Why innovation is not always the answer.

We’re all part of that urgent storm of change and innovation.

As for my part, I am an innovator; it’s what I do. I can’t help it; I do it automatically. But even I admit that innovation is not always good, nor is its timing. Innovation is mostly disruptive and painful to the people who lose their jobs and careers when innovation happens. Their trades or professions become commoditized, outsourced or obsolete.

Then there’s the politics of innovation. With the rallying cry for innovation sounded, there will be unnecessary destruction and disruption without reason. Order will become chaos without a strategy. Entrenched bureaucracies will see this as justification to act as usual and kill the innovators, bury them in unmarked career graves and close ranks. Both sides will polarize. The volatility of politics will predominate and neither side concedes until it is too late.

Like putting a very old and sick dog out of its pain, some businesses (corporations) don’t need innovation. They need to be put down or sold off in parts like harvested donor organs that can bring life to another in need.

I can’t help but ask if most innovations simply create more problems that need more “innovations” to solve.  Should we then stand still, if only for a moment and listen for some form of ecological inspiration instead of the sound of our own strenuous breathing?  I don’t know, I leave that to us to decide together.  You already know what I do: I am an innovator; it’s what I do…..

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Part time lawyers not welcome in Switzerland!

Iain Jacobs,General Counsel at The Contract Centre and Managing Director of The Dispute Centre, posted this at The Online Bar Association Group on Linkedin:

“There is also prejudice against part-time working amongst lawyers (my own former company only took on one part-timer among around 170 lawyers). I think the technological tools and virtual office structure is ideally placed to allow a second emancipation (and that view is shared by several of my highly qualified and experienced women-lawyer friends here).  Switzerland is an extreme case, but how is it in your country?”

No matter how extreme the Swiss may be perceived, all it takes is for one Swiss lawyer with nothing to lose, to figure out how to work part-time from his seaside flat in Valencia.  Soon that sun tanned, part-time lawyer will be leveraging all the full-timers at the traditionally, snow-bound firm by outsourcing work to them. Then the self-exiled “part-time lawyer” will occasionally supervise the full-time lawyers’ work while sailing around Sardinia on the client’s 100ft, hand-made Finnish yacht.

Game over.

But the traditional firm will not actually know the game is over for some time yet. When it does it will seem like it happened overnight.  Revolution is the common shriek let out by those abruptly woken up from inertia.  For pioneers, change is an excruciatingly slow evolutionary process.  It’s like watching a glacier melt.

Traditional firms actually cannot change within their existing paradigm.  They torture themselves and their employees with unnecessary demands.  One cannot embrace real change by changing the color of one’s shirts. Real change is more like giving all your belongings away, moving to Namibia and joining a tantric group of hippies!  It’s no wonder very few firms embrace change voluntarily.

Who would give up a life of comfort and prosperity for uncertainty and temporary scarcity?  Those that think they know what’s coming, those that like uncertainty and those that were tricked into it.  May your trip to Namibia be joyful, may your hippie friends bathe often, and may your family and friends appreciate all your belongings, because you’re not getting them back.

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