that working, then there’s resources to do a lot of other things to address social needs and to improve the quality of lives of people. But unless you can get that economic piece, that value creation piece working, then the other stuff becomes sort of a holding action and unsustainable. So I’ve come to have a passion about the importance of business. You know I used to think that business was just, you know, “Gosh everybody should think business is important.” But you know there’s a lot of people in the world who don’t think business is good, you know? There are a lot of people who attack multinationals, or think that firms are the root of all evil. And I’ve come to believe very passionately that without successful businesses that compete appropriately, there can be no good societies. And I tell my corporate friends, “Look. We can’t be defensive in the business community.” Business has the power, and the ability, and the skills to actually do enormous amounts of social good; but we’ve got to understand how to think about that. And I increasingly have the view that the social and the economic are inextricably intertwined. That is we can’t pull them apart. And every time we try we make mistakes. Every time companies ignore the social and just think about the economic, they have trouble. Every time the folks in government and NGOs think only about the social and ignore the economic, and the ability of companies to create productive goods and services, the more they fail.

Recorded on: 6/11/07

Transcript: Well I was asked some time ago to talk to a group of graduate students about, you know, research. And I did reflect a little bit on this, and I’m not sure I can put it into words. But I think first of all to do really, really creative work, you have to have, I think, a very strong grounding in some underlying, theoretical disciplines that are relevant to the problem – highly relevant. So in my case it was economics. I had a very strong training across the river – _______ Business School – in economics. And I sort of had that perspective, that point of view, that rigor. But that’s not enough. Then you’ve gotta find a way to sort of immerse yourself somehow in the phenomena and get enough data, and enough data points, and enough conflicting examples and stories that . . . And then there’s a collision between the two. And then what you find out is that the economic theory and the frameworks that you start out with are, you know, failed you know? And then there’s some process of seeing a new way of looking at the problem. So for example if you look at any industry . . . pick an industry. Autos, tires, whatever it is. There are probably 20,000 things about an industry that are relevant. You can make lists, and lists, and lists. The product is green. The product is blue. You know, it’s heavy. You know, the cost of shipping is X – thousands of things that are relevant. Every industry is different, so that becomes an intractable problem of, “How do I describe an industry? What’s the way of thinking about it that’s relevant?” And so you have some economic theory principles, and economic theory tells you that profitability is in some sense the most profound metric that you want to look at. Because when you create a profit, you also create social value because somebody’s willing to pay more than the cost of doing something. So one of the things you do to help you think through this morass of looking at industries is you sort of have to have an objective function. And that’s profit. But then you’ve gotta ask yourself, “How do I look at this to inform choices and really understand a phenomenon? How do I sift through the 20,000 things that are different and come up with the five forces?” Now how that actually happens, I don’t know. It just happens. It comes from being an engineer. It comes from looking for order. It comes from forcing a way of trying to put a wrap around something that encompasses all the cases that you can encounter. I don’t know exactly how that happens at the very micro level; but somehow it’s the kind of reverence with one, you have a strong theoretical framework and a strong discipline; but then it’s gonna . . . just diving into the phenomenon. And when I was saying earlier that I spent six or seven years in the library, six or seven years was not on the theory. Six or seven years was on getting enough data points, and understanding enough industries and enough companies that I could start confidently saying that this way of looking at it really did encompass all the cases that we’d actually do. So I don’t know if that’s an answer, but it’s the best I can come up with.

Recorded on: 6/11/07

Question: What do you do?

Transcript: Well I would say that in general terms, I’m in the business of really creating intellectual capital or creating ideas for looking at a different way at very large, messy, complicated problems all of which have something to do with competition, and economic value, and really delivering value in terms of organizations working. So it’s . . . I started out with a fairly focused, although very complicated question, which is, you know, what makes some industries prosper and not others? And then later, what makes some companies prosper and not others? But ultimately that core set of ideas, and frameworks, and ways of thinking gave rise to work in some very powerfully connected areas like economic development, and most recently in healthcare delivery. Again healthcare delivery is a large, complex, multidimensional problem. It involves organizations delivering value who are competing in some way against other entities. And so that classic problems are the ones that I’ve evolved my work into looking at. And although I have a hopelessly broad bandwidth in the sense of I work in a lot of different fields – I work in the environment. I work in social responsibility, philanthropy – it all emanates from that common set of perspectives and ways of looking at organizations doing something to deliver value.

