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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.
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.
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.
If You’re Serious About Change, You Need To Make These 3 Mindset Shifts | Digital Tonto
Leaders are trained to operate with a manager mindset because consensus and predictability are essential to execute complex operations. Everyone needs to know their role to carry out their responsibilities and be able to trust that everyone else will do the same. That’s how you deliver for customers, partners, employees and other stakeholders. When you need to change course, however, you need to discard the manager mindset and embrace a changemaker mindset and that means that the usual best practices won’t work. Change isn’t predictable, but uncertain. You can’t expect a consensus, so need to identify a coalition that’s willing to believe in the change vision and explore possibilities. What makes that so difficult is that adopting a changemaker mindset requires leaders to abandon what made them successful in the first place. Persuading people that you have the right vision is unlikely to succeed, so you need to identify people who are already enthusiastic about it. Instead of emphasizing on how the change is different, you need to focus on values that are already widely shared. What’s perhaps most challenging—and humbling— for leaders to understand is that transformation is not a journey in which they get to play the hero, but a strategic conflict with the status quo in their own organization, which is supported by sources of power that have had years—and sometimes decades—to take hold. Effective leaders need to master both the manager mindset and the changemaker mindset and learn to effectively switch off between the two. Just because you need to pursue change doesn’t mean you can just ignore everyday operations. On the other hand, if you try to pursue change with a manager mindset you are almost guaranteed to fail. Genuine transformation happens not when you push change harder, but when you embrace a different mindset.
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.
Happy 16th Birthday Digital Tonto! | Digital Tonto
Much of what this blog has become was born in the winter of 2004 on Independence Square in Kyiv. It was there, with the uncertainty and confusion of the Orange Revolution swirling around us, that we stood shivering in the cold. We didn’t know what would become of us, or of Ukraine, or of anything,
It’s Good to Learn From Your Mistakes. It’s Better to Learn From Someone Else’s. | Digital Tonto
We remember our heroes in their most iconic moments. It’s hard to think of Martin Luther King Jr. without picturing him at the Lincoln Memorial, delivering his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. In much the same way, Steve Jobs will always be remembered standing on stage, calmly saying, “Just one more thing…” before unveiling the next revolutionary product. Yet those moments are deceiving. Long before Jobs became the creator of the iPhone and the CEO of the most valuable company in history, he was cast out of the company he founded. It was what he learned during his years in relative obscurity—discipline, focus, how to retain top talent—that set the stage for his later triumphs. Martin Luther King Jr. did even better. He learned from others’ mistakes. He studied those who came before him, especially Gandhi. That’s how he knew to build his movement methodically, to train activists and to pick fights he knew he could win. Rather than simply calling people into the streets, he focused early on local campaigns and boycotts, each with a clear strategic objective. All change leaders need to learn from their own mistakes—and that's crucial. But the really smart ones learn from the mistakes of others. The truth is, it’s hard to learn much just by looking at successes. You have to look at the whole picture: examine the missteps, moments of weakness and strategic blunders and the lessons learned. That’s how you improve your odds. That’s why, before you set out to make a significant impact in any field or endeavor, ask yourself: Who’s tried this before? What were their failures? What can we learn from them? And how can we apply those lessons to the challenges we face?
When You Fail To Forge Shared Values, Your Vision Will Fail Too | Digital Tonto
The Women’s March of 2017 was never built on solid ground. Tensions between the white activists who wanted to emphasize issues like reproductive rights and the activists of color who prioritized things such as criminal justice, corporate power, and wealth inequality were barely concealed under the parade of hopeful slogans and pussy hats. Things came to a head in February 2018, when Tamika Mallory, one of the co-chairs, was reported to have attended an event featuring Louis Farrakhan where he let loose with a torrent of anti-Semitic slurs. Further recriminations followed after Mallory refused to condemn Farrakhan during an appearance on The View. In the aftermath, three founding board members announced they were transitioning to other projects. Every change effort faces similar challenges. The status quo always has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully. The opposition, for its part, must weave together a coalition of fractious interests and competing priorities. This often devolves into infighting, recrimination, and, inevitably, collapse. The failure to survive victory is always a failure to leverage shared values, usually in favor of differentiating values that allow people to assert their status and identity. Transformational change is always made up of small groups, loosely connected, but united by a shared purpose. The job of change leaders is to help those groups connect through shared values that can form the basis of shared identity and shared purpose. To do that, you need to be explicit and up-front. Papering over differences will only give them space to fester and, eventually, they will erupt. Like so many that came before, the Women’s March failed to meet that challenge, as do so others that are failing even now. The path to success is a narrow corridor and must be tread with courage and discipline. Much like Tolstoy said about families, successful movements always end up looking alike; unsuccessful ones fail in their own way.
