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It’s good to keep in mind that those who extoll the virtues of disruption tend to be—coincidentally enough—the ones in the winners’ circle. But disruption that spreads its benefits and new opportunities broadly is better for society. Fortunately, most disruption falls into this category. In a 2004 working paper, “Schumpeterian Profits in the American Economy: Theory and Measurement,” Yale economist William Nordhaus examined the US economy from 1948 to 2001. Based on the data he collected, he concluded that only 2.2 percent of “profits that arise when firms are able to appropriate the returns from innovative activity” went to the disrupters. “Most of the benefits of technological change are passed on to consumers rather than captured by producers,” he concluded. Like it or not, change is inevitable—but it doesn’t have to be wholly unexpected.
Blitzscaling
Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh
Either explicitly or implicitly, the goal you set is a proxy for an expected-value equation, balancing the benefits that you’re trying to gain against the costs you’ll bear to get them. This is all part of the process of setting the goal. But what happens to that calculus once you’ve set the goal and you’re pursuing it? After we set a goal, it becomes a fixed object. This thing that is a proxy for something else becomes the object itself. The goal is the thing we’re trying to achieve, instead of all the values expressed and balanced when we originally set the goal. The goal becomes fixed even as all the inputs that led to choosing that particular goal evolve. The conditions in the world change. Our knowledge changes. The weights we attach to the benefits and costs change. Our preferences and values change. As these things change, if we were to rerun the cost-benefit analysis, the output would surely be different. But we don’t rerun it. To achieve the things we want to achieve, we have to be responsive to the way the world is changing around us and the way that we ourselves are changing. That would mean unfixing our goals, but we don’t naturally do that. In combination, the pass-fail and fixed nature of goals causes us to just keep on toward the finish line, even when the finish line is no longer what we should be running toward. Inflexible goals aren’t a good fit for a flexible world.
Nobel-Prize-winning economist and cognitive psychologist Herb Simon captured the essential dilemma of our lives in the digital world when he wrote that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently.”
Attention Span
Gloria Mark
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