Monday, October 27, 2008

The Privilege of Mentorship

“No man ever stood so tall as one who stooped to help a child” so the saying goes. This saying sounds simultaneously profoundly touching and somewhat condescending to me. I think of the act of helping the next generation somewhat differently. I think of it as a privilege granted to me by someone who trusts me enough to genuinely expect me to put them above my own life’s agenda.

Imagine a society where the ONLY way to achieve anything of significance in one’s life was to help others to achieve it… where one NATURALLY ascribed all of a person’s achievements to their TEACHER rather than directly to the person themselves. The consequences of having such a societal norm would transform society – no less. In order to succeed in such a society one would have to pick the right people to mentor and then devote oneself to making them better - MUCH BETTER - than oneself. This would be the only way to succeed since nothing we could do ourselves would ever result in acknowledgement to the doer but rather only to the teacher. We would be forced to convey all of what we have learned – not just the essentials – to the next generation and insist that they be better than we ever were. We would have to be sincerely engaged in this or we would have no hope of having achieved anything. Think of the consequences of such a societal norm. The next generation would be sincerely interested in learning from the previous since they could trust that the older generation would genuinely WANT (even for the most self serving of needs) to transfer all of their experience and knowledge to them. It would ensure progress – true progress - of our society, and it would empower all of us with a common purpose – to learn as much as we could from the experiences of past generations so as to be BETTER than them. It would make both teacher and student PROUD when the student exceeded the teacher! It would make us also pick and choose the very best teachers and students so that the possibility of truly moving past ourselves could be realized for both parties.

By now you are probably thinking “This can never REALLY happen! Right?” but history has already proved you wrong. This is the old eastern tradition of “GURU” and “CHELA”. In old eastern cultures a distinguished teacher simply walked the land teaching in villages and at other gatherings as he thought fit. They would naturally gather about a dozen or so younger people intent on learning as much as they could from the guru through experiencing life with the teacher. The guru for his part would carefully select these “chelas” so as to maximize the chances of producing, through them, a generation of gurus MUCH better than the present one since it was the ONLY way they had of truely achieving their lifes goals. Then the teacher would dedicate his life to transmitting as much of what he knew to these deciples as possible in the time left to him on earth. This is actually not such a foreign tradition even in the west. It is at the heart of Christianity itself. In other words not only is it POSSIBLE it is in fact part of the fabric of who we are today. But the tradition has been lost. Somewhere along the line society started to look no further than the performer rather than looking at the teacher. The teacher began to see the student as his “competition” and therefore started to teach them a little less than what they knew so that they would always have the upper hand over their students. One upmanship was born. Who can blame them for this. It is what they had to do to survive. But their survival has put our society at risk today. We are doomed to repeat the mistakes of our teachers. We are slowly – generation by generation – diminishing as a collective. We are all complicit in this evolution and we all have it in our power to change it if we so desire. Mentorship is one of the avenues to do that. If we each start by deciding to GENUINELY help someone realize their dreams by contributing our own experiences to their success – exposing all of the embarrassing mistakes that we have made along the way - with nothing asked in return except the sheer joy of watching a promising younger person succeed better than we ever could hope to, then we will have done something of GREAT significance in the world. We will have changed it forever. Mentorship is a privilege and those who perform well as mentors can be truly proud of their achievements and their legacy.

Monday, October 13, 2008

Inter-University Collaborations

According to Brian Uzzi, Benjamin F. Jones, and Stefan Wuchty of Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management as quoted in Chemical and Engineering News this week http://pubs.acs.org/cen/news/86/i41/8641notw11.html the amount of INTER university collaborations is on the rise in the US and also produces better quality research than INTRA university collaborations or single-author papers. It is apparently a very thorough and complete piece of work.

This is worth thinking about as two things happen around us 1: the financial crunch in North America is bound to put the squeeze on research dollars at universities eventually making it all the more important to utilize our research dollars in the best possible way. 2: Fields of research are interacting more and more and the BEST new discoveries now appear to come from those interfaces between previously quite disparate disciplines of science. Given that research dollars will be shrinking one can only assume that travel to meetings (especially meetings in OTHER disciplines) will be on the decline. So one can reasonably ask "How will intelligent, successful scientists in one discipline meet really successful scientists in another so that the most fruitful sorts of cross-discipline collaborations can develop?"

One answer is provided by services like that which ArrowCan Partners Inc provides. Last year we connected more that 100 scientists in Canada with others in seemingly orthogonal fields of science whom they would not otherwise have met. There is a real need for the scientist turned business entrepreneur who will seek out the best and connect them with others through personalized and trusted introductions. Knowing how important a trend this is helps me to continue this work even in the dead of winter in Canada when travel is not at its easiest.