Creating better trees
A few weeks ago I was asked ’so what do you do?’ I could go on and on, explaining the intricacies of quantitative genetics, the problems to convince breeders to spend some time defining their objectives, etc. However, I was reminded of Guy Kawasaki’s writings on making meaning and the importance of a good mantra.
Breeding programs rely on three elements: vision, improvement objectives and breeding strategy. I have covered the second and third ones, but I have not mentioned vision before. Vision relates to our set of believes about what the future brings, including markets, products, technologies, etc. It is our way to deal with this vision that gets ‘mantrified’.
Rather than wasting time on useless and mediocre ‘mission statements’ — which nobody remembers — it is much more powerful to synthesise (or summarise) our objective in a mantra. Plus Tree’s mantra is fairly simple: ‘creating better trees’. This can be easily transformed to an elevator pitch as ‘we create better trees — through the use of genetics, statistics and economic tools — aiming to maximise industry profit’.
I have found that mantras are not only useful to remind me what are we suppose to be doing, but they are great to provide a vision to research clients. For example, one of our projects is being presented as ‘profitable shorter rotations’: short and sweet way for clients to remember where are we going and why they do need to revisit their research portfolio.
Mantras or, better yet, clear visions also provide an advantage over competing research organisations. While they try to communicate a real dog’s breakfast of projects — without much success — one can fit multiple steps in ‘creating better trees’.