You’re Fired.
“Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.”
Those famous last words tell me all the adjectives I need to know about how people in a company operate: risk-averse, calculating, political, bureaucratic, orthodox.
I should have known then, during a final interview for a Tier 2 consultancy firm, that I wasn’t going to be hired by the partner who had just arrived after a tenured career with them. Nobody gets fired for hiring IBM; nobody that is going to stick their neck out gets hired by them either.
The only worthwhile thing I can remember IBM creating in the last 20 years is the Thinkpad; and even then it’s a competent laptop in a sea of microchips and escape keys.
Businesses in the 50’s and 60’s could afford to be complacent; hyperlocal competitors racing to the bottom were the stuff of fantasy alongside predictions about handheld personal communication devices and flying cars.
The wolf is truly at the door now though: AI is here, half of the planet is on Zuckerbook and the rise of remote working means your expensive mortgage payments are being undercut by someone hanging out in a café in Bali. Enterprises are being eaten more frequently than Big Macs, inspirational leaders are talking about taking bets on intrapreneurs and yet there is still an uncomfortable tension when we consider hiring in the person who has sold/shuttered their own business, thus paying the school fees to be there.
This kind of bureaucratic empathy leading to entropy isn’t new; a leader who isn’t concerned with their longevity hasn’t toiled to get to where they got to. The irony, though, is that some of these leaders were the innovators of their day: the people who put their heads above the parapets and bet on themselves to win.
As the rate of change within our world continues to increase, so should our appetite for risk, imagination, exploration and exultation within our businesses. As we remove our reliance on the fossil fuels that previously powered the industrial era, so business should move away from relying on fossil leaders and companies to ensure their longevity.
Think about that the next time you buy IBM.
