gapingvoid

Return to beginner's mind?

By spending insane amounts of money on a make-over that only effects the surface?? Seems like the American way.

This is something that the military used to do well. When you have kind of people who are building flying fortresses by the thousand to go and flatten the enemey territoy, turns out they need a certain kind of mindset, i.e. production orientated. Build that plane at all costs, get the materials, the people, debug the assembly line, etc. When they needed to get the next generation, they got these people to try and create the new designs, what you get was the Peacemaker, big, big big, and not very effective. It's the factory working in its own image. Or NASA who go from the Apollo missions, a work of genius, if flawed, to the Shuttle. Job creation for Florida Engineers. 20,000 people to prep a ship with seven astronauts.

What the military do then is they create X-projects, where the guys go and do a lot of experimenting. They build the X-1, the X-15, and so on. (See the "Right Stuff" for a good overview, and a good film.) Purely experimental, and not designed to do anything other than be an experiment. Guess what, they learn a shedload, because there is no production possible with this thing. Once they have the base data, then they go and think about how you do production, but they have knowledge that they would never have dared to try and use if they had been forced to make the X-1 into a fighter plane that could be used with clear conscience with an American inside it over Korea, etc.

So, have a skunk works. And use the results. Xerox had a group called the PARC group, which designed the WIMP (Windows, Icon, Mouse, Pointer) GUI interface. Was too much for the suits, so they let these guys out into the wild. That's why you use a Mac, and latterly Windows, and not a Xerox. What a fuck up.

Oh, and guess who are the only computer companies in the world who still have a fundamental research lab? IBM, Microsoft, and Intel in a more limited sense. Wonder why SUN, HP, and the others are tanking? They are not growing their own successors, they are just watching them grow outside, and then wondering why it is all going wrong with the quarter by quarter numbers. Or Sony. They buy a music division, and the suits get all out of whack about muisc piracy, and they make the thing impossible to use. Does Sony even have an MP3 player these days?

You have to give people permission to cannibalise from the inside. That's the only effective way to do a change.

Ain't for nothing nature uses generations. Your design no longer applies, goodbye. As that lovely little angelic Nazi kid sang in "Cabaret", "tommorrow belongs to me." Chilling.

Kaizen.

And, let me point that out, a human re-inventing itself is not simple at all, but truely difficult. Improvements, sure, but if you break the limit of what you can assimilate (either too much to stay consistent, or 'improving' fundamentals such as values / believes), you have to play Phoenix - burn yourself down and rebuild from scratch, in the hope of rising again - which you as well might not. No risk, no fun.