rogueanalystblog

[rogueanalystblog]

On modern leadership

Leadership is a tricky concept. Everyone talks about it, but nobody really knows what it is and can come up with a satisfactory defintion or analysis that goes beyond the dictionary circumscription. 

However, that does not mean necessarily that people do not demostrate leadership. They do it on a daily basis, often intuitively, often way below their best. That is why it is so tricky to manage others, difficult to be managed by poor leaders and even more demanding to identify and grow leaders in your organization, especially since leadership is not per se a fixed concept but is subject to socioeconomic change.

In the good old days and not just back then, leadership was top-down. It was about direct reporting lines, giving instructions and following up on their implementation. The traditional way of leadership was like a one-way street where the input comes from the top and trickles down and where there is little to no feedback. People are given orders and follow them, and if they do not they face consequences.

This style of leadership usually emerges in “discrete” organizations and industries, where the process is clear and set from above and is generally repetitive. It leaves little room for innovation, other than that kind of innovation that comes from the top. Thus, such leadership suffers from a lack of initiative and most importantly, a loss of relevant and consequential information. The leaders themselves become litterally bottlenecks who manage and control or rather try to manage and control the flow of information. This is fine as long as there is no challenge or rather as long as the organization can afford to ignore new situations as they emerge...up to a point that is. 

It is the story of German carmakers that faked their way to the top with shady emissions-control-software, the story of Kodak just as digital cameras were emerging, or the story of Nokia when there were the first rumours about Apple launching the first I-Phone. It is the story that either the “selected few” decision makers see the writing on the wall or they don’t. And all to often they don’t and they don’t because in this setup they can’t because they will never all relevant and consequential information before it is too late.

Speaking of the I-Phone, ever wondered how Apple and Google maintain their speed of innovation and agility? Well, it has to do with modern leadership. Modern leadership and modern organizational development means essentially to create anarchy for the lack of a better term. Instead of divisional hiearchies you have self-organizing teams that still have leaders, but leaders that rather create a framework and network, than a feudal top-down-pyramid.This is also reflected in the pay-grade, since even simple employees can outearn their leaders and even their leader’s leaders, if they create enough of an impact.

So what is this phenomenon of modern leadership then? It is essentially a topos that consists of many elements, such as anarchy, equality, performance values, goal orientation, flexible processes and direct communication that goes both ways. The modern leader then is more of an evangelizer and cultivator, a teacher and a supporter. He (or often she) still does check up on the team and he or she still dishes out feedback and even reprimands, but most importantly the modern leader creates an environment in which he is the primus inter pares, who helps to organize the process, brings the right stakeholders together and delegates the tasks accordingly. This is often reflected in the lack of traditional status symbols, such as expensive watches or ties. The new leader does not need to show that he is “the boss”. He justifies his position towards the team due to his management performance in the same way as his associates justify their positions with their input. The modern leader serves his team as much as he or she serves their superior managers. He not just acknowledges superior skills or knowledge, he fosters it. He or she litterally empowers the team to be better than him- or herself.

And most importantly, the modern leader gets the relevant information through an open and honest dialogue among equals with his team as the whole organization moves from division hiearchy to essentially what I would call “the bracket organization”. A group of people that is dedicated to a goal and that does self-organize itself according to arising needs and changing conditions.Here the better argument counts and not who said it. Here all are committed to common goals, be it higher revenues, a better product, a better process, generally better results. Here the people come up with ideas and innovations and feel appreciated and taken seriously, and that is the precondition for the successful dissolution of traditional hierarchies.Within this “bracket” people assignmen themselves to tasks while the leader is in charge but not in control. Here people do things not because they are told to it, but because they naturally know it is the right thing to do. By empowering people the modern leader raises more experts and other leaders himself and thus creates a massive impact on his company. He lets people and ideas compete with each other, he or she lets a hundred flowers bloom. That in essence is modern leadership.

So is modern leadership then associated with a loss of control? No, but rather with letting the illusion of contro go and making peace with the fact that nobody ever is fully in control. 

[rogueanalystblog]

The Bat Effect

When a weakened human organism is infected by the Corona Virus/SARS-CoV-2, it is more likely to suffer more damage and go through a more severe, if not critical, order of events up to ending up in intensive care or even facing death. 

This is by now probably not really a novelty to most readers, as I am writing this during the peak of the Corona crisis in Europe. However, this crisis exposes not just individual health related weaknesses, but also a much larger systemic and political one.

