Managers who can’t understand a solution

On 12/2/1998, I saw my name for the first time in print in the US [the very first press mention came in Le Monde on 12/29/1995 for a Science Magazine article] based on an interview with Sue Goetinck Ambrose of the The Dallas Morning News! The topic? How to use inspiration from nature (ants!) to solve engineering problems. Very exciting!

But the real reason I love that piece is that I apparently said something really cool that I have no recollection of saying. I may have and I am very grateful to Sue for the attribution (and perhaps rephrasing the statement to sound less French?)!

So what is it? The last paragraph of the article: "Managers would rather live with a problem they can't solve than with a technology they don't trust."

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So it looks like the way I appropriated this quote is: "Managers would rather live with a problem they can't solve than with a solution they don't understand", according to GovExec: link

But, unsurprisingly, I found a much, much earlier version from Dr. Francis F. Bradshaw (1893-1979), a former president of the Society for the Advancement of Management, quoted in a 1965 Management Science article, appropriately titled "Roadblocks to Progress in the Management Sciences and Operations Research". link

And to think I thought I had inadvertently invented a meme. But that was before the age of Google and I had forgotten about it. Mixed blessing, this Internet thing.