Cheaper, Faster, Better, page 10
He said, “Yeah, but I’m a Republican, and if I don’t have Republican credentials then people around the world who I care about, and who I do business with, won’t give me any credibility and I’ll lose the ability to make any impact. I can’t afford to piss off Trump.” He wasn’t willing to tell the truth about climate, because doing so would mean risking his importance, influence, and access.
In ordinary times, there might be wisdom to this approach. Staying on the inside usually means you have to work incrementally, but sometimes incremental progress is the best you can do. Also, if you abandon the playing field entirely, you risk losing your ability to be heard. Other people might take your place who don’t share your values or possess your judgment.
But this isn’t an ordinary moment for our planet. We can’t afford to ignore the truth in order to work within the system, but at the same time, we can’t get much done if we only work from the outside. If we’re going to stabilize the planet, what we need is a middle ground, a position that allows us to work within established institutions and ways of thinking, but that also allows us to step outside of them and challenge them when necessary.
One of the defining experiences in my life took place in just such a middle ground. I wouldn’t have predicted it back then, but the mentality I learned as a walk-on soccer player has been hugely helpful throughout my life—and it might even be essential for climate people today.
When I arrived on Yale’s campus in the fall of 1975, joining the team had been easy. That summer I’d received a letter from the head coach, Bill Killen, inviting me to try out. (It came with a workout plan so intense I genuinely thought it was a joke. I ignored it and prepared for the season by playing tons of pickup soccer in Central Park.)
I was also confident—maybe a little too confident—in my athletic abilities. I was a three-sport athlete in high school, and I didn’t see why I couldn’t do the same in college. It seems insane now, but my plan was to play varsity soccer, varsity basketball, and varsity tennis. I knew that some athletes had been recruited by the school, while I had only been invited to walk on to the team. But it was only after I got to the first practice that I realized that walk-ons were in their own, lesser category. The recruits were treated differently. The coaches knew their names, were interested in their studies and what dorms they were in, and wanted to make sure they were doing okay away from home. I got none of that special treatment, but I figured it wouldn’t make much difference once we got on the field.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. Our coaches had recruited some amazing athletes, but as strange as it sounds, some of them weren’t great soccer players. One of the recruits was blazing fast but didn’t know how to dribble the ball with his head up. He kept looking at his feet. Another guy could shoot the ball like a rocket and was even athletic enough to do a flip in celebration each time he scored a goal. But that didn’t happen often, because he took too long to get his shots off. Before he could slam the ball into the net, a defender would run up and steal it from him. To the coaches, however, it didn’t matter: the recruits were the recruits, and the walk-ons were just walk-ons.
I was pretty sure I was better than some of the varsity players, but as a freshman, I was assigned to the JV. So were a lot of other really good soccer players. We knew we had talent, and we loved being a team—some of my best friends to this day are people I met playing JV soccer. All season long, we backed up our confidence with results. We played against all the other Ivy League schools and a bunch of others and went 12–0. But what we really looked forward to was our intramural scrimmages against the varsity team. We played them twice a week, every week, all season long, and we beat them every single time.
In my teenage naivete, I thought that when JV walk-ons consistently beat the varsity recruits, at least some of the JV squad would get to move up. Instead, Coach Killen told us, “You’ve got to stop winning, because you’re sapping the varsity’s confidence.”
This is where I first truly experienced what I think of as the walk-on mentality. I’ve always loved being part of teams. I wanted to be coached. But when I heard Bill Killen tell us to start losing, my first thought was, no way. He chose subpar players, he lost, and now he wanted us to stop trying? Not gonna happen. I never thought about quitting the team. But I also never thought about playing along. It was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard.
I soon realized that I wasn’t making varsity my freshman year under any circumstance. It didn’t matter if I deserved it or not. The coach was never going to admit to himself that he’d recruited the wrong players. He wasn’t really committed to them, but he was committed to his previous judgment.
While I was disappointed, there was a silver lining. I loved playing soccer with my JV friends. In fact, we banded together and made a pact: we would only go up to varsity if they agreed to give us real playing time. My sophomore year, Coach Killen put the pact to the test: he offered me a varsity spot but told me I’d be warming the bench, backing up one of the recruits. A pure team player might have given up on the pact and taken the offer. I stayed on JV.
I finally did join the varsity team as a junior and was captain my senior year. But looking back, I wouldn’t have traded my walk-on experience for the world. If you offered me the chance to time travel, arrive on campus as a recruit, and play every minute of every varsity game for all four years, I would turn you down. Because I learned something over those four years—quite possibly the most important thing I learned in college. You can’t go it alone in life. But you also can’t just go with the flow. The higher the stakes, the more important it is to be a team player and be independent at the same time. That might sound like a contradiction, but it’s not.
