But hungry for immediate profits at all costs. The guarantee of short and medium term profits freezes one in a morally and temporally worn out project; it has one crouch under the umbrella of the comfort zone by fear of not, mistakenly, letting a limb stray outside its protective shade; it minimizes or eliminates any ideas that could change, even partially, the profitable paradigms.
There is no greater barrier against innovation than searching and inventorying good practices from everywhere and trying to implement them as such, without nuance, in completely different social, economic and cultural environments.
Indeed, there is no greater barrier. What does exist, however, is a direct and imminent threat to innovation: babbling on the subject of innovation, stemming only from the desire to join the buzzword trend. This chatter is more toxic than disinterest in innovation.
Many walk around with a death grip on the word innovation, not willing to let it go no matter what, like a pit bull with its teeth stuck in a rubber bone. One might get the impression that we live in a world so advanced that it is able to manage pandemics, wars, energy and financial crises, even if they were, say, all compressed and superimposed in two years.
But hey, how come this world, inebriated with words, convinced that it is innovating, did so poorly in managing this unfortunate superposition of catastrophes? How come it strives to act just like before? How come it aspires to return to the old “normal”, thinking that this will save us all?
Seems too much like the scenes before the sinking of the Titanic, when people were having fun, singing and dancing, even though the ship was already taking on water, doesn’t it?
In times like these, you need genuine ideas and leaders or you collapse as a society, organization, or system sooner or later. Nothing needs to be proven on this point, had you opened a history textbook at least in middle school.
“Marius, my dear, the world lacks big ideas”, a great man told me, you can find him in many books on the history of medicine, despite the efforts of his successors to minimize him, to reduce him to the lowest common denominator.
The lowest common denominator – this operation was supposed to remain only in math books, not turn into a mass operation, applied at the level of society, school, corporation.
If you are educated in the spirit of values that have crossed the millennia, it is difficult for you to understand how the world can function without authentic leaders and without big ideas, from one day to the next, like a mad race from nowhere to nowhere.
People and their wonderful ideas are needed to move the world forward, to keep fixing the horizon line further and further, to inspire people (and above all children and young people, who need more than ever of authentic landmarks) and make them understand the higher dimension of us as a species.
Otherwise, living from festival to festival, disinterested in science, innovation and big ideas, aren’t our lives reduced so much that we are practically witnessing an involution on the scale of humanity?
Our history is actually a succession of terrible ups and downs, from which we have emerged each time with our own vision, ideas, leaders and names. That’s how Apollodorus went down in history, not Gabriel of Damascus – you get the point, and the examples abound.
There’s still a chance, as long as there are still people who have access to the news about the rovers exploring Mars and whose names are banal – Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity and Perseverance – when they could be called Let it go, little brother (in Romanian, Las’ că merge și așa, frățioare, a saying that means that you shouldn’t put too much effort in a specific task, as long as it’ll do the job at least once).