I found the article interesting because it applies to so many places in life, not just business. Have you ever felt like in your marriage, or a friendship, or in your ministry at church, like what once brought so much fruit and, "bang for the buck", doesn't work with as much effect a second or third time around?
It's something I both love and hate about ministry. LOVE: We are able to constantly be creative and always experiment with new ways to spread the Gospel. HATE: Sometimes it can be frustrating when something that worked so well once (a Sunday service, a event, an encouragement, an idea, etc...) stops being as effective as it once was, and you have to go back to the drawing board again.
Maybe some of the things around us, a friendship, a marriage, a life group, etc.., are overdue for a new & fresh change.
Hope you enjoy Seth's article below, I hope it provokes thought that provokes change.
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Senior management
A newly-retired executive takes a job as an adjunct professor and really shakes things up. Both the school and the students are blown away by her fresh thinking and new approaches.
A forty-year old internet executive who has been running his company for decades misses one new trend after another, because he's still living in 1998.
One thing that happens to management when they get senior is that they get stuck. (As we saw with the new professor, senior isn't about old, it's about how long you've been there).
If you've been doing it forever, you discover (but may not realize) that the things that got you this power are no longer dependable.
Reliance on the tried and true can backfire (Rupert keeps missing one opportunity after another, and keeps misunderstanding the medium he works in) or it can (rarely) pay off (Steve Jobs keeps repeating the same business model again and again--it's not an accident that Apple has no real online or social media footprint. Steve believes in beautifully designed objects, closed systems and evangelizing to developers and creatives).
Worth quoting--one of Arthur C. Clarke's lesser known three laws: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong."
The paradox is that by the time you get to be senior, the decisions that matter the most are the ones that would be best made made by people who are junior...
