The Missing Ingredients

What's missing?

My daughter worked in a start-up company that was beset with problems, not of a business nature but of a Human Resources nature.  There was a total lack of "culture," i.e. accepted and expected behavior, attitude, and personal values.  It even went so far as to have a committee address the issue.  Nothing was resolved, the company simply disintegrated and became worthless.  It was a shame because the idea and the needs that it met were real.  Another entrepreneur advanced the idea and it was successful.

Burger King floats the idea that any woman impregnated by a World Cup competitor would receive free hamburgers for life.  A restaurant in Lexington KY refuses service to a White House staffer.  Time magazine uses a composite photo of the president and a child that misrepresents both of them.  All of these are cases of poor judgement.

We see a lot more of this now because there are three ingredients necessary for an idea or an organization to succeed.  These are intelligence, judgement, and discipline.  All three of these have to be in play in order to avoid missteps and embarrassment.  And in today's environment two of the three are missing.

Why do we see more of this?  I submit it is because we are evolving a society that doesn't value experience.  Experience by those who have been there, done that, and are sadder but wiser for it.

Lacking a stratum of experienced heads, the people who don't know any better are making decisions.  The mistaken belief that knowledge, i.e. knowing facts and interpreting them, is all that it takes to be successful.  We have abandoned any idea of an older wiser opinion having value.  We are reluctant to even discuss what we are going to do for fear that it will be nixed.

We are into our screens, searching data bases, and reading news that is manipulative.  Isolating ourselves from any and all who might disagree with us.  And when we think we are right, we do it.  Like the person with the right of way on the road, sometimes we are dead right.

We don't have social intercourse with others in general, in waiting rooms, on the bus, at the fitness center, at the ball game (or any other sports venue.)  If we aren't familiar with someone, don't know them, we have nothing whatever to do with them.

So the idea is put into action and things blow up in our face.  It's time to temper intelligence with experience, to have the wisdom to base our actions on judgement and the discipline to think and ask before acting.