The Experts Aren’t the Problem. It’s How You’re Listening to Them | Digital Tonto
One of the best innovation stories I’ve ever heard came from a senior executive at a leading tech firm. Apparently, his company had won a million-dollar contract to design a sensor that could detect pollutants at very small concentrations underwater. So the firm set up a team of crack chip designers and they got to work. Shortly after, the team’s marine biologist walked in and casually dropped a bag of clams on the table. Noticing the stunned looks around the room, he explained that clams are incredibly sensitive to pollutants—able to detect contaminants at just a few parts per million—and respond by opening their shells. So instead of developing an expensive sensor, all they needed was a basic system to detect when the clams opened. “They saved $999,000,” the executive told me, “and had the clams for dinner.” The story gets to the core of the challenge of listening to experts. If you only listened to the chip designers, you would devote far too many resources and come up with a less optimal solution. If you only relied on marine biologists, you would never be able to design even simple chips. To solve meaningful problems, you need to integrate insights from multiple domains. Innovation isn’t just about technical talent, it’s about creating the space for the dialogue across disciplines. So when we listen to experts, we need to apply a critical lens and ask: What’s the nature of their expertise? If you listen to technology experts, for example, you will come away with a better understanding of what a technology like artificial intelligence is capable of. If you listen to economists, they will give you more realistic context about its potential impact on society. Yet if you examine both with a critical eye, a new story emerges. AI’s productivity on some tasks, such as coding, is already transformational. For others, such as personal services, it has been negligible. That may not predict what the future will be, but it will give you some actionable insight on where to focus your efforts most productively. Understanding the world isn’t about “doing your own research,” but listening to experts critically and integrating the accumulated knowledge from multiple domains.
3 Stupid Things Leaders Often Think | Digital Tonto
Leaders begin their role with the best of intentions. No one start out by thinking, “I want to make everyone’s lives miserable and undermine their performance.” Yet, we know many do just that. Most are thrust into the role, with very little training or development, because they were good at something else or there was simply a hole to be filled. In "Good Boss, Bad Boss," organizational psychologist Bob Sutton writes, “Devoting relentless attention to doing one good thing after another—however small—is the only path I know to becoming and remaining a great boss” and that’s good advice. But before you can become a great boss, you first need to stop being a bad one. The first step? Letting go of the beliefs that undermine your leadership effectiveness. While nobody sets out to adopt counterproductive ideas, certain myths creep in over time and shape decision-making. These misconceptions lead to poor actions that harm both leaders and their teams. Here are three of the most common stupid things to watch out for:
When You Feel The Urge To Create A Conflict, Create A Dilemma Instead | Digital Tonto
When we feel passionately about an idea it becomes part of our identity, dignity and sense of self. That’s why any opposition can feel like an affront, an assault not only on the idea, but on our very being. That makes us want to lash out, to dominate, to overpower and smite our enemies; to show them that they cannot win and resistance is futile. That never ends well. Usually, you just get pulled into a petty back-and-forth. Even if you prevail in the immediate conflict, you create animosity that is bound to turn back on you and undermine what you are trying to achieve. Whatever stories we want to tell ourselves, the urge to dominate is always seeking status for ourselves, not devotion to a cause. That’s why instead of creating a conflict, we need to create a dilemma for our antagonists. It starts with identifying a shared value and then designing a constructive act rooted in that shared value. That’s what creates the dilemma: Your opponents either need to let the act go forward or to violate the shared value. To change the world, we need to learn to see it differently. We can’t just fight the same losing battles. We need to redefine the terms of our struggle in ways that tilt the playing field to our advantage. In the final analysis, that’s what makes the difference between people who want to make a point and those who actually make a difference.
The End of History All Over Again… | Digital Tonto
Before 1789 the world was ruled by the divine right of kings and the feudal system. Yet that year would prove to be an inflection point. The American Constitution the French Revolution and the first Industrial Revolution, already underway since the introduction of the steam engine in 1776, together created a fundamental realignment of power. Another came in 1919, with the end of World War I, the rise of the United States as a global superpower, and the second Industrial Revolution, driven by electricity and the internal combustion engine. The next half century would not be defined by empires, but ideologies, as capitalism, communism and, briefly, fascism, vied for supremacy. That era ended with the Cold War in 1989 and what comes next remains unclear. The neoliberal global order, if not completely discredited, has been found grossly inadequate. Today, we’re undergoing four major shifts in demography, technology, resources, and migration that are straining the global system towards a breaking point. Our institutions—governmental, educational, scientific, religious and economic—have been under siege for decades and have lost credibility. The main debate now is whether the current system needs to be completely torn down and replaced with some new order or redesigned, streamlined and strengthened. The one constant through it all is the basic need for recognition. That’s been our fundamental mistake over the past half century. We believed we could transcend human nature and build a society on purely rational economic foundations. We were wrong. Whatever comes next will have to begin by acknowledging the visceral human yearning for dignity and meaning.