When the new kind of disease started to spread in Wuhan, Chinese authorities opted for a full lock-down of huge metropolitan area with more than 10 million people, all after counting just 400 cases, and sent in a well-oiled machine to combat and suppress the outbreak on January 23rd 2020. Today is March 19th 2020 and Mainland China did not report a single new case, apart from a few imported ones that they intercepted at the airport, while in Europe we are now surpassing the death toll of the Chinese with new infections still growing in an explosive manner and it is becoming more and more clear that each and every European state does not have the capacity to deal with a pandemic of this magnitude. And by European states we are not talking about Moldova or Ukraine, but Italy, Germany, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Britain, Spain, Sweden et cetera, so realtively wealthy countries with a reputation for having very solid healthcare systems and well trained physicians and other specialists. So how on earth is it possible, that it is exactly here where the virus hits hardest? Has the disease not spread from Mainland China? Has Europe not had weeks or even months to brace for the impact? Why are they so unprepared? Did they not bother to formulate action plans in case of a pandemic outbreak? They had to deal with the threat of terror attacks for two decades now, so they should have had every reason to prepare for such scenarios.

Yet they did not. Even weeks and months into the outbreak, Europe did not even bother to cancel flights or screen passengers, let alone instruct doctors and hospitals to test patients with certain symptoms for Covid-19, the lung disease that follows from a Corona infection. Au contraire, it was European “specialists”, some of them not even physicians but veterinaries, like in the case of the German Robert Koch Institute, who posed as experts on a virus that they have never seen and that they did not fully understand. While even in China, the virus sent about 4% of all infected into their early grave, European virologists and health experts compared the SARS-CoV-2 with the normal Influenza or flu, which in fact has a death-rate of usually less than 0.1%. Instead of demanding decisive measures, controls, testings and ramping up of capacities across the board (hospital beds, desinfectants, consumables like masks et cetera), they downplayed the threat and advised for letting the virus spread through the population to allow for a  “herd immunity” to develop, a collective resistance against the virus. At the same time a number of Asian states have taken all sorts of measures to contain the virus and even reducing the number of new cases down to zero, effectively eradicating the virus, at least for the time being, and thus buying time to develop vaccines and medication to manage it better down the road.

Letting a virus, to which your population has not acquired said immunity (which by the playbook of mother nature is a rather cruel process that goes hand in hand with high casualties, just think of the smallpox that killed up to 90% of the native South American population a few centuries ago). demonstrates an almost criminal incompetence and negligance.

And while the death rate in Wuhan was just shy of 4%, the death rate in Italy stands currently at a whopping 8.3% (when you divide the number of deaths by the number of reported cases). And it is not just the old and sick that perish. It is doctors and nurses, who are under great stress. It is the younger ones who have a chronic condition, known or unknown, and it is in general people of all ages, whose immune system is just temporarily not in shipshape to combat this new virus  and who are thus affected most severly. In short: the virus is a threat to everyone across the board.

Now compared to the smallpox that hit the indigenious populations in South America, the Corona Virus is relatively “mild”, it will not wipe out the population. However letting the virus spread in this uncontrolled fashion is playing lottery with the lives of millions and effectively a euthanasia program for anyone whose health is already impacted by another condition. In short: it is something we would have expected from an autocratic corrupt dicatatorship or one-party state but not something that happens in relatively rich, civilized and democratic Europe. A continent which supposedly values the individual and which would be expected to go to extreme lengths to protect its population. And yet it is exactly European countries that play nonchalantly with an unknown disease and who are putting up with enormous risks for their citizens,while China and Vietnam, both undemocratic one-party regimes, keep the disease in check and effectively protect their nation against it.

By now, we have to ask ourselves the painful question: why has Europe let this happen? We have more than enough governments, institutions, universities and reasearch facilities and yet almost none alarmed the wider public, in fact they all downplayed the issue up to the point when it became clear that they were all massively wrong.

The even more painful answer is that this is a systemic failture. Our systems are not that democratic as we want to think they are. They are way more rotten and corrupt, in same cases even more than certain autocratic regimes, than we try to autosuggest to ourselves. And they are way more unprepared to deal with a real crisis, that cannot be inflated away by central bankers. In fact our systems have decayed to the point where they are not any more capable of sound decision making processes and probably have been already for some time. It is not a question of left or right, or individual politicians. It is a question of the whole sytem of government that buys support with empty promises and debt and yet fails to deliver in times of need. So far we were lucky and many government failures could be contained or their effects postponed to future generations, but this one is different. The virus does not care about interest rates or currency reforms. It does not change its deadly impact or just goes away by relabeling it or using the wrong statistics to downplay the effects. The virus itself is a fact that cannot be negotiated away and no PR campaign will be able to contain it. What Corona did, was exposing the rotten state of Europe (and maybe the US of A) and the collective incompetence of our elites and maybe our own because we put them there. 

