“Our game is more like art and sports than accounting, in that high percentages of failure are quite OK as long as enough larger processes succeed. Ty Cobb’s lifetime batting average was “only” .368, which means that he failed almost 2/3s of the time. But the critical question is: what happened in the 1/3 in which he was succeeding? If the answer is “great things” then this is all the justification that should be needed. Unless I’m badly mistaken, in most processes today—and sadly in most important areas of technology research—the administrators seem to prefer to be completely in control of mediocre processes to being “out of control” with superproductive processes. They are trying to “avoid failure” rather than trying to “capture the heavens”.

What if you have something cosmic you really want to accomplish and aren’t smart and knowledgable enough, and don’t have enough people to do it?”