Vain Notion Confirmed as Hurdle

 

Changing Embrace

Mania for change has always nudged American culture, but became increasingly nagging from the 1970s on. This was when the power of computers was being taken seriously for the first time, and organizations were confronting baby boomers, blacks, and women entering the workforce. Some employers came to terms with these forces, others refused, but those that accommodated major trends tended to last longer and prosper more. Later, in the 90s, many people came to believe that the Internet "changes everything," and thus became receptive to bubbling assertions that everything had to change.

Searching for books discussing innovation at amazon.com yields more than 2,500 titles, many of which aren't even published yet. Even allowing for duplicates and for books which aren't about business or new technology, preaching the gospel of technocratic innovation is clearly a growth industry. For their part, readers seem eager to learn what innovation is, where it springs from, why it's critical for success, and how to foster it in organizations. Nothing they read, however, will tell them how inventiveness unconstrained can chew up and spit out everything in its path.

The essential subtext of most of the business innovation literature is "innovate or die, lazy fools; you have no hope unless you replace all your time-worn processes, discard all your miserable preconceptions, and leapfrog your competitors." The new, improved conventional wisdom embraces radical technological and organizational change at any cost; executive acolytes chant the liturgy with a clueless passion, believing their mantras will shake up employees, soothe investors, and ingratiate consumers. Those who subscribe to this theology had best prepare themselves to meet a vengeful god.

Copyright © 2001 by Geoffrey Dutton. All rights reserved.

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