And when the day comes and we will have survived the outbreak, surely with massive losses in terms of health and jobs and lives, we will have to get up and start another kind of therapy: fixing our democracies. 

You all have probably heard the phrase that crisis is just another word for opportunity. And in this case, Corona is exactly what the doctor ordered. A painful wakeup call. And if we gonna miss this, the next disaster will just just follow. And who knows, the next plague will not just contend itself with 3% or 8% but maybe 10 % or 60%? The next economic recession might not just result in bouncing back in the next 10 months but may become a full-fledged depression (as it partially has been in southern Europe already since 2009). In short: if we gonna miss this one, reality will most likely continue to punish us harder and harder, up to the point where we start to learn and adapt, or jump off the stage of history itself.

Agreed, today we all stick together, take care of our loved ones, our neighbours and ourselves. Today we have to fight this battle against this invisible enemy, but when this is over, we will have to start asking questions.

A bat made a Chinese man feel a bit funny in late autumn or summer and all of Europe came apart at the seams in spring...the bat effect. And before you try to blame the Chinese government for not “controlling enough” (oh the irony!) or the Chinese people for their exotic eating habits: this could have been anything, from a bat soup in Wuhan to an undercooked chicken in Madras or foul shrimp in your salad that was served in a bistro in your neighbourhood. These things happen, but it is your job to contain it and deal with it. And by these standards Europe (and by the looks of it America as well) has already failed spectacularly.

[rogueanalystblog]

What is “Digitalization”?

Many things we do call “digitalization” or “digital transformation” are not essentially new: the computer, robotics, connectivity...many of these things have been around for decades. Of course it goes without saying that many of these technologies have improved massively since their introduction as has their presence, but then again, they were with us for quite some time.

So why are people talking about these technologies today as if they were invented yesterday? And what is the mainstream getting right and what does it get wrong about the issue of digitalization?

The main problem is the oversimplifying view that digital transformation is just throwing money at fancy tech-gadgets that may somehow make life or work easier. Yeah, it definitely is a good deal of what it is going on but all in all it is a shortsighted view. Digitalization is in essence then a socioeconomic transformation of which digital technology is an essential part, nothing more and nothing less. 

Now this has many implications as it goes beyond the immediate realm the workplace applications for electronic devices or software. Digitalization itself is a transformative era that is reshaping all aspects of society and which is accompanied by many other structural changes that will in many ways turn the world as we know it on their head.

Digitalization will not only change massively the way we work but also the way we compete, shop, consume, communicate, recreate, procreate, for all sorts of forming and maintaining essential human interaction like employer-employee relationships, government-citizen relationships, romantic or sexual relationships, parental relationships, frienships et cetera. In short: the change can be seen everywhere and with everything.

Now this infers a good deal of fundamental changes that will inevitably make their breakthrough and which in one way or another we all will have to inevitably accept. We will all have to undergo willingly or unwillingly a massive change process, in which old roles, ways and morals will have to be dropped and new ones have to adopted. That will also include the ways bodies of governance work, be it governments of states or managements of corporations.

Digitalization creates in essence a new mindset, a new type of human if you wish, which will not be anymore compatible with values and wisdoms of the sometimes more distant or even more recent past.

Managing affairs on a larger and more complex scale like a country or a multinational then will have to eventually go hand in hand with ceding direct control to the lower hierarchy levels and smaller units,  giving them more autonomy and responsibility. It will also do away with old ways of labour-capital relationships, turning labour more into stakeholders than classical employees., which will include higher rewards but also less job security. It will also mean that the good old welfare state of the 1930s will eventuall start to disappear and will be replaced by a more indirect, smaller and weaker form of government in which bodies of governance and cizitens are rather partners on equal footing than superiors and subordinates. Welfare will be replaced by human capital development and investment, which wlll be measured by the return it creates rather than on some arbitrarily set goal. 