Today, in the climate world, we need independent team players more than ever. On one hand, our world needs to change quickly—and we need teams to make that happen. We need new technologies, new ways of creating energy, new ways to cut emissions of greenhouse gas. Then, we need to figure out how to deploy these new technologies worldwide, in countries with wildly different levels of infrastructure, prosperity, and political stability, all while facing relentless opposition from fossil fuels. Only by working together can we achieve the kind of change we need at the pace we need. That’s particularly true within institutions and organizations—everything from media outlets to businesses to governments to banks. If people who already have credibility within existing institutions can help those institutions transform to meet this threat, it’s going to make an enormous difference for the climate and the planet.
On the other hand, organizations can become havens for groupthink. They can be corrupted by special interests that don’t care about the future of the planet we all live on. (My friend’s Republican Party, under Trump, is an excellent example.) To be a climate person, you have to be able to play the outside and inside games simultaneously—to work within big organizations to drive change, and then, when necessary, to challenge those organizations to change themselves.
Above all, you can’t fall victim to the idea that what’s good for the team is necessarily good for the world. Institutions and organizations are a means to an end. To harm the entire planet in order to further the interests of a single business, political party, or nonprofit organization is a much more high-stakes version of starting the recruits because they’re the recruits, even when it makes it harder to win.
Striking this balance is easier said than done, particularly when the issues are complicated and the potential consequences so enormous. It can be especially difficult when the people dispensing conventional wisdom are respected and important. But in my experience, part of thinking like a walk-on is remaining skeptical of those I call “suits with titles.”
I’ve always been amazed at how many people are willing to respect someone just because of the position they hold. A few years after I went to Morgan Stanley, while I was still on Wall Street, I was talking with a friend about a wealthy corporate raider. I thought he was making a really stupid investment decision and said so. “He’s got a lot more money than you,” my friend reminded me, “so he’s probably a lot smarter than you are.”
I said, “Really?” My grandfather wasn’t rich, I told my friend—but he was smart as hell. If someone had ever dared to suggest to him that people with more money were automatically smarter than he was, I don’t think he would even have gotten angry. He just would have looked at them like they were crazy. (It turned out I was right. Over the years, as I made a lot of money, it didn’t make me any smarter. It just meant I had more money.)
In the climate world, there are plenty of suits with titles who help prop up the fossil fuel industry: CEOs and politicians and investment bankers and heads of industry-funded think tanks, all of whom are used to being treated as people with serious ideas because they hold important positions.
If we’re being honest, the climate movement has its own version of this kind of problem, where people end up reinforcing conventional wisdom not because the arguments are the strongest, but simply because the institutions who espouse them are important. The mainstream climate groups—the well-funded environmental organizations that have been around for decades —have racked up extraordinary achievements over the years: they defended and strengthened the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act; curbed acid rain; protected the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; won the Supreme Court case that allows greenhouse gas to be regulated as a pollutant; and much more.
Our society is much better off because of these groups, and I’ve been proud to support them over the years. However, in part because their origins are in conservation and opposing development, they have sometimes been too incremental in their advocacy on climate change or let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
A good example involves permitting reform. Last year, a bill before Congress would have sped up the government permitting process for new clean-energy projects. That’s absolutely essential if we’re going to meet our emissions-cutting targets. But many of the most influential conservation groups opposed the bill because it would also have sped up the permitting process for new natural gas pipelines, and because even clean-energy projects often come with environmental tradeoffs. (For example, placing new wind turbines on an undeveloped mountainside, or building a solar farm that could potentially disrupt the habitat of a threatened species.)
Hamstringing our ability to fight climate change because it would come with some conservation-related tradeoffs is terrible for the environment in the long term—and just because some of the organizations adopting this strategy have done truly impressive things in the past doesn’t make it a good strategy. Bill McKibben wrote about this eloquently in Mother Jones. Describing a different set of clean-energy-related tradeoffs—that lithium mining has the potential to hurt ecosystems and many communities in Central and South America—he acknowledges that these harms are real, unfair, and tragic. But, he writes, reflexively saying “no” to new development ignores the harms of maintaining the status quo:
[S]lowing down lithium mining likely means extending the years we keep on mining coal, that more than 6 million people a year die from the effects of breathing the byproducts of fossil fuel combustion, and that we’re dancing on the edge of the sixth great planetary extinction.
He went on:
Making the perfect the enemy of the good is, in such a case, more like making the perfect the enemy of anything at all. When you’re in an emergency, acting at least gives you a chance; not acting guarantees an outcome, and not a good one.
In my experience, it’s often the people outside the climate establishment who have been quickest to understand the changing nature of the threats we face, and how to fight them. Part of thinking like a walk-on is having the courage of your convictions and not outsourcing your judgment to others just because society has named them “coach” or “senator” or “CEO.”
There’s another version of ignoring suits with titles: great leaders and managers, in my experience, make it clear that they care more about the idea than the title of the person who has the idea. This was certainly true of the best boss I ever had, Bob Rubin.
I met Bob when I started working at Goldman Sachs. At the time, he was already well-known as the young head of the firm’s highly profitable risk-arbitrage division and as a prolific fundraiser in Democratic political and economic-policy circles.
