Paradigm Wars

Thomas Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions nearly fifty years ago to describe how difficult it is to change minds when they are wedded to a paradigm about the basic assumptions in their field.  His point was that evidence could be dismissed for a very long time by believers in the extant assumptions, in fact it usually required that the old guard died rather than any thought they'd change their minds.

Joel Barker picked up on Kuhn's thesis twenty-five years ago, and developed some terrific videotapes for corporate training groups, seeking to inspire "out of the box" thinking to fuel innovative corporate thinking.  Alas, it mostly doesn't happen.  I have just finished a memoir about our Logic Analyzer inventions that documents some of the issues we faced at HP.  The book, Permission Denied: Odyssey of an Intrapreneur, discusses seven rules for Intrapreneurs, but more importantly, seven rules for managing them. It is the management failure, not the creative failure, that dooms most corporate innovative efforts.  People prefer to stay with what they know, rather than bet on the unknown.

And here we are, coming off a Red vs. Blue election that revealed fairly dramatically how differently two sides view many issues within America -- whether jobs creation, gun control, women's rights, who pays what taxes, entitlements, immigration or a myriad of other topics.  These views have become increasingly rancorous and unable to be reconciled -- a sure sign of a religious war or a paradigm war.

But the bigger issue is that while both sides are essentially unable to 'hear' the other, each is basically blind to the real issue that is causing angst.  Re the jobless recovery, and whether Obama or Romney could do better, the fact is that American jobs have been decimated by American business leaders sending the work to other countries, either by outsourcing or offshoring.  Why?  Because other countries are more competitive than the US at this point for these jobs.  Simple arithmetic, one might say, but it seldom entered the election campaigning.  On this one, it is the elephant in the room.

Similar issues exist all over the place.  Land taxes in Silicon Valley are eessentially frozen at 1975 rates unless a true sale happens, in which case the land can be reappraised.  This is due to a unique law, passed in 1978 in California known as Proposition 13.  It froze both residential and commercial real estate taxation until a sale or until 35 years of leasehold.  So -- all commercial leases have, guess what, a 34 year, 11 month termination today, and then they're renewed at 1975 rates when Silicon Valley was still mostly apple orchards, and the name of the place was still more known as the Valley of Heart's Desire.  How much does this matter?  Estimates are that IBM, HP, and Stanford plus their brethren are camped on savings PER YEAR of $6 billion in unassessed current value land taxes, this while the state deficit is $16 billion.  Sizable loophole.  And the once-vaunted University of California graduate schools programs have been decimated in the meantime, which is a big part of what built Silicon Valley

So, one task for InnovaScapes research is to ferret out some of these challenges, to try to illuminate the problems and potential solutions, or if not that grandiose, at least they'd be 'food for thought'.