Election cycles bring out the best in people—or not. Visiting our daughter at a large Midwestern university last weekend was quite the eye-opener. Seems political messaging and manure slinging is as nasty and prevalent in America’s heartland as it is in the sleazy world of Chicago politics. From the sound of it the corruption is just as bad too.
Watch a few political ads and you are ready to sentence both candidates to a lifetime of hard labor in a rancid, disease-ridden penal colony far removed from humanity. Listening to them blame one another for the ills of our economy is tantamount to death by a thousand cuts. At the same time the populous blames government for not doing enough. Our presidents look like they’ve been dragged through a rock grinder by the time they leave office. Everyone, it seems, is a critic.
But what if our present economic situation wasn’t the fault of any government agency or leader at all? What if the problems we are facing have more to do with unavoidable and irreversible change than partisanship and bureaucratic incompetence? After all, playing the blame game will only get you so far anyway.
In my quiet time this morning I was reminded of how information was communicated in ancient times. Scribes copied texts and bound those documents, typically using parchment, to form a larger collection called a codex. Hence, scribes performed an extremely valuable service in ancient times, as did the manufacturer and seller of the parchment and inks used to create such compilations.
Then along comes Johannes Gutenberg and the industry was never the same. Movable type was now used to copy documents because it was faster, more accurate, and capable of mass production on a scale never before imagined. Paper replaced the more expensive parchment and papyrus. And more people had access to the written word as a result, fueling a magnitude of change relative to literacy among common folks while spawning entirely new industries and obsoleting others.
Of course, I am typing this post on a computer that is postage stamp sized compared to the computers needed to produce this much power as recent as 20 years-ago—if that were even possible back then.
The bottom line is technology and innovation wrought change upon the world at a rate so fast and furious that we are all a bit dazed and confused as we scramble to catch up. Due to initiatives like TQM, six sigma, and lean manufacturing organizations can out-produce consumer demand. Jobs and careers that were once essential are now obsolete. And behavior of the masses is changing just as fast. Traditional values and ways of doing things are no longer the norm.
The blame game happens in business as well. When things don’t go quite as we envisioned we spend a lot of time looking for someone to blame rather than asking “how can we fix the problem.”
At MindMeld we use a tool called the fishbone chart for analyzing what barriers, constraints, or unrecognized problems might be hindering the growth and health of a business. It’s a simple process but it does require discipline and a commitment to identifying root causes of flat or flagging performance and taking the necessary steps to remedy the situation.
If you would like to know more contact me at doug@mindmeldmarketing.com. In the meantime, let’s forget about party affiliation, casting aspersions, and character assassination and focus on how we can all be part of sustaining our republic and the values we all hold dear through this tumultuous inflection point. Our children will thank us later.