In the real world outside of academia, we have the same problem where corporate employees are discouraged from thinking, they are trained to do things exactly according to the employee handbook, industry BMP’s or the instructions of their bosses, but their bosses are doing the same? Is anyone, even the C-suite or the board of directors, still thinking? Are they busy copying their competitors’ marketing campaigns, business strategies and processes too? Apparently, which is pretty obvious from reading trade magazines and following industry associations.
In fact, many industry associations (bureaucratic status quo) have training courses for people in the industry, but that just means that once everyone is trained, all companies run the same track at the same speed with the same power. and the same rules as everyone else. Welcome to the human rat race – it’s more like NASCAR than groundbreaking innovation or technological breakthroughs. How can you or your company win if you simply copy what everyone else is doing or trying to do? How can your company get to a breakthrough or the next big thing?
We Americans complain when China and others steal our intellectual property, and yet what are we doing to ourselves? Nobody thinks anymore? Every time I turn around I see the same thing. What happened to American innovation, creative problem solving, and that ‘can do’ attitude that when there’s a will, we’ll find a way? Do we see only a few corporations thinking bigger or pushing boundaries? Why?
Do we have too many restrictive rules and regulations? Are too many companies worried about lawsuits or setbacks in shareholder equity, share price and quarterly earnings? Are too many class action attorneys ready to strike, preventing companies from taking risks? Are companies overly concerned about boycotts enabled by political correctness in our evolving society? Be careful not to offend anyone, be safe, don’t rock the boat?
Is it all of these things mentioned above, plus the slow and mind-numbing indoctrination of the media, academia, and the inherent ever-pervasive indoctrination of government? Perhaps, but what is the underlying cause. Humans are not getting less intelligent. IQ scores have been rising for 100 years. Could social networks have something to do with this problem that I have observed? Some say that social networks have helped innovation, right? It seems like faster communication would increase original thinking and make everyone a little more innovative, but it hasn’t. It seems that it is cheating our society more than it is helping to foster creative minds and make us all innovators.
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