Outtakes with Russ Wilcox
The care and feeding of scientists: “The most important thing is to care about their passions. As a manager, it’s important to be curious. For instance, your heart must become incredibly excited about a new polymer synthesis technique. Creative people need an audience that cares about and loves what they do.”
Not quite a black sheep: “My dad, brother, aunt, uncle, and cousin all went to MIT. I was a math major at Harvard, but it’s not quite the same.”
Creative license: “Start-ups let you create something from nothing. It’s a storytelling device for what your life is about.”
On patents: “We have 150 issued patents in the United States. You definitely need them, but you can’t rely on them alone. As a small company, we can’t pursue millions of dollars in patent lawsuits. At the end of the day, you have to stay ahead with your technology and compete on technical and supply-chain capability as well as customer service.”
What’s on his Kindle: Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell; the Boston Globe; the Wall Street Journal.
Why we’re in trouble: “With BlackBerries and instant messaging (IM), we live in a twitch society. People are losing their ability to concentrate. Having a long train of thought — being able to carry many complexities in your brain at the same time — is a certain skill that people who grow up reading literature develop. People who read IMs don’t.”
Why e-readers are a good thing for civilization: “E-books bring reading back to a familiar playing field for young people — digital content. We hope that a by-product of the e-reader is that young people will do more long-form reading and raise the level of debate on some of the world’s more complicated problems.”
