Some Can Transform Themselves. Others Can’t. Here’s What Makes The Difference:
A while back, the conservative columnist John Podhoretz took to the New York Post to denounce the plotline of Disney’s new miniseries The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. In particular, he took umbrage with a subplot that invoked the Tuskegee experiments and other historical warts in a manner that he termed “didactic anti-Americanism.”
His point struck a chord with me because, in my many years living overseas, I always found that people in other countries were more than aware of America’s failures such as slavery, Jim Crow, foreign policy misadventures and so on. What they admire is our ability to take a hard look at ourselves and change course.
It also reminded me of something I’ve noticed in my work helping organizations transform themselves. Some are willing to take a hard look at themselves and make tough changes, while others are addicted to happy talk and try to wish problems away. Make no mistake. You can’t tackle the future without looking with clear eyes at how the present came into being.
A Pregnant Postcard
The genesis of shareholder capitalism and our modern outlook on how things are supposed to work can, in some sense, be traced back to Paris in 1900. It was there and then that an obscure graduate student named…
