Running a company can often feel like caring for a newborn child. There is a natural and healthy fear that arises that if you are not eternally vigilant then something bad will happen. With a baby, this is called good parenting. With a company, this is called micromanagement and it is universally resented by all employees.

Your company may feel like your baby, but the professionals that you hire to implement your vision are competent skilled adults who desire to be treated that way. There is a certain amount of management necessary to advance people in their careers and keep them aligned with company goals. But executives and managers must learn to let go and trust, or risk stifling and alienating their talent.

In physics, the observer effect states that observing a phenomenon has an impact on what is being observed. For example, when using an electron microscope to view subatomic particles, the light from the microscope impacts the movement of those particles. Since scientific methods require objectivity, the influence of observation can call the entire experiment into question.

By micromanaging, people are only driven to perform in the hope that you will one day leave them alone.

I asked myself how this device called the “smartphone” – which didn’t even exist as a product category five years ago – could have become such an integral part of my morning routine. 

The wireless-technology pioneers who invented the technologies that enable these connections were bold enough to do costly research and development in extremely risky and unproven areas, at a time when cell phones were the size of brief cases and only carried by doctors and heads of state.  They were able to take those risks and do that R&D because there was a chance, albeit a small one, that they might solve problems previously considered unsolvable and then sell products or license that technology to others for a fee.  Some of those successful inventors then took some of that money and reinvested it in even more R&D that produced even more advanced, licensable technologies and generated even faster connections.

None of them would have been able to take those risks or spend the money to experiment without the guarantee that their invention breakthrough would be theirs to own and license.

So tomorrow morning, when you wake up and reach for your smartphone, think about what the smartphone would look like without the technologies encouraged and enabled by patents. I think it might look a little like this: two tin cans connected by string.