While the theme of the Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce 73rd Annual Dinner on Thursday was “Toward Greater,” much of the evening focused on food.
Specifically, recipes and wine.
More than 1,200 people attended the annual event, an evening of networking, dinner and speeches from business and community leaders at the Monona Terrace. Keynote speaker Lindy Elkins-Tanton, the director of the Space Sciences Laboratory at University of California, Berkeley — and the second woman to lead a NASA space mission — said leadership depends on many things.
Chief among them, she said, is remembering the recipe.
Doing so was imperative to ensure the highest possible success rate for the Psyche mission she is leading. Psyche is an ongoing endeavor, where NASA has sent a spacecraft on an eight-year journey to collect data from an asteroid between Mars and Jupiter.
During the mission, she has encountered people who forgot the recipe. A team member didn’t have the knowledge to make a critical component because a previous employee had retired, for instance, and the new person didn’t know what to do.
“Keep teams from losing your recipe,” Elkins-Tanton said.
She pointed to the Ise Shrine in Japan, which has been torn down and rebuilt for the past 1,300 years, as one impressive, perhaps extreme, example. It is rebuilt every 20 years so the knowledge — or the recipe — is not lost.
As she recounted anecdotes from running the team at NASA, she said the formula for success applies to any organization, whether one is pursuing an asteroid or running a marketing firm.
Elkins-Tanton referred to treating workers as a network of dyads, focusing on how each team member works with each other and connects. It’s also important to never give up, lead by example, develop better ways to assess and reward, and ensure the culture — or how work is done — is strong and understood by the whole team. These were all important components of her leading 800 people at the peak of the project, which is now down to 250, in a mission that cost about $1.2 billion.
She also said to listen to junior developers, or the most junior people in the organization, so problems can be met early enough to find a solution.
She recalled how not listening to junior programmers resulted in a 14-month launch delay that cost $170 million. Simply listening and respecting everyone in an organization can counter that.
It may not stop the problems, but it provides an early enough window to find a solution, she said.
Wine and success
Kim Sponem, CEO and president of Summit Credit Union, the presenting sponsor of the event, and Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce President Zach Brandon both incorporated wine metaphors into their speeches.
“We invest in education, innovation and leadership because we know that when more people are successful and have opportunity to succeed, our entire community is stronger,” Sponem said.
Some in attendance uncorked wine, and Sponem said that just like uncorking that wine, it is imperative to uncork opportunities, and thanked those in attendance for uncorking potential in Madison.
To further emphasize the point, a Summit-branded wine opener was provided to each attendee at their table.
The uncorking must continue, Brandon said. His story of wine talked about how it can be diluted with water, and that if everyone doesn’t put in 100%, there is a dilution in what can be achieved in the community.
He said Madison is hitting high metrics, like Indeed ranking it the sixth best metro in the country to work in out of 228. Madison is ranked second for job opportunities on the same list. It is sixth for job quality and eight for economic opportunity.
“Opportunity and jobs are advanced by education, and we are now ranked fifth most educated city in America,” Brandon said.
But not all is perfect, Brandon said. There is work to be done to curb rental prices, which are up 10%. And the housing market is solid but lacks affordability.
Brandon also said Madison’s AI talent needs to improve, because it is not ranked highly compared to others. (Though the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s new College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, along with other Wisconsin schools pursuing AI, may help to change that.)
While Madison is thriving in many ways, Brandon said the city needs a new formula. It needs to list the ingredients, every asset and figure out what works.
And then the city can repeat what works, looking to the future.
“And why do all that?” he asked. “Because growth doesn’t run in a straight line. Every curve flattens, and the next one needs a new formula,” especially as the ciy races toward an additional 300,000 people by 2050.
“Scale won’t absorb our mistakes — it will reveal them,” he said. “We need a new formula, and Dane County desperately needs it before this happens.”
And Brandon finds it doable. After all, it’s not like it’s rocket science.