It will also change the way we work and parent, with old ways of dividing up childcare and work going down the river, and old ways of forming family bonds being transformed into looser bonds with more emphasis on individuality, equality and responsibility. Traditional monogamy and marriage start to disappear on a larger scale while people adopt new forms of cohabitation and raising their offspring.

Now of course one may decry this as the end of culture or the end of the industrialized west or “what about the children” or what have you, but when all is said and done, there is nothing that can prevent this transformation from happening. You can either move forward with it and speed up the process of readjustment or you can throw precious ressources at maintaining old and outdated industries, family ties, ways of employment and institutions.

But then again, the more you stretch the rubber band the more painful it will be when it eventually will snap back in. I guess that kinda narrows it down with regards to how many sustainable options we have on the table.

That means the only way forward then is to let change happen, remove legal and instituational barriers that slow it down and strengthen institutions that speed it up. As we are not possessing the full knowledge of all the different new forms of social self-organization that will emerge, with some of them vanishing again and some persisting, it would less wise to set goals or targets, but more sensible to open the gates and tear down the walls that try to keep the rising floods of change in check. 

People will find a way as they have always done, that is if you let them.

[rogueanalystblog]

21st Century government: from Identity Politics to Ecosystem Management

Now when you hear “identity politics” you might probably think of the heated debates of the late Obama era, like the ones about what kind of people can use what sort of bathroom and the likes of it. 

However the very concept of such identity driven politics is neither new nor is owned by any particular political ideology.There are identity based politics across all shades of the political spectrum, from securing the pensions of housewives on the right to publicly funding hormone therapies for 12 year olds on the left.

If you wish, the whole 2016 election was a clash of identity politics between moralistic liberals and provincialistic identitarians.

But then again 2016 was not the first time identity reared its head in the political process. You can find identity driven political debates and conflicts all the way from 1920s Germany to Stalinist Russia, all the way from the painfully erratic British attitude towards Europe to things like the civil wars in the Balkans or Kashmir.

So summa summarum identity politics is pretty much the mode of existence of any modern society with all its positive or negative consequences.

Governments have usually not operated in order to achieve certain performance or indicator driven goals but rather tried to serve all sorts of different identity groups or identities, very often at great cost and very often with only meager to symbolic outcome, but then again this was not a question of efficacy or efficiency but rather a question of performing rituals for socities that needed to have their emotional needs served. 

Invading the Falklands would not have created any improvement in the lives of average Argentinians even if Britain would refrained from a military response, but yet the whole show was all the rage until failed miserably.

The relevant goal was not to achieve some sort of actual change or improvement but rather to garner public support for a ruling government or party by stroking national agos and create a false sense of unity.

As such policies were often hugely expensive and hugely ineffective, the main issue was of course to secure a financial basis. And one by one governments would find and exhaust all sorts of options: debt, inflation, war, plunder and reparations all the way to targetting sometimes smaller or sometimes larger groups of people with repressive expropriational politics in order to obtain funding.

But throwing money at identities is of course only one part. Another one is using state force through courts, police or bureacracies. Trying to compel people to behave in certain ways as to satisfy identitarian needs, be it the way they talk or opinions they voice, or who they want to live or sleep with, what sort of cloting they can wear or not wear, if they are allowed to have an alcoholic drink outside in the park et cetera.

So divorce for instance had to become expensive and painful, so the conservative demographic would get the warm feeling that the state is “safeguarding” family values, while people had to be jailed for snorting coke, so some beer-drinking-chain-smoking-philistine could watch said arrests on his TV while consuming high-fructose-soda and go on about how these drug-addicted people are a threat to society.

However despite creating costs and consequences, governments could never stem the tides of change that were running through society, although they would inflict collateral damage on the very institutions they usually set out to safeguard. Their payoff were not results but votes and that gig did work quite well during the last 100 years.

So what is the lesson that can be learned then? What possibly could be the essence of a modern, efficient and effective policy that could solve the eternally problematic trade-off between freedom and order?

In fact freedom and order, often seen as a tradeoff in traditional political theory, depend on each other and often increase together rather than at each others expense. The idea then iis quite similar to “organizing” a market, which is that you do not really organize anything at all. You set a rough framework that enables equal access and does away with institutionalized discrimination and unnecessary regulation and then you let things happen. 

The ecosystem then grows and develops and often finds its organizational patterns, solutions and even self-regulations, de facto or institutionalized. The state then becomes a gardener or rather a ranger, who observes, keeps track and intervenes only when things get out of hand and might pose a threat to the ecosystem itself.