In a lot of ways, Bob and I are very different. He likes to consider all his options; I can be more impulsive. With the exception of his time in Washington, he’s spent his entire adult life in New York City, while I still look back on our move to California as one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Politically, he’s closer to the center on many issues than I am, although I give him real credit for coming around on climate.
But while we don’t always take the same approach to issues, from the moment I began working for him, I was struck by Bob’s judgment. When I got to Goldman Sachs, one of the firm’s biggest clients was a guy named Ivan Boesky. One day, Bob told us, “Ivan Boesky is doing something wrong, and he’s going to get in trouble. We can’t be connected with that. We’re not going to forbid him from working with Goldman Sachs—you can take his order if you’re a trader. But no one is to ever speak with him or interact with him, not even on the phone.” At the time, I didn’t think that much about it. But two years later, when Boesky was arrested and revealed to be the ringleader of a giant insider-trader scheme, I realized that Bob had an ability to see two moves ahead.
And that was only part of what made Bob Rubin such an exceptional manager. He was also a good listener; he was clear about what he needed you to do; and he kept your focus where it belonged.
Perhaps most important of all, as long as you were honest, took responsibility for your actions, and ran a thorough process, Bob treated you with respect and listened to what you had to say. If you were a junior person, and he thought you had the best argument on an issue, he’d take your side. Bob Rubin is the quintessential establishment figure, yet I think he has just a little bit of walk-on in his personality: he makes his decisions based on what people have to say, not on who says it.
In fact, the one time I remember Bob speaking harshly with me was when I let unnecessary, arbitrary bureaucracy get in my way. It was Christmas Eve, 1984, and we had both gone into the office. Things were quiet. Then, out of nowhere, we got some information that completely blew up a position that the arbitrage department had taken in Phillips Petroleum, which was fighting a takeover bid from oilman T. Boone Pickens. Bob immediately said, “Tom, do the following five things . . .”
“Bob,” I explained, “I’m not working on that deal.”
“This is a problem we need to handle right now,” he snapped. “Do what I tell you.”
And you know what? He was right. The firm had a major problem, and we were the only two people in the office. Who cared that Phillips Petroleum wasn’t technically my responsibility? Assignments are important for teams to function, but they can’t be more important than the team’s actual mission. I should have just gotten to work.
It’s a lesson I’ve tried to carry with me ever since. You’ve probably heard the phrase “Stay in your lane.” In my experience, the walk-on mentality is about doing the opposite—getting out of your lane and focusing on accomplishing what needs to be done rather than saying, “It’s not my job.”
It’s probably no surprise by now that getting out of my lane has rarely been a problem for me. I’ve certainly never thought of myself as an establishment person. I worked for decades in investing, but I never felt like a Wall Street insider. I supported campaigns for major ballot measures, formed a nationwide political organization focused on turning out young voters, and even ran for president, but I’ve never felt like a political insider. I’ve dedicated years of my life to climate, and I work with brilliant scientists, entrepreneurs, activists, and policymakers every day, but I don’t think of myself as a climate insider, either.
Being not-quite-on-the-inside has given me important perspective. But I don’t mean to imply that it’s easy. In fact, not being an insider can be really frustrating. Thinking like a walk-on can also come with real personal and professional costs. In 2008, after Barack Obama’s election, some people encouraged me to consider trying to join his administration. The Great Recession was in full swing, so leaving my team would have been basically impossible, but I was still kind of intrigued. Washington is a heard-it-through-the-grapevine kind of place, and I began to hear that my name was in the mix for some fairly high-level positions. It started to seem as if I might get a call from the president.
I didn’t. Later, I found out at least one reason why. Someone I know well, and still consider a friend, had given White House officials their honest opinion of me: whatever my other good qualities were, I wasn’t a team player.
Was I annoyed when I found all this out? Absolutely. Not least because I’ve played, and won, on plenty of teams.
But in retrospect, maybe my friend had a point. Maybe I’m not cut out to be staff in an administration. In those jobs, you don’t have to go along with everything, but you do have to be willing to hold your nose at times. I don’t know if I’d be comfortable doing that. My insistence on maintaining independence has probably cost me a lot of other opportunities through the years as well. It’s definitely stressed me out at times. My brother Jim, who’s an idealist but also a pragmatist, is always saying to me, “Tom, you get so upset—just go along with it for Christ’s sake.”
But I guess I’m just not a go-along type of guy. That’s the cost of not being an insider: a kind of frustration tax.
Climate people have to be prepared to pay the frustration tax in order to protect our planet. Many of the people I trust most on climate were, for years, ridiculed as alarmists for making predictions that turned out to be true. When it comes to the facts about the speed at which our planet is warming, and what that warming is doing to our world, being a climate person often means being a bearer of bad news. Even among people who understand the issue, and broadly agree that action is needed, climate people are used to being the fly in the ointment, telling those around them, “This is great, but we’ve got to do more.”
