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FOUNDATION TO BUILD UPON
Saturday, March 6, 2021 - daily column #6688
Governments, after the investigations, meekly admit that they didn’t know what they ought to have known, and now they are trying to fix it.
Examples like the Cuban Missile Crisis, 9/11, and January 6, 2021, come to mind. As do SARS, MERS, COVID-19; begging the question, not so much about why they didn’t see it coming – but why they didn’t act once they knew?
Another example – I’m sure, in 1958, most of us would have said, “What is a computer?”
Tom Watson, former CEO and then Chairman of IBM, famously mused in 1958 that the world would only need five computers. Most people, however, were not in that lofty position in technology – so we should wonder whether that kind of separation between senior executives and what is really going on persists.
He was someone you would expect to be a leading-edge wise guy, helm of the world’s foremost intellectual property and technology firms – but he was wrong.
Profoundly wrong.
It’s a joke now.
But it wasn’t then – instead, a failure to properly understand and assess the future. Also, in that culture at IBM, a manager agreed with fledgling Microsoft that while IBM would contract to buy the operating system Microsoft had created, it would and allow Microsoft the rights to sell it to others. One must wonder, from all that collective genius at IBM and in the early days of Microsoft (Bill Gates a.k.a. William Henry Gates III and Paul Allen), if maybe the smartest futurist was the Microsoft lawyer who negotiated the deal … and I believe that lawyer was William Henry Gates II, no doubt the father of the father of modern computing. Incidentally, it was the father who suggested setting up and who initially ran the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
So, a boneheaded move in a company not seeing the future clearly, let loose Gates and Allen, changing the world in ways IBM could not see, and the legacy has and continues to improve the world, and has enriched a lot of investors too.
Those adventures and ‘those times’ valued:
Go for gold.
Win the prize.
Seal that deal.
Close the sale.
Get on the podium.
Grab the brass ring.
Rise to the occasion.
First across the finish line.
Is this a hierarchy of need or greed?
But does that describe anyone besides old-school A-types today?
New generations have fresh priorities – new issues that were never thought of or known when I was coming up, concerns about the planet, role or work, need for better non-work experiences, thirst for knowledge. The challenge to learn and teach and parent and manage a generation raised on technology whereby everything anyone wants to know is already known, nor is there an algorithm set to calculate a result.
Is it time for a different hierarchy of needs, and if we woke Maslow from his grave, would he see a need for change. You see, Maslow didn’t invent anything – he simply observed people and chronicled their needs, their way of operating and described those needs in a ranking as to what matters most, what is needed first, and second, and so on.
What are we working for, saving for, investing for, inventing for?
If something comes to us, it’s likely already come to someone else – and Google can provide the results in a matter of moments.
So what is there to strive for?
An easy answer would be to emulate Watson, to expect everything that can be imagined has been imagined already as if we’ve reached our limit. Yet year over year, decade over decade, we are awe-struck by the discoveries of the universe out there and microscopic universe down here. And that space between everyone’s ears, where the action really starts.
Fifty years from now, trips to shallow orbit outer-space will be affordable for many, we’ll have colonized Mars, and we’ll be exploring Jupiter’s moon Titan, Bitcoin and its rivals will be consolidated, the world will be cashless, and oil will be obsolete. I don’t believe all of that will be accurate, but some it will be.
We just don’t know with certainty.
A thousand years from now is tougher to predict, but we know life will be better, the planet will be in better shape, the climate will get warmer or cooler because that’s what this planet has always done.
The future is incalculable – and in that mystery, there are no limits to what can be done in the name of good or evil, but I am convinced the goodwill far outweigh the sinister. I believe a desire for continuous improvement exists within our society – a collective DNA if you will – which enables the brightest and the weakest among us to be playing our role in creating an exciting future. It will be full of products, technologies, disease cures, interplanetary travel, art, music, thought, and humanity – so much of which we would not recognize, but we will be simply part of the collective silt of time as its foundation …
Reader feedback:
Insightful musing today Mark, and so true. Loved it. The attached Attention Test is a simple demonstration of how focused yet unobservant we can be. This example is right before us. I understand that what you are proposing is that we need to be more proactive in our search of what is out there that is new or different. This is a an eye opener, RT, White Rock, BC
Unfortunately Mark I see things almost completely the opposite. I see kids’ play fading and tyrants increasing. Of course (?) they won’t last forever. But who wants to live in the time of and under the control of a tyrant? LH, Lethbridge, AB
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