Is it just me, or does the armchair quarterbacking of our tech leaders towards other industries underscore the absurdity of their allegiance to innovation? Just look to the way they’ve discussed the recent automotive crisis. With all of the U.S. auto manufacturers facing serious shortages of cash, insanely high labor costs, highly immobile capital investments, poor CEO leadership, rising gas prices, and a severe recession, what’s the magic solution — innovate! Apparently, Detroit’s problems aren’t due to real issues, happening in the real world. Nope — they just didn’t think big enough, or dream hard enough.

I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I do it anyway

It’s always great to start out an argument by just wishing that realities could be different. Not offering a hint of a solution, really, but just claiming something isn’t ‘good enough.’ Demanding better is a rallying cry of the innovator:

It takes something like 5 years to get a new car designed and built in most large auto companies. That’s too long. I realize that designing and building a new car platform is not like hacking up a new web app. But five years? C’mon. We have to do better than that [sic]
Fred Wilson http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2008/11/bustup-not-bail.html

Why is a five year figure unacceptable? If it’s a shared, industry reality, why is that to be criticized? If a client asks me to bid on a site development project, I quote the work at 100 hours, and he comes back and demands it in 35 — I politely tell him to find another firm. Sometimes realities are just real, and can’t be moved (or at least, not in a dramatic fashion). Forgive me for thinking inside the box.

Happycake ovens for all

I don’t mean to single out Wilson — he’s far from being alone in his opinions and rhetoric (and in the end, it is just a blog post). My beef is with the ‘thought leaders’ and moneymen in our industry treating the idea of ‘innovation’ like it’s some magical happy-creme you just rub on things to achieve success. When we, as an industry, have the illusion that a pile of napkin sketches, a few million dollars worth of someone else’s money, and a cheerful outlook are a substitute for a real business plan, that’s our own problem. It’s when we extrapolate that glee as a cure for the complex problems of established industries that we start looking more than just a little foolish.

Tesla, fail

It’s best to look at an example. Tesla motors, the “upstart”, “green” automaker just a few years ago, was going to teach Detroit a lesson by innovating like madmen. Everything was thrown out the window, and all the mistakes and corporate clumsiness of the Big 3 would be ignored. I remember the flurry of media coverage, and the gleeful hope (which I admired) that a bunch of nerds with passion could do just about anything. Dan Lyon’s recent piece in Newsweek shows how things have been less than rosy:

…five years after its founding, Tesla has shipped about 70 electric roadsters, and the car does in fact turn out to be a classic Silicon Valley product—it’s late and over budget, has gone through loads of redesigns, still has bugs and, at $109,000, costs more than originally planned. Tesla’s first 40 roadsters went out of the factory with a drivetrain that needs to be replaced. (Tesla will do the rip-and-replace for free.) Its second car, a sedan, has been delayed until 2011. Tesla, based in San Carlos, Calif., has raised $150 million and burned through almost all of it, plus millions more put down by customers in the form of deposits (the company won’t give an exact figure). Now, hit by the downturn, Tesla has laid off 20 percent of its staff, closed its Detroit office and borrowed money to stay afloat.
Dan Lyons http://www.newsweek.com/id/169161

Even better, the ousted and current CEO’s have been battling it out publicly, trash-talking each other at every chance (how classy!). Hearing them both speak, it’s pretty clear that there have been serious faults in leadership and strategy — the same mistakes that Tesla, as a hip little upstart, promised never to commit.

It’s scary then, if we start clamoring for failing industries to rub that same hoo-ha happy-creme all over their businesses. Witness Wilson again, in the same article, advocating turning the big three loose, as lean and mean start ups run by visionaries like him (not nerds who look at numbers):

“…One PE firm should buy Volt. Another should buy Buick… This is the best way out of this mess. We have to get the biggest businesses in this country smaller and nimbler, we have to get smart money behind them, builders not spreadsheet pushers, and we must focus on innovation not lobbying.

Yes, if we just ‘trust innovation’ more and more (much like we all trusted the market) things will come up roses — just like they have for Tesla. But you know, these are just the thoughts of a guy who wrote all this “on the eliptical trainer at the gym so no links and prob some typos. [sic]”

The world is not a web-app

The reason I bring all of this up is that I think that believing too much in our own, still incredibly fetal industry is dangerous. Running a Twitter-clone start-up with 5 part-time employees in a loft in NYC is a far different problem set than re-tooling a three decade-old auto fab plant in mid-Michigan, while meeting labor and government regulations.

Treating the excitement we have for web-apps and internet culture as a template for how everyone else should run their business is foolish to the point of total absurdity. Sure, the world needs forward thinkers and innovators, but reality demands that we address complex issues (i.e. solving the auto crisis) with a greater sense of humility, patience, respect and a desire to look for functional, long-term solutions.

Anyone in the business of doing anything acknowledges there are limits on what’s possible. The sooner we stop pretending we can all make ponies by dreaming fluffy dreams, the sooner real innovation — working well given constraints — can happen.