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There is an enormously stupid pretense by most businessmen that
they can foresee the future and plan against it. They make grandiose
plans and wild statements about the future. They pay themselves
enormous salaries based on that nonsense. Then, when things go
wrong, as they must, they explain that they are only human. The
truth is they are subhuman. A rational human would not have the
arrogance to make such a pretense in the first place.
The universe is a dynamic ever changing fluid. It is not, and never will be, stable. It is evolving continuously. So, when we plan or attempt to solve problems, we must do it in the now for the now and the near future. We must understand that our solutions will not last forever. Sometimes, as in a battlefield situation, our plans will be very provisional. In these circumstances evaluation must be continuous. In the more stable business situations, our plans will last a little longer. They will not last forever.
What this means is we can consider the future and even hedge against it, but we cannot cast our plans in concrete. We must be always ready to change our view of reality. The universe belongs to those of us who can adapt to change. We cannot solve problems which may or may not occur at some future time. We can only do our best to avoid doing things which will put the future at risk and be flexible in meeting the ever changing universe.
As businessmen, we can and should be open and flexible in our planning. The secret to being a good business leader is the ability to act in the now for the foreseeable future while avoiding those actions which will obviously threaten the future. Foreseeing simple future threats merely requires thoughtfulness. To often, however, the manger s rigid mindset prevents thoughtfulness.
Of course, the manager is not the only practitioner of stilted thinking, merely the most dangerous. In human culture, we find many cases of fixed mindset. Some of these are the engineer, the suburban housewife, the cosmopolitan, the provincial, the redneck, the mystic, and the artist. The true genus is the one who can switch mindsets as the situation demands.
The genus can act within the limits of a particular mindset, knowing full well that there are many other possibilities. The drudges of the world, be it engineers, managers, or housewives, are those who lock themselves into one particular way of thinking and pretend it's the only possible view of the universe. They forget how to change and refuse to acknowledge alternate ways of thinking.
Children can switch mindsets easily. They do it constantly when they are at play. For most of them though, as they grow up, sooner or later, the ability gets beat out of them. They are told to grow up and most do, to become drudges of various sorts. Sometimes the conditioning fails and we get a Buckminster Fuller.
Unfortunately, the Fuller's of our world are few. The brain
dead managers are the most plentiful. I fear it will always be
thus. With our current educational attitudes, one or two genuses
per decade is about all we can hope for. It takes a very tough
mind to rise above the cultural norm. It takes a very special
mind to escape being the product of our times.
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