On not reinventing the wheel

July 2024 Issue

I love bicycling. I'm not very fast, but I ride thousands of miles each year, and, more importantly, I have a lot of fun. Also, bicycling gives me a rich set of metaphors for life and work.

One of the peculiar things about the bicycling world is that the companies that make bicycles never make the whole thing. Even the biggest companies with the most resources – I'm thinking of Trek, Giant, and Specialized – nearly always use, for example, derailleurs made by Shimano, SRAM, or maybe Campagnolo or microSHIFT. It's not uncommon for even high-end bicycles to use wheels, tires, hubs, cranks, cassettes, rotors, calipers, handlebars, brake levers, shifters, stems, seatposts, and saddles made by other companies. In fact, in order to be considered a legitimate bicycle manufacturer, all you really need to do is take the 9 tubes of the bare frame – the head tube, top tube, down tube, seat tube, bottom bracket shell, two seat stays, and two chain stays – and turn them into the familiar double triangle design using steel, aluminum, carbon, or titanium. (And you may or may not make your own forks; it's perfectly acceptable, sometimes preferable, to use another company's carbon forks.) This is the approach used by several of my favorite bicycle companies, such as Crust , Squid , Soma , Velo Orange , and Rodeo Labs .

[And, for what it's worth, most bicycle manufacturers don't actually build their own frames. Rather, they design them, and then send the designs to specialized factories in China or Taiwan, which make roughly 95% of the world's bicycles.]

To be clear: this is not cheating and it's not cutting corners. Bicycle components like a rear derailleur may be fundamentally simple, but it's very difficult to achieve the quality that, say, Shimano has developed over the decades. Even Tadej Poga?ar , who just won the Tour de France for his third time, and whose team, UAE Team Emirates, has an essentially unlimited budget, used production Shimano derailleurs on his Colnago V4Rs race bikes. Relying on others is often the best practice.

On Not Reinventing Work

You may or may not care about the particulars of the bicycle manufacturing world, but some of these principles carry over to other professional worlds. One place where the idea of "not reinventing things" is important is with nonprofits. I know a few people who have created their own nonprofit organizations. I have seen stories in the news about young people who have created their own nonprofits. And I have, at times in the distant past, wondered about doing the same thing myself.

But, after looking into things for a while, I came across a consistent theme in articles written for people who were considering making their own nonprofits: DON'T DO IT. Here are a few such articles:

• Giving Compass: "Don’t Do It: Don’t Start a Nonprofit "
• The Charity CFO: "Why You Shouldn’t Start a Nonprofit "
• The Nonprofit Reframe: "Start a Nonprofit? Don’t. "
• BoardSource: "Don’t Do It: Don’t Start a Nonprofit "
• Alan Cantor Consulting: "Friends Don’t Let Friends Start Nonprofits "
• The Johnson Center: "Don’t Start a Nonprofit. Start a Giving Circle. "

All of these people and organizations strongly support the missions of nonprofit organizations and value the work that they do. Their counterintuitive advice is based on 2 basic factors:

1. Running a nonprofit is difficult, and passion for a topic does not directly lead to being a skilled manager and organizer for an organization that addresses that topic
2. Raising money is one of the most important activities that nonprofits have to do, and many nonprofits are in direct competition with each other for donations

Because of these 2 challenges – management and development – the common advice is that, rather than starting a new organization from scratch, you should find an existing organization that you can partner with, then either support their work or create a new project within that organization. This approach cuts down on the headaches, reduces combined overhead, and allows you to focus on the things that you care about.

So, I didn't start my own service-oriented data organization. Instead, I partnered with existing organizations, including the school where I teach, Utah Valley University , to get funding, space, and volunteers for the Data Charrette service events that I organized. This was a much better solution and it has allowed us to provide data-based, actionable insights to a wide range of local organizations. That's a win-win.

The same general advice can also apply outside the nonprofit world. Ten years ago, when I first created datalab.cc , it was with the intention of founding a profitable enterprise that could grow over time, and, eventually, I could rely on as my sole source of income. After a few years, however, it became clear that running a business required both (a) many skills that I didn't have (similar to the management issue for nonprofits); and (b) much more time that I was willing to give. (I never quit my day job as a university professor, and I still haven't. Many suggest that you have to quit your day job and make the leap in order to succeed as an entrepreneur. The most vivid exemplar of this approach was Theranos co-founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes , who was on the cover of Inc. magazine in February of 2015, and said "I think that the minute that you have a backup plan, you've admitted that you're not going to succeed." As a quick reminder, Theranos is dead and Holmes is currently in Federal prison serving an 11-year sentence for fraud . So, maybe a backup plan isn't a bad idea, after all.)

In my case, I did the math after a few years of trying to run my own business, saw that the payoff was negative, and decided to focus exclusively on two things: my university work (because I love my school’s mission, and there's no job stability in the world like tenure) and my work for LinkedIn Learning (because it gives me a global audience and allows me to address a broader range of topics in a briefer manner than is possible at my university). My company, datalab.cc , still exists, but it's mostly so I have an email address and can do occasional consulting. Since my realization a few years ago, I have made no attempt to monetize datalab.cc or grow it the way that entrepreneurs typically do. That is, I saw that I didn't need to reinvent my work. Instead, I chose to focus on partnering with two excellent organizations, and that has worked beautifully.

On Not Reinventing Life

The principle of relying on others and not trying to create everything from scratch on your own applies to many other elements of life. The simplest version of this is to connect to other people, and to engage with them in meaningful ways that expand your experience and insights. (Please note that this does NOT include interactions in "echo chambers" where everybody is saying or doing the same thing. When there is nothing new or different, nothing can change for the better.) I have been married for nearly 30 years, and while my wife and I see eye-to-eye on many things, her life as a modern dance choreographer gives her a dramatically different view from my life as a social psychology researcher and data person. Our 3 adult children, all of whom are adopted, are just as profoundly different from each other as they are from us. I'm grateful for the ways that we have all been able to teach one another, learn from each other, and support each other.

I also believe that the arts can produce this kind of mind-expanding engagement. To state the obvious, books, movies, theater, music, and visual art can give us windows into different lives and different worlds, as well as ways that we can develop our own lives. As I may have mentioned elsewhere, I learned more about depression and bipolar disorder from Jane Kenyon's poem "Having it Out with Melancholy " than anywhere. I learned more about PTSD from the opera "The Long Walk " (music by Jeremy Howard Beck and libretto by Stephanie Fleischmann, based on Iraq veteran Brian Castner's memoir of the same name) than anywhere. I could list more, but it's better to think about your own experience with art and literature opening the world for you. All of us have benefitted from people sharing the best and/or most meaningful aspects of their own lives.

Our hobbies, our work, and our lives don't have to be created from nothing in order to work well or have meaning. We work best by learning from and relying on others. And, in turn, it gives us the opportunity to share with and help others. Thanks for joining me here today.