Now you might now ask about the weak, poor and downtrodden and how they could benefit from such a largely hands-off approach? Well, just check the input and output you get under the old system! Is there any traditional paternalistic-interventionist policy that has not spectacularly failed its presumed proteges?

Women’s rights and finances, as they are often paraded as the holy grail for interventionist ideas, are better served by kindergartens that remain open in the evenings than by most courts, since financially independent women do not need to put up with abuse and it closes the gender pay gap too since the necessity to work only part-time ceases to exist.

Job security is often rather served through competion-oriented policies , remember the guy who wants to hire you is your silent lawyer at the negotiation table, than by bureaucratic machinations.

Working together brings people closer than community organizers or government mandated cultural integration courses will ever do, as collaboration creates more intermarriages and removes more prejudices than any restriction on free speech.

A good education is the better approach to eliminating poverty than any minimum wage that nobody will never pay anyways for unskilled labour.

You might get the point by now...you tackle the underlying conditions, set them straight and then send people on their way to do the rest. 

Some countries are slowly moving towards that direction, most notably the Nordics but also some reformed Eastern European countries like Estonia.

Reality is complex, and using vulgar-cybernetic approaches that try to introduce rigidity into a system that is in flux will always fail and will always create costs, misery and counterproductive results..

You can either row against the wind or just cross sail into the future.

[rogueanalystblog]

A tale of two companies: Lancia and Apple

Not many people would come up with the idea to compare these two completely  different firms or rather even see the differences as well as the commonalities between those two, but taking a closer look actually does indeed reveal interesting parallels where one can draw certain conclusions from.

Both companies started out as highly innovative enterprises: Apple, as if anyone still needs to be told today, was one of the pioneers of the personal computer business that later on set out to reinvent basically every electronic communication and entertainment device from the phone to the computer itself.

While today almost nobody remembers, Lancia introduced in its heroic period between the 1920s and 1950s many industry-firsts, many of which would become standard technologies only decades later, such the first car with independent suspension, the first V6, the first V4, the first 5-speed gearbox, the first car with a monocoque chassis, the first car with a transaxle and...almost unbelievable in retrospect given the rather low realibilty record in later years...industry leading quality standards.

So while Apple recovered from its dip in the 1990s only to again set new industry standards and eventually wind up to become the most valuable company worldwide, Lancia did not recover any more during the post-war period as it was eventually bought by Fiat and is now an almost defunct brand of Fiat-Chrysler that barely sells sixty thousand cheap and ghastly small cars, which in automotive terms equals to being effectively off the map.

So the question is then: why did Apple quickly rebound from its 1990s stagnation and why did Lancia not become a highly successful automotive OEM that still creates the dreams on four wheels that everyone wants to own? How is it possible that the company that was founded in a bedroom and that came up with slogans like “the computer for the rest us” because you “don`t need to be a genius” to operate one did succeed while the company that survived two world wars, that still holds the record as the most successful rally car brand became an obscure shadow of its old days?

Of course one might look at the circumstances, the differences between post-war Italy and the US of the 80s and later the globalized economy of the 90s and 2000s, which all certainly played its role. But even then: there were other firms in the cold war period which prospered then and prosper even now, like Volkswagen or Toyota.

And therein lies the essence: successful business, especially when looking at large companies, is a people’s business and it goes without saying that all major successful transnational corporations have their own state-of-the-art human resources that keeps the workforce in shape and motivated but also helps to evolve the way people work together, how leadership is defined and how new organizational models enhance productivity...all these things are the cornerstones for sustainable accomplishments that a firm like Lancia just did not develop. 

Innovation, productivity, performance...all these things are tied to the human factor first and foremost. And a company that manages to create a support organization that helps to drive the necessary and sometimes disruptive changes, that helps to retain. reward and develop talent, that also sometimes comes up with innovative collaborational models itself, only then can such a firm defend and consolidate its top position in the long run and become an industry trend-setter that operates one or two steps ahead of the competition. 

Apple certainly is the best practise case where, among other factors, by adding a strong HR organization that has a significant impact on the business while the failing names like Lancia all had purely controlling, reactive and labour-relations focused personell administrations.

In other words: people and their performance are the basis for a firm’s success, so naturally there should be an organization that is dedicated to this valuable resource as there are others that maintain and improve the machinery, it is after all a no-brainer.

[rogueanalystblog]

What is the cost of sub-optimal solutions?

