My dad came to Canada as a high school student in 1974 and went on to obtain an engineering degree and an MBA from the University of Toronto. In 1991, he started working in sales at a company in Eastern Ontario that manufactures wires and electrical cables. Six years later, he acquired the company through a management buyout with a partner and he has been managing operations there ever since.

When my dad took over the company in 1997, 60% of the business was dedicated to manufacturing flexible power cordage for use in appliance cordsets and extension cords. This was around the time that a lot of manufacturing was moving to China, particularly appliance manufacturing and the extension cord businesses, because these processes are labour intensive and it was (and still is) cheaper to perform the manufacturing overseas. Many electrical cable manufacturing companies supplying these sectors in Canada and the US did not survive this economic shift.

In those difficult times, my dad managed to sustain the company by doing one very important thing: becoming flexible and adaptable to different customer needs. Specifically, he shifted the focus of the business to developing cables for use in residential and commercial construction and also other industrial applications. These were end use markets that could not be moved overseas and suppliers, such as my dad’s company, could focus on becoming more efficient so as to ensure that their own products could still be produced cost effectively on home soil.

Survival of the adaptable

My dad’s experience of adapting to survive a volatile economy resonates with me strongly now that I am a postdoc. This is because the demands of “publish or perish” expose postdocs to many of the same stresses as leaders in business, and our survival similarly depends on us responding effectively when things don’t go according to plan. How do we as scientists manage uncertainty in order to circumvent failure? Answering this question for myself began with understanding how one of my dad’s favourite business mantras applies to academic life:

No plan survives contact with the enemy

As a postdoc, your job is to come in with a plan of what you want to do or adopt a problem that your supervisor is interested in. You might have a set of goals that you want to accomplish and have written down a timeline and list of tasks that you need to perform in order to meet those milestones. Perhaps you are already envisioning the completed manuscript in your head. It is also very possible that this project that you have built up and idolized will fail completely or lead nowhere.

Assuming that your project will succeed is as much of a fantasy as trying to figure out how much profit a company will make in two years. It is especially unsafe to bet everything in one direction because it is a low probability event that things will go according to plan. What you can do, and what I have observed my dad do in business, is always be prepared for the unexpected and be ready to respond to change in order to mitigate risk. In both business and academia, this might be achieved by diversifying your project portfolio (while still maintaining your core projects), not mindlessly focusing on a singular direction, grabbing onto new opportunities and keeping an open mind.

Constructing a research plan around a perceived unstable future is easier said than done. Key decisions about how to spend limited resources and what equipment to buy become more challenging because you are now factoring in risk/reward, the fact that competitors are getting better and the reality that demands are constantly shifting. However, maintaining this “paranoid” mentality (as Andrew Grove, CEO of Intel would call it), is ultimately beneficial because you are more likely to survive a strategic inflection point (Figure 1). The strategic inflection point is the point at which your usual way of doing things is about to stop working.

Figure 1. A strategic inflection point model for success in academia. Adapted from Andrew Grove’s book “Only the Paranoid Survive”.

Finding my entrepreneur instincts

Confronting an inflection point during my postdoc career was a potentially destabilizing event. However – thanks to the lessons from my entrepreneur dad – I was ready to re-invent myself when my research plan didn’t proceed as expected. I realized that continuing to progress in my career depended on me adopting a more flexible research strategy: one where I was not relying on a single research avenue to generate publications. I achieved this flexibility by dispensing my rigid long-term plan and diversifying my research portfolio to include new ideas and collaborations. There are risks and expenses associated with diversification, so I chose to branch out into related areas, where I knew I could leverage my strengths to produce results within a reasonable timeframe and at minimal added cost.

I have since acquired several new projects, each with their own risks and rewards, and this places me in an offensive position against unexpected events that might threaten my research career. Yet, I still subscribe to Grove’s advice of remaining paranoid by staying alert for new opportunities and studying my competitors. The moral here is that scientists can create advantages for themselves by embracing entrepreneur instincts. As in my dad’s story as well as my own, simply recognizing a need for change and then implementing it effectively can mean the difference between success and failure.