Transcript: Well you know, I suspect just traveling around the world and talking to people and meeting people that probably, at this moment in history, I’d probably be best known for the notion of the five forces; because it’s such a visible and sort of clear framework that when people encounter it, all of a sudden it kind of totally changes the way they look at industries and markets. And a lot of students get exposed to it during their training, and therefore it sticks with them. I think probably the close second would be the value chain – the notion of how we think about how an entity actually creates value and think about the cost of creating that value in a systematic way. I mean again, my roots are in economics, and that’s where my doctorate is. And in economics, there’s a very simple conception of _______, which is . . . there’s a production function. There’s labor capital that’s converted into output. And that’s fine for many economic applications. But in order to really understand how to think about strategy, and competition and value, you need to go beyond that. So I think probably then would come the diamond theory of looking at locations and clusters, which is a close present. So there’s been a succession of these frameworks; and you know, I’m not done. I keep pounding away at these kind of problems, because what I find is that today as we think about how ideas develop, certainly in the economic and managerial domain, there’s a tendency to reduce, to simply, to partition, to specialize, to look at the piece if you will, not the whole. And of course ________ Christiansen, my beloved mentor, this was his sermon almost every day in class. It’s the whole. The parts are important, but it’s the whole. There’s something unique about the whole, and how you think about the whole, and how you get the parts to fit together. And that’s the essence of what creates true success in most situations. And so it’s that struggle to understand the whole in these interrelated domains that really motivates me.

Question: What are you working on now?

Transcript: Well you know, this is a horrendous answer for a strategy professor, but I’m working on everything. And I would say that I continue to try to advance all of my major bodies of work. But if you wanted to identify what would be the . . . really the dominant in intellectual agenda right now, it would be the continuing pursuit of this kind of body of work on healthcare delivery. And most recently, through some relationships with folks at the medical school and elsewhere, I really got interested in problems of global health delivery in developing country settings, which again initially looked like a totally different problem than healthcare in the U.S. But the more deeply I think . . . the more you look at that first principles level, you see that the problems are very, very similar. So the hope is that we can create a partnership which allows us to better harness the mass amounts of resources that are now going into fighting diseases like AIDS, and malaria, and ________ and TB by really revolutionizing our thinking about how to deliver care. See the thinking about healthcare in general, and global health in particular has been dominated by the science perspective. You know, how can we come up with a better malaria pill, or a way of, you know, using drugs to treat TB? And what we’ve come to understand is that the gaining force is actually not the science. It’s actually the delivery. And delivery is complicated. You have to see it as a system. You can’t just look at the individual parts of how you do one therapy here or one therapy there. You have to see the overall delivery system. And research in global health has not really been able to take that perspective, just given the scientific roots of most of research. I mean one of the very interesting issues in . . . and this may be a whole new subject we could talk about for hours . . . is the nature of intellectual endeavor. And even in business, and even in economics, we keep trying to make every problem into a physics problem where you’re down at the micro, micro, micro level and there’s little particles behaving on the basis of a few forces that we can model mathematically and then simulate. And so what we have in most important things in the world, we have these complicated human systems where there’s lots of complexity and multidimensionality and interdependence. And we simply keep failing whenever we don’t capture that in our ways of thinking in our frameworks. So that’s kind of what I try to do with varying success and constantly learning.

Question: Whose work are you watching most closely?

Transcript: Oh gosh! There’s so many interesting people doing interesting work. And I’m very eclectic in the sense that I think all kinds of work can actually contribute to our knowledge of these phenomena. I mean you know in the area of health, I think actually the practitioners are ahead of the theorists. So you know people like Paul Farmer and Partners of Health I think are the ones that are on the frontier of new delivery models really. You don’t see it in the academic writing. You know I’m very taken with a lot of what’s happening here in and around the Cambridge community. I mean the broad institute and the ability to kind of marry science and practice in the human genome project. I get very excited about that. In the economics’ sphere, I think the growing awareness that people are not robots, and there are behavioral phenomena that guide how people make choices in the economies. So the scholars that work on behavioral finance and kind of simulation of how actors really make choices, of which there are a number here at Cambridge and elsewhere are good. So those are the kind of things that attract me. We have people that are sort of bringing kind of a fresh new perspective to a problem that was sort of received and well understood.

Question: What is your contribution?

