What I learned at technology camp
I spent yesterday at a regional technology planning conference where I was told that the mantra for technology business success is “eat or be eaten.” If this injunction doesn’t sound new, it’s because it isn’t. If I recall, it’s been around since guys hunted mammoth beasts wearing loin cloths and carrying big sticks. What’s new is the scale. Today, you get to make business headlines if your prey is global.
So this raises the questions for me … how would business look today from a globally collaborative rather than globally competitive model? …. would we need to develop new competencies? … what would be the impacts on education, arts, innovation, and environment? … which of our spiritual values would be awakened in the process?
April 28th, 2005 09:25
The zero-sum mentality is just about the heartiest survivor of all. Belief in it seems to resist all evidence to the contrary and all our intuition that it’s repulsive on its face, so utterly out of step with what we see all around us in nature and society.
All the more reason for you to continue to preach your message, Jack.
April 28th, 2005 11:34
Very well put John; so true. Thanks for the encouragement.
April 28th, 2005 16:50
Jack: This is a very witty response to a not-so-funny situation. I appreciate your use of humor. It is an excellent antidote to cynicism and despair, and creates space for non-reactive reflection on ways to practice compassion and use more than just the reptilian brain stem in the marketplace.
April 29th, 2005 06:27
Having struggled with resisting the peer pressure of this type of thinking while immersed among these “leaders” for a couple years, I realized that the take/extract-lose/forfeit mindset does not CREATE. How are those who claim to work for CREATING wealth in our region able to do that when their thought process is all about redistribution/stealing?
April 29th, 2005 09:41
Nice Steve. I’m riffing off the stealing metaphor and thinking of the idea of right livelihood. It brings up a whole new set of questions about what right livelihood is in a “globalized” economy where “disruptive” innovations are positioned as the summum bonum, the highest good.
April 30th, 2005 04:15
Well, there is the whole open source movement in software which is pretty much antithetical to eat-or-be-eaten…. I take it they were ignoring all that? I’m betting that technology = hardware at that conference.
Open source seems to me to work because programmers discover that it’s fun to share, and to give help to others, and to get help from others. They don’t want to work alone. (Programmers, of all people — there’s a stereotype-buster, for you!)
April 30th, 2005 12:53
Yes Sandy, we need to remember the cooking-and-eating-together open source community who are no less tech-minded than their closed source peers. The whole issue of scarcity drives much of the difference in perspectives. If we believe there is only one rabbit in the world for lunch, we must spend as much time fighting one another as we do fighting it.