Academia and industry seem to have different problems but they're actually the same root illness. My impression of industry so far: they don't get progress. Th

Academia and industry seem to have different problems but they're actually the same root illness. My impression of industry so far: they don't get progress. They don't get innovation. They have problems, but they they don't understand them and are unable to commit resources to the procedures that are needed to solve them. Academia, too, has a lot of problems. I left because of the publish or perish mentality. I liked to work on hard problems, and had some successes, but overall it is the numbers that matter not the difficulty. There are an equal number of politics in academia as in industry, though they are different in academia. In industry, politics often involves a lot of incompetent people in high places following paper work procedures that do not support their supposed cause, while in academia it is more a lot of infighting over government grants and insultingly simple metrics like the number of papers published. Academia and industry both have the same root problem and it's this: Those Who Can, Do; Those Who Can't, Evaluate. We see them as different cultures with separate sets of values, but the fact is that people who are good at office politics tend not to be good at anything else, so Decisions get made by incompetents. I don't think there's a scalable organizational antidote, because people who are politically adept and competent are incredibly rare. I think that the power players in academia are even more egregiously incompetent. They often lack basic social and leadership skills. Academia has been dying for 35+ years because its leadership is completely inept at fighting for its people against the cost-cutting mediocrities. Say what you will about MBAs, but I'd rather have one fighting against HR for my budget than an ex-academic. However, the professors are high-IQ incompetents-- though often not that smart, even still-- which makes the cerebral narcissist in all of us a little bit more sympathetic to them.