Transcript: Well you know, I would say that I believe that the sort of frameworks, and ideas, and ways of looking at these series of problems. But the most important contribution is that those ways of thinking have really substantially affected and transformed thinking in those respective fields. And that’s ultimately what I care about. I, like most of us here at HBS, am deeply rigid in practice. What I really care about is not so much the publication or the idea in its own right, but actually the ability of a practitioner to do better, to deliver better value. The ability of a government official or another stakeholder to actually make better choices in terms of developing the economy of a particular region. It’s really changing the way people think and seeing that reflected in actual practice. And that’s what I feel like I’ve made my biggest contribution. And I feel like that contribution has been meaningful. And again, that cuts across a variety of different fields. But wherever that happens, that’s the contribution I think I’m the proudest of.

Transcript: I think as we look at questions like strategy, or economic development, or restructuring healthcare delivery, or revitalizing inner city economies through different sets of policies, I think you know . . . and this may be . . . this is always a dangerous thing to say. But I think that we are much closer now to understanding what it is that works. So now the real critical questions we often face are given . . . Even if we know what works, how do we actually mobilize a community, or a set of actors or policy makers to actually do that thing? So again we see this in economic development all the time. You know I can take you to 10 countries and we could, you know . . . I could literally . . . in 15 minutes, we could identify six or seven critical policy priorities that will make an immense difference in the well being of the citizens of that country. And yet the stuff doesn’t get done. It doesn’t get done for a variety of reasons. Partly it doesn’t get done because people don’t have the right ideas. Bad ideas are a huge part of the problem in this world. But it also doesn’t get done because we don’t understand exactly yet how change processes work, how to mobilize those change processes. So it’s really the . . . The thing that keeps me up at night is, you know, how can we get participants in these complex systems where there’s always multiple participants, and they have to sort of agree and work together to come up with a good outcome. How do we get them working together? It’s the kind of work that Chris Argyris and others who work on sort of change processes, and constructive reasoning, and how people can actually learn, and adapt and change . . . those are the issues that I think are really the compelling issues now in more and more aspects of society. It’s not the what. It’s how do we get there? Well I mean I think there has been a big divide between those who think about and those who act. I think certainly my work and whatever success I’ve had is partly because I’ve been able to break that divide a little bit, and being very, very informed about the phenomena at great levels of detail. Therefore the theory and frameworks that I’ve developed capture complexity rather than abstract away the complexity. I wish more academics would do that . . . would sort of live that bridging themselves rather than see their role as solely the thinking part. And I don’t know how to create the right incentives and values in the fields to do that, because right now the pressures are a little bit the opposite. The pressures are the specialized to focus on roughly publications in the academy. And you get very little credit for going into the field and engaging practitioners, and understanding the phenomena firsthand, and then therefore getting better insights into how to apply the ideas. That’s fairly rare and very hard to sustain so far. Now what you find is that the people who can actually do that and will do that can often have huge impact. But perversely, I think that sort of the median incentives that many scholars feel are really not to make those investments. So it’s a real challenge. This fragmentation of knowledge and ideas is, again, to me, one of our compelling issues not just in academia, but also in society as a whole.

Question: Is the fragmentation of ideas and knowledge a market failure?

Transcript: That’s a market failure, and how we think about solving that market failure . . . Now I sense a glimmer of change in some of the very young people that I encounter now who are more problem-focused than literature focused or field-focused. And if you really . . . if your real passion is solving a societal problem, or a puzzle, and you can stay grounded in that, that helps you to kind of work across boundaries. And I think if we have a new generation of young people who really are passionate about the problems that they see in the world and can really have that be their highest calling, I think that would be a very optimistic step forward.

Recorded on: 6/11/07

Trasncript: I think sports was a really defining part of my upbringing. Certainly until I went away to Princeton and even after that, sports was always my ticket to engaging and making friends, and getting established in all these new communities. I always had that. A couple of days out on the baseball field and I would make friends and I would be accepted. So I think, you know, you also develop this set . . . this discipline and this sense that you’re competing, and that you have to prepare, and that you have to practice, and train, and rehearse and so forth. And I think that mindset kind of carried over into my work. Of course my work isn’t about sports, although it’s fundamentally about competition. And in fact, one of the books that I’ve got on my long term list of writings is a book about why we see certain nations and regions excelling in particular sports. And so the international competitiveness of sports is, I think, a fascinating parallel to many of the same issues that I study in my work on economic development.

Recorded on: 6/11/07