Why Bad Ideas Refuse To Die
When I was 27, I moved to Warsaw, Poland to work in the nascent media industry that was developing in the wake of the fall of the communist regime. I had some experience working in media in New York, so I was excited to share what I’d learned and was confident that my knowledge and expertise would be well received.
It wasn’t. Whenever I began to explain how a media business was supposed to work, people would ask me, “why?” That forced me to think about it and, when I did, I began to realize that many of the principles I had learned and taken for granted were merely conventions. Things didn’t need to work that way and could be done differently.
Yet I would never have known that if I had stayed in New York. Surrounded by people who thought like I did, my ideas about “the way things work,” would have never been questioned, but constantly reinforced. That’s why it’s so easy to get disrupted, because we get locked into bad ideas embedded in our networks and aren’t able to shift away from them.
Cultures Of Genius
In 1997, three McKinsey consultants published a popular book titled The War for Talent, which argued that due to demographic shifts, recruiting the “best and the brightest” was even more important than “capital, strategy, or R&D.” The idea made a lot of sense. What could be more important for a business…
