Academia is Like a Zero-Sum Game Posted on March 1, 2006 John B. Reid (bio) chats about the advantages of working in a non-academic setting.

I guess one of the things you have to do in a soft-money place is to be successful, and we've been successful. I've only been on unemployment once since I've been there, and actually it was kind of an interesting and good experience. We tried to develop a set of norms based on what you might call mutual self-interest.

Many times in academia, there's competition for space; there's competition for tenure. There may be a certain number of tenured slots available, so that it's like a zero-sum game, that the sum is always the same, so if I get something, you don't get something. And what we tried to create was a system that didn't have a zero-sum game. I loved it if Deborah Capaldi got a grant, because her grant helped pay for the xerox machine.

The notion was that, one, we were bonded together by a common mission. We wanted to work on externalizing behavior, on school failure, substance abuse, all the things that go wrong with kids, and we had a common mission that everything we wanted to do, no matter how basic the research, would lead to better interventions for kids and families.

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