Paying the Past, but Bankrupting the Future
December 14, 2005
11:02 a.m., MT

Music: 'Turn the Page', by Rush

We are standing on the brink of many amazing changes in how we do things. Medical treatments are slowly becoming more personalized, and will continue to do so as genetic research points the way to accomplish it with fewer, and often milder, risks. Computing power and technology steadily offers gee-whiz advances across a variety of applications. Those are just two examples of the interesting times ahead.

Frankly, I'm not as productive as I'd like to be because I spend a lot of time thinking about what the future will look like. More specifically, I wonder why so many individuals seem to have a determined resistance to what's coming. While doing some random clicking-through, I think I've hit upon part of the answer, in You're in the Wrong Business...Now What? at Worthwhile:

Most managers, frankly, will cling to their present operational model even if it requires a good dose of denial to do so. They have invested resources to sustain the present infrastructure and feel as if there is no turning back. In other words, they have to get a return that will justify the past investment. In other cases, personnel and material resources are so geared to keeping the train running down the current track that it is almost unthinkable to consider a different course.

How many people do you know who are doing this very same thing in some form? In the political realm, they're probably uncountable; even many ostensibly pro-freedom individuals cling to electoral politics as the tool that will solve the problem of bad government, despite its long record of perpetuating the problem. For me, the field of information technology has provided a superabundance of examples, as I encounter person after person who performs the equivalent of Emperor Kuzco in The Emperor's New Groove: "La la la la la la -- I'm not listening!". This response is often strongest from those whose livelihoods depend on the current infrastructure; it's as if any change would necessarily mean the end of their abilities to earn a living doing what they're doing now. Most seem so threatened by the mere idea of something new that the possibility that they could actually earn more never enters their minds.

Yes, this is just the concept of "sunk costs" expressed differently. And yes, I've my own painful experiences of throwing good money (time and energy too) after bad, trying futilely to be the one who does retrieve those investments that sank. I appear to have learned, though, to begin to question my investments at earlier stages, thereby avoiding compounding the problem to the degrees I previously reached. Doesn't mean I can completely avoid sunk costs -- I don't think anyone can, in all areas of life -- but it's progress, and for that, I'm thankful.

Bureaucracies, which are legion in this country and becoming so at the world level as well, are inimical to progress. Without fail, they seem to adopt the modus operandi of, "That's the way it's always been done." Why -- and how -- do so many otherwise creative individuals appear to fall into that kind of thinking when it comes to marketing, promoting, and/or selling their works? Some might attribute it to "rational ignorance", but I submit that it is most emphatically not rational to fail to at the very least know about technological changes that will someday -- perhaps sooner than one thinks -- require a profound change in "how things are done".

Last word comes from the same Worthwhile blog entry I quote above, emphasis mine:

Leadership today requires the wisdom to discern when a legacy should be buried, and the courage to give painful birth to new organizational life.

Sunni

Home
Previous entry: "A chip off the old beast?"
Next entry: "Special Copy of 'The Black Arrow' Up for Auction to Benefit Freedom Activist"