Behind Every Successful Project

Enjoying a little light reading over the weekend, I read most of – and retained about 30 percent of – Lisa Randall's bestseller, "Knocking on Heaven's Door: How physics and scientific thinking illuminate the universe and the modern world."

That a small portion of humankind has come to such an understanding about our physical reality and is capable of building machines such as the Large Hadron Collider in order to experiment with and perhaps prove some assumptions correct is almost as mind-blowing as the universe itself. I bring this up because, much like our own industry, projects are driven by science-enabled technology that most of the world and even most in the industry do not understand and sometimes doesn't appreciate. We don't stop to think that a near-perfect representation of our voices is turned into electronic waves that are then converted to digital pulses that are sent along copper, fiber and airborne paths fraught with potential failure every step of the way yet are delivered successfully and instantaneously 99.999 percent of the time to just about anywhere. And most have no clue how it all works (me included).

A small portion of the industry is so good at what it does that hardly anyone else notices. It is high-tech at its best. But as I noticed in Randall's book, technological advancement is often only as good as the money behind it. We think telecom has long planning and deployment cycles, but imagine keeping a project on track and funded for 15 years without even knowing it could work. That was the length of time from the approval of the LHC in 1994 to the first successful proton-to-proton collision in 2009 – and the energies required for achieving its intended purpose won't be reached until around 2014. The breadth of the LHC project from the time of inception (1984) until then will have been 30 years. Imagine if LTE took that long to roll out.

The LHC project was flat-out rejected by CERN in 1993, but a man named Christopher Llewellyn Smith, a theoretical physicist from the U.K. and CERN director general at the time in support of the project took off his man-of-science hat, donned that of a businessman and found a way to save the project by soliciting funding from Switzerland and France to make up for that lost during German unification in 1990.

He did so by successfully communicating the benefits of funding the project, as risky and uncertain as they were. Everyone who steps up to do that, no matter the industry, is putting their reputation on the line. Somewhere, in the inner circles of every service provider is that guy or that woman, or teams of both, who step up and convince the CFO and the CEO and the board of directors that they should take a chance and move forward. Who will remember that Christopher Llewellyn Smith was that guy for the LHC when six, eight or 10 years from now the next Einstein uses the data collected from the collider to redefine gravity once again? Who was it at AT&T or Verizon that had the winning argument for IP vs. ATM? Who tipped the scales in favor of CDMA? Who found the money in the budget for either?

The unsung heroes. Keep doing what you do. Keep believing big things can be done.

E-mail me at tmcelligott@vpico.com.