Are Your Customers Failing 99% of the Time? [Start Your Week]

Are Your Customers Failing 99% of the Time?

Research is full of trials that don’t work. For example, plant breeding is 99% failure and only 1% success. That means 99% of the time plant breeders fail to achieve their goal of developing a better variety because the plants they’re working with can’t defend themselves sufficiently against the environment and produce top yields at the same time. 

I was a corn breeder for more than five years. My job was to take a group of corn plants and expose them to as many different, challenging environments as possible, while measuring how well they yielded under those conditions. We would plant the seed three inches deep in the spring to select for seedling vigor, inoculate them with all kinds of diseases, and apply different forces on the growing plants to see which ones wouldn’t green snap. I would select only the plants that passed all of the tests with flying colors and cross them with other plants of a different family that passed the same tests. As strange as it may sound, one of my goals at the end of each season was to throw away as much breeding material as possible and keep only the very best. Many plant researchers don’t think that way because their egos won’t let them. But if the plants you’re currently working with can’t defend themselves against the environments they’re exposed to, they don’t get a second chance. That’s why each fall when it came time to harvest MY breeding nursery, I asked our Director Research to walk through it and tag only the plants he thought should be kept. I would discard the rest. When he was done, he had usually tagged 99% of the plants in my nursery. Although it was hard to watch, I knew it was for the best. This guy was ruthless but had a proven record of releasing great varieties to the market...