As I was going to say before I got sidetracked by Hurricane Sandy…
Literally the day before Sandy hit, I was reading this Atlantic profile of Michael Bloomberg. One quote really stood out to me:
In medicine, or in science, you go down a path and it turns out to be a dead end, you really made a contribution, because we know we don’t have to go down that path again. In the press, they call it failure. And so people are unwilling to innovate, unwilling to take risks in government …
In the tech startup world, failure is almost a badge of honor. While everyone would prefer success, the default result of most things humans do is failure. Got a business idea? Me too. We all do. Most of them are no good, but most of them at least sound good at first. The only way to find out is to try it. It will probably fail, but we all learn so much from the attempt (especially now that companies are more willing to share their failures publicly on the web).
Bloomberg understands this. In the course of making his billions, he knows that he made an awful lot of wrong decisions. But he learned from them and integrated them into the he way he operates. More importantly, he integrated the idea of failure into the way he thinks about problems.
Most politicians don’t come from that place: take a risk, fail, learn, move on.. Instead they come from a world where failure is about right and wrong and usually seen through an ideological lens. So when Bloomberg does things like the soda ban, they skip the questions around “how can we fight obesity?” and instead turn it into a Constitutional crisis worthy of Patrick Henry.
So even though I’m a little skeptical of the soda ban, I’m glad he tried it. It may not work, it may have unintended consequences, but Bloomberg is the kind of guy who will say “okay, we tried that, it didn’t work, let’s try something else” and not care what they say about him on CNN or Fox News or whatever.
My representative is Jared Polis, a mega-successful entrepreneur who nonetheless has experienced many failures. (Okay, I admit the video on his site is a little hokey; I never said he was a comedian.)
My governor is John Hickenlooper, a successful brewpub entrepreneur who has a reputation for being more results-oriented than ideological.
I hope both of these gentlemen run for president someday. Politics needs more entrepreneurs.