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How Ukraine Defied History | Digital Tonto
My friend, the global activist Srdja Popović, once told me that the goal of a revolution should be to become mainstream, to be mundane and ordinary. If you are successful, it should be difficult to explain what was won because the previous order seems so unbelievable. Those words were very much on my mind last week as I watched Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy flanked by top European leaders at the White House. It’s getting harder to remember a time when Ukraine wasn’t admired around the world. It has come so far since I first arrived in Kyiv more than two decades ago, the past now feels almost like a mirage. To be honest, I’m not sure anyone really knows how we got here. There were so many pivotal moments. What if Putin hadn’t poisoned Yushchenko in 2004? What if he had died or dropped out of the race? What if Putin hadn’t shut off the gas? Or derailed the EU trade agreement? What if, on the night of the full-scale invasion, Zelenskyy hadn’t stood with his ministers in Kyiv and used the camera on his smartphone to broadcast to the world, “I’m here”? So many, “what ifs,” far too many to list. So many questions left unanswered, and so many genuinely unanswerable. But I did get the answer to one question that had long been on my mind. At a small dinner I attended with Yushchenko and his wife last year, I asked him about that pivotal moment, when he left his hospital bed, body ravaged and face disfigured, marched down to Parliament and demanded, “Look at my face.” I was sitting right across from him, just a few feet away, and he told me softly—as if the moment his courage inspired a nation and changed the course of history was just about the simplest thing in the world—“I just always believed in the Ukrainian spirit.” It was a phrase he had used throughout the evening, not dramatically, but in passing, as if he were referring to an antique piece of furniture that had always been there, quietly waiting to be noticed. So maybe the simplest answer to the question of how truly transformational change can happen is that, first, someone has to believe in it.
Here’s What Nobody Tells You About Building an Innovative Culture—Not Everyone Will Thrive In It | Digital Tonto
At PARC, Xerox created a culture where creative minds could thrive. It was there that Alan Kay invented object-oriented software, Bob Metcalfe developed Ethernet; and so many other technologies were created that became central to the age of personal computers. Some of the technology was spun off into entirely new companies, such as 3Com and Adobe. It was also a place where Gary Starkweather, who had been a pariah in the old Xerox research lab back on the east coast, found he fit right in. The technology he had been developing became the world’s first laser printer and brought the bitmapped graphics technology to life. As a product, it would prove to be so enormously profitable it would save Xerox. Yet even the most innovative cultures aren’t fertile ground for every idea. Two researchers at PARC, Dick Shoup and Alvy Ray Smith, were working on a new graphics technology called SuperPaint. Unfortunately, it didn’t fit in with PARC’s vision of personal computing. Much like Starkweather, the two were seen as outcasts and would go elsewhere. Smith would team up with another graphics pioneer, Ed Catmull, at the New York Institute of Technology. Later they joined George Lucas, who saw the potential for computer graphics to create a new paradigm for special effects. Eventually, the operation was spun out and bought by Steve Jobs. That company, Pixar, was sold to Disney in 2006 for $7.4 billion. Great leaders build cultures that are fit for purpose. That means you have to make choices. Inevitably, that means that some things—and some people—won’t fit.
Disruption Doesn’t Drive Innovation—Safety Does | Digital Tonto
In 1997, when Clayton Christensen first published The Innovator’s Dilemma and introduced the term “disruptive innovation,” it was a clarion call. His key insight was that, under certain conditions, the basis of competition in an industry shifts, and the strategies that once made incumbents successful can suddenly make them vulnerable. Yet what Christensen didn’t anticipate was how seductive the idea of disruption would become. Soon all of the pundits—most of whom never read his book or understood his concepts—were preaching the gospel of disruption. Suddenly, everything had to be disrupted all the time. But the truth was, we weren’t disrupting industries, but disrupting people. The unfortunate reality is that when most leaders talk about disruption, they’re not thinking about business strategy but elevating themselves. Disruption becomes a personal brand. A way to feel bold, daring, visionary. Yet while they are glorifying themselves, they’re making things harder for everyone else and there’s a cost to that. Genuinely visionary leaders know that disruption and safety go hand in hand. The safer you make your organization, the more you empower your people to think boldly, take risks, and explore new territory. The more stress you create, the more you drain cognitive capacity, limit creativity and shrink the space for insight, collaboration, and original thinking. To truly lead an enterprise, you need to empower the people in it. You do that by building trust, which can only thrive in an environment of safety and well-being. If you want bold action, you need to create a space in which it can thrive.
What if The Future Looks Exactly Like The Past? | Digital Tonto
In his 1954 essay, "The Question Concerning Technology," German philosopher Martin Heidegger described technology as akin to art, in that it reveals truths about the nature of the world, brings them forth, and puts them to some specific use. In the process, human nature and its capacity for good and evil are also revealed. He offers the example of a hydroelectric dam, which uncovers a river’s energy and channels it into electricity. In much the same sense, the breakthrough technologies of today, like the large language models that power our AI chatbots, the forces of entanglement and superposition that drive quantum computing, as well as technologies like CRISPR and mRNA that fuel tomorrow’s miracle cures, were not “built,” so much as they are revealed. In another essay, "Building Dwelling Thinking," Heidegger explains that what we build for the world depends on how we interpret what it means to live in it. The relationship is, of course, reflexive. What we build depends on how we wish to dwell and that act, in and of itself, shapes how we build further. As we go through yet another hype cycle, we need to keep in mind that we’re not just building for the future, but also for the present, which will look very much like the past. While it is, of course, possible that we are on the brink of some utopian age in which we unlock so much prosperity that drudgery, poverty and pain become distant memories, the most likely scenario is that most people will continue to struggle. The truth is that innovation should serve people, not the other way around. To truly build for the world, you need to understand something about how people live in it. Breakthrough innovation happens when people who understand technical solutions are able to collaborate with people who understand real-world problems. Just like in the past, that’s what we need more of now.