Part IV: A TASTE OF CREATIVE DESTRUCTION
When Joseph Alois Schumpeter, the great Austrian-American economist, called the process of creation and renewal “the gales of creative destruction,” who imagined we’d be witnessing this phenomenon in real time?
With today’s commercial challenges, few corporate leaders have the vision, energy, or time to control the processes of creative destruction, especially at the pace and scale necessary to compete against the markets. Yet this is precisely what is required to sustain long-term performance excellence in ever more volatile landscapes of business...and education.
The emporiums of commerce, and the cathedrals of education, cannot sustain themselves without this knowledge.
“What drives an innovation breakthrough?”
Others ask how one grows a company beyond its core business. And most fundamentally of all:
“How do we find new ideas?”
As can be seen in my drawing here, examples of the outcomes of creative destruction were the electric light superseding the candle, the buggy giving way to the automobile, and the personal computer making obsolete the typewriter.
The high-performers in today’s marketspaces think productively, not reproductively. With emphasis placed only on reproductive thinking, core competencies soon become core rigidities. In contrast, productive thinking is always refreshing because it calls upon cognitive flexibility and fluency.
Productive thinkers know that nothing is impossible or improbable, and that creative success is inevitable!
Remember An Wang?
He moved from success-full to success-fool. Triumphant in the 1980s, when his word processing machines dominated corporate operations, his status quo soon lost status: the devices never evolved into computers. Neither did they incorporate spreadsheets.
Wang swooshed from near absolute dominance to bankruptcy, a victim of the riptide forces of creative destruction.
The rules have changed forever. Some companies have made the crossing. Under Jack Welch, General Electric negotiated the apocalypse and emerged resurgent. Johnson and Johnson is moving across the divide positively.
Corning has cannibalised its dependence on consumer durables and become a leader in high-tech optical fibres.
L’Oreal has found a new way to organize itself and transfer beauty concepts from one economy to another. But these are the exceptions.
For the larger mass of companies, this journey is long overdue. And for schools and colleges? Immediate action is needed!
At the birth of a corporation, the preeminent emotion is passion, the vital energy that makes things happen. With passion dominant, the tendency is to ignore information and analysis, in the name of vision: “Why bother with analysis when we know what to do?”
As the corporation ages, bureaucracy gets entrenched. Passions metamorphose into “rational decision making,” often the sorry codification of what has worked in the distant past.
An apt metaphor for creative destruction is the foetus, for whom, birth is like a death, for it is the end of the old life in the womb. Likewise, today’s business scene is a stage for lives that are in essence, works in progress for their next incarnation.
Emulating the foetus, which cannot conceive of the life to follow, our limited minds are unable to conceive of life in the wake of creative destruction.
Likewise, consider a simple metaphor through movement, such as dance, which is but the continual loss and instantaneous regaining of balance.
In Indian cosmology, Shiva’s dance is the fine edge of the universe tumbling into chaos and destruction and the simultaneous recreation of poise, in a continuous ecstatic, spontaneous whirl of creation-destruction-creation-destruction.
Organisations wither and die from a lack of competitive adaptiveness. The assumption of organisational continuity, is obsolete. Discontinuity dominates.
The companies that survive and thrive into the 2020s will be unlike corporations today. They will have to master the volatile dynamics of creative destruction — designed for discontinuity, morphing like the markets.
Joseph Schumpeter anticipated this transformation over six decades ago when he observed:
“The problem that is usually being visualised is how capitalism administers existing structures, whereas the relevant problem is how it creates and destroys them.”
© Dilip Mukerjea
Say Keng's comments:
If I were to sum up very briskly the essence of the 4-part blogpost by Dilip Mukerjea, I would like to use a particular excerpt from global futurist and independent scholar Jack Uldrich's forthcoming book, '20/20 Foresight: A Futurist Looks Ahead to the Ten Trends That Will Shape the World of 2020', as follows:
"... the future of education isn’t learning about something, it’s about learning how to fluidly adapt to change. And it’s definitely not about going to a place to get “educated,” it’s about accessing and customizing the ocean of knowledge that already surrounds us in “the cloud.”... "
Readers can go to this link at 'Jump the Curve with Jack Uldrich' weblog to read the chapter from which the foregoing has been excerpted.
I would strongly recommend readers to read also Jack Uldrich's '8 Questions for Innovative Educators' in the same weblog. Here's the link.
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