We’ve all come across suboptimalism, be it business or politics, private affairs or personal issues. All too often we try to negotiate the contraints of reality away, all too often we think consesus or shared viewpoints will change reality itself. All too often we know what the optimum is, but decide for a bunch of reasons not to go for that option, all too often arrogance, complacency, ignorance or convenience instead of rational discourse are the true drivers behind suboptimal decisions.

Objective reality though is as indifferent in its beliefs as it is merciless in its consequences. 

Not going for the optimal solutions incurs a massive hidden cost on those affected by the suboptimal decision, although not necessarily on those who voted for that option itself. That is probably one of the main reasons sub-optimalism is the norm rather than the exception: all too often those making the decision are either not affected at all, affected only indirectly or at least hold the belief that others will somehow bear the brunt of that cost.

So what is the total cost suboptimalism is hiding in plain sight you might ask then? Well think of optimal and suboptimal solutions as a mountainous landscape, where the highest peak (ie the optimal solution) is surrounded by lesser mountains (ie the suboptimal ones).

Now of course you would be inclined to say that the true cost then is the difference between the height of the highest tip and one of the lesser crests, and for the time being that might very well be the case. But what happens if you have rising water levels, or erosion or any kind of situation where it just does not suffice anymore to sit on one of the lesser hills? That is where the process of change or disruption steps in, which, you might sense a theme here, is the norm and not a rare exception. Change in the landscape might create negative consequences for positioning yourself at a suboptimal maximum.

When you are exposed to these processes you not only have to go back all the way down into the valley, but then again also to climb up another slope, sometimes over several ups and downs, in order to reach that one summit which enables you to weather the stormy winds of change. 

And while doing so, you will have to abandon and forfeit all that was achieved in the past, all the endeavours, investments, sacrifices that were needed to mount the lesser top were ultimately made in vain. In fact you do not get back to start again at zero, but in addition you have to deduce all the investments made to climb to that suboptimal height plus the costs of coming down to the valley again, plus, lets not forget, the cost of having to climb up all the way to the one optimal pinnacle that holds the one sustainable solution for your predicaments. So now you are worse off than most new kids on the block, you do not get back starting at zero but you have effectively mortaged your prospects of recovery away by supoptimal decisions in the past.

Now factor in constraints like limited resources and time pressure, which again is rather the norm than the exception, and voila you are more often than not confronted with impending disaster. Now the negative consequences, the proverbial flood if you wish, is hitting you with the full force if you camped on peak suboptimum for too long.

Recent history has many examples of such stories, The souvereign debt crisis in Europe, the western car industry in the age of electrification, the downfall of various socialist experiments all the way from Soviet style policies to the Scandinavian model or the British post-war-consensus, the low-cost-sloppy-engineering approach at Boeing, the lackluster due-dilligence in the Monsanto takeover by Bayer all the way to your best friend`s holding on to a failed relationship by buying expensive gifts for his disaffected partner with his credit card…the list of foreseeable doom is endless and the examples are everywhere.

And even if one day the right strategy is finally adopted, it stil requires colossal sacrifice and patience to get back on track while in many cases it turns out that this path is shut completely and any chance of improvement is reduced to zero. Those  are the hopeless cases, usually illustrated by avoidable bankruptcies, state failures or personal dramas, all the way from the explosion of reactor number four in Chernobyl in the 80s or the violent breakup of Yugoslavia in the 90s to spectacular business failures like the closure of Lehman Brothers, Kodak’s too-little-too-late attempt to adapt to the impact of digital cameras and smartphones down to all the 80s or 90s one-hit-wonders or actors that ended up on welfare in the 2000s. In these cases the downfall was either fatal or at least massively crippling, reducing former titans to dwarves.

So instead of praising compromise and consensus as viable solutions we should be downright afraid of these, pun-intended, compromising outcomes and instead try to establish processes and discourses that favour optimal solutions by managing the most valuable resources appropiately, effectively and efficiently: the information and ideas, the dispersed knowledge and experience of the people in the frontlines of the daily business. As trivial as it all may seem, it is trivial mistakes that create the biggest disasters…and you might have guessed it: tripping over trivial mistakes is quite ubiquitous.

You might wonder if failure is rather the norm than success, so what`s the harm then? And by asking that peculiar question you already have your answer: yes failure is the norm, so that alone should be enough to get you off the couch of complacency and thus this very insight should be the all the wakeup-call you or your organization will ever need.