Gary Bloom [08.13.06 03:27 PM]

An anecdote Alan Kay tells about working at Xerox. From The Early History Of Smalltalk:

Along with Ben Laws' font editor, we could give quite a smashing demo of what we intended to build for real over the next few years. I remember giving one of these to a Xerox executive, including doing a protrait of him in the new painting system, and wound it up with a flourish declaring: "And what's really great about this is that it only has a 20% chance of success. We're taking risk just like you asked us to!" He looked me straigt in the eye and said, "Boy, that's great, but just make sure it works." This was a typical exeuctive notion about risk. He wanted us to be in the "20%" one hundred percent of the time.

  Jason Yip [08.14.06 04:15 AM]

This is a typical statement. And the best response is to ground what you're doing with something that is perceived to be safe and make sure what you're doing can fail fast and cheap.

  Grant Jacobs [08.14.06 04:45 AM]

I'm an independent bioinformatics scientist, working for whoever needs my services. When I'm doing something risky, I try if I can to arrange it so the project into stages, with an early a stage as possible revealing the likelihood of failure, so that the client can bail out sooner rather than later if they choose to. Perhaps this might be a strategy that would suit some of these grant agencies...?

  G.J. [08.14.06 05:26 AM]

Excuse my poor self-editing in the second sentence; I hope the intended meaning is still clear.

  Mark Szpakowski [08.15.06 07:53 AM]

DARPA's approach (with Licklider in charge I believe) in the 1960's and early 1970's to projects at MIT was to review what you had done in the previous year, and, if they liked that, fund you to do more (but not specified in advance) for another year.