Out of sudden fear, he spoke. “What I would say about him, though, is that he’s totally… like, on his gravestone it would say ‘He actually did it.’ As in, loads of people say, ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be cool to start an energy company?’ But his thing is that he really does it.
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He started building renewables capacity right away, but with small steps. “In the very early days,” he recalled, “I had to downplay what we were doing and say, ‘Hey, it’s kind of a nice little niche for us, and we’re making some money, but it isn’t a core element of our strategy.
“You believe in all this Earthseed stuff, don’t you?” “Every word,” I answered. “But . . . you made it up.”
science. Really, this was a lesson in humility. You couldn’t blame the outside world for not conforming to your ideas. It wasn’t the world that was wrong, it was you. Either you could be humiliated and angry and hurt, or you could let that go and start building a better model. He began to search where he always had: within himself. In some ways, it wasn’t complicated: if tidal energy wasn’t going to beat gas and coal on price, and you still needed tidal to win, you had to assume that gas and coal were finished.
Javier might make a better head of engineering than Alan. Maybe. It was premature. James needed to watch him for a while. Javier was not a follower; he would try to impose himself on the company. That would cost stress and effort to restrain. But better a strong beast you had to fight to keep in harness than an obstinate little mule with no imagination who only ever said that it couldn’t be done.
And he insisted with every tool of his personality that they see the situation as he saw it, that they feel as he felt or as he convinced himself he did. As he worked on them, they began to tentatively sense – not as with James, that they were led by a man of admirable vision and ability – but that they were in this together, and that they wanted themselves to succeed.