My father ran R&D at Armstrong World Industries, until a couple of years after the “quarterly earnings report” culture set in. After three reorganizations, he resigned before following orders and doing a fourth.

My mother died last year. I spent this past summer throwing out even more weight than the kitchen sink. (🙌I cleared out half the house!) Right now, my father’s patents are next to his fraternity framed pictures, his bowling team league trophy, his bar light and his father’s carpentry tools.

He had a B.S. degree in Chemistry, me in Chemical Engineering. But our degrees feel different than his patents. They feel like talismans.

I want to believe that our mutual disdain for Harvard MBA types has something to do with ….

List some factors that may have contributed to [my father’s] development as an inventor

Earthiness

Manipulator

Renegade

the article never explicitly rejected any genetic propensity for innovation, and my holistic perspective accords with that.

I vaguely remember a conversation about my grandfather tinkering away with Scientific American magazines in his Lake George basement. My father’s being 100% Welsh, of course