Our nearby SF-Oakland Bay Bridge is closed indefinitely after large metal hunks and poles—pieces installed over Labor Day weekend to fix another serious problem—fell onto rush hour traffic. Beyond making for a nightmarish commute, this closure and its background makes for several useful lessons for inventors and business managers. Among them:
1. Confidence sells. There’s now a growing sense that commuters hastily “bought” Caltrans’ (aka: California’s Department of Transportation) earlier fix because the transit agency so confidently told us it had quickly handled a major crack in the Bridge’s eastern span. With hindsight, this doesn’t necessarily reflect well on Caltrans, nor on area drivers. But it highlights one big point: if you’re confident when you tell people about your idea, product, really you name it, they’re much more likely to believe what you’re saying.
2. Quick fixes often aren’t. Edison didn’t invent the phonograph on his first day in the lab. Because creating an effective solution often takes time. So too does exploring alternative solutions, quality, accuracy, and triple-checking your work when the stakes are high. So as you create and pursue product success, take the time you need when you need it. Rushing is good... when balanced with the smarts to know when not to.
3. Ongoing maintenance matters. It’s not like Caltrans didn’t maintain our beloved Bridge. It’s just that we’re now seeing it could have maintained it better—much better—more proactively. The same is true for people with inventions and/or businesses: you need to keep investing your resources to maintain your patent and/or product line, as it will slowly but surely lose strength if you don’t do so. To be sure, it’s natural to want to pause and enjoy once you’ve achieved some success… but this is a sure-fire way to shortchange that success.
BTW, a few interesting facts about the Bay Bridge:
- When opened in 1936, the entire Bay Area set out to cross it at the same time, leading the San Francisco Chronicle to report it as "the greatest traffic jam in the history of S.F., a dozen old-fashioned New Year's eves thrown into one.”
- Before its latest closure, the double-decker bridge was handling roughly 270,000 vehicles a day, with an average of roughly 4,000 vehicles on it at any given time.
- It’s officially named the James "Sunny Jim" Rolph Bridge, in honor of San Francisco’s 30th mayor, who would go on to be California’s 27th governor… and who, like our current governor, would also grace the big screen in a couple films.
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