Taking Risks

For an individual to succeed in an environment where management is not creative requires the individual to be very bold, very brave and a little bit obnoxious.  I tell in my book David and Goliath the long story of a cancer researcher who kind of goes against the grain to pursue what turns out to be an incredibly important and powerful idea in chemotherapy. And he put his career on the line and he nearly got fired on numerous occasions, in fact did get fired. So he took an enormous personal risk because he believed in what he was doing and I don’t think there’s any way around that.

Where management is not smart enough to understand where good ideas are coming from people have to take enormous risks with their own careers. That is a sad and inescapable fact about what it takes to create real change.