Why You Should Beware The Action Trap | Digital Tonto
When you are launching a new initiative, you want to start with a bang. You want to create a “sense of urgency,” conjure images of “burning platforms” and get everybody’s butts in gear. You will have the urge to recruit high-profile executives, arrange a big “kick-off” meeting and look to move fast, gain scale and rack up some quick wins. While this may be a good approach for a traditional initiative, for a transformational project it’s bound to backfire. Yes, you’ll excite and inspire some, but you will also ignite resistance. As opposition forms and begins undermining you behind the scenes, you are likely to get bogged down. Ironically, creating a sense of urgency often creates the opposite effect. That’s why when we work with an organization, we never do a full-blown launch, but rather start with a Keystone Change—a clear and tangible goal that involves multiple stakeholders and paves the way for future change. Yet instead of shooting bigger, we encourage the team to make it as small as possible. Your first actions should be barely noticeable and focused on people who are as enthusiastic about change as you are. Any early failures should be nearly invisible to the larger organization, but a meaningful success will provide traction and momentum to move forward. You don’t need to convince everyone at once, just enough to get going. Action without strategy, on the other hand, is doomed to fail. That’s why so many change efforts floundsert. They rush in, make noise and sputter out. Then people wonder why nothing ever changes.
Change Usually Fails. Ask These 3 Questions To Improve Your Odds | Digital Tonto
To lead change you have to believe in it. You have to be optimistic and overcome doubts—your own and those of others. So it’s understandable that you want to make sure you have all the answers going in. Unfortunately that’s an unrealistic expectation. Change is inherently unpredictable and nobody has all the answers. But what you can do is ask good questions: Who will resist change and why? What are the sources of power that support the status quo and how can you influence them? Where should you start and who should you start with? These are tough questions without clear or simple answers, but you have to continually ask them. What you definitely don’t want to do is just make a plan and move forward on a timeline, hell or high water. That’s a sure path to misery and defeat. The truth is that nothing slows you down more than failure, so you want to move forward deliberately, learning as you go, and building traction and strength as you progress. Change is nonlinear, you accelerate over time. Pixar’s Ed Catmull described new ideas as “ugly babies” because they start out “awkward and unformed, vulnerable and incomplete.” “Originality is fragile,” he wrote. “The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends… Our job is to protect our babies from being judged too quickly. Our job is to protect the new.” To take the metaphor a bit further, what you don’t want to do is take your ugly baby down to a biker bar and just let it get wailed on. Yet there’s something about human nature that, when we feel passionately about an idea, we want to convince the skeptics. We want to put the idea in front of exactly the people who hate it most and try to show that we’re right. Don’t do that. Protect the baby. Start by asking the right questions.
Here’s How To Think About Artificial Intelligence, Jobs And The Economy | Digital Tonto
Henry Ford provides a good model for understanding how displacement, productivity, and reinstatement shape how technology affects jobs and the economy: Automation on his family farm displaced his labor there, which led to him going to work for Thomas Edison. His increased productivity afforded him the luxury of leisure time, which he used to tinker, experiment and imagine new things. It was the third effect—reinstatement—that proved transformative. Ford became prosperous enough to start his own company and pioneer an industry that created many more jobs. Millions left their family farms, where their labor was no longer needed, to work in factories. Their increased productivity allowed them to earn more and educate their children to work in the high-tech industries of today. What’s crucial to understand is that it is ecosystems, not inventions, that determine the future. You can’t understand the impact of the automobile just by riding in one. It’s the second and third-order effects—how improved transportation and logistics transformed industries such as retail and manufacturing—that truly mattered. Electricity did the same for communication, information processing, entertainment and other things. For a decade, I’ve argued that we need to prepare for a new era of innovation. In fact, I considered this idea so important that I chose it as the title of the final chapter of my book Mapping Innovation, with which I concluded, “It is no longer enough to disrupt and disintermediate industrial era institutions; we must forge a new path with a renewed commitment to fundamental innovations.” What will determine our future is not any particular technology, but the ecosystems we build and what they are designed to serve. How can we focus our energies on tasks that AI can’t so easily automate? Do we intend to feed the hungry, cure the sick and protect dignity for every human life? Or do we want to preserve those things for only those that market and technological forces feel are deserving? Only we can shift our focus toward creating completely new industries that can serve us better. No machine, no matter how smart, can automate those decisions for us. Some things, we just have to do ourselves.
Working, Fast And Slow | Digital Tonto
I think you can learn something about a person through their relationship with books. Some read a lot of books, knocking off one a week, but never tackle anything challenging. Others will read a single book over the course of months. The truth is that there are different books for different purposes and, in the end, the reader takes possession of the experience. I write my books to be read somewhat slowly and put a lot of work and thought into creating an experience crafted for that pace. My friend Alex Osterwalder, on the other hand, has little interest in books like mine. He creates his books to be used rather than read, and puts a lot of thought and effort into developing that experience. But Alex and I don’t write for different people—we write for different modes of work. Alex’s books are designed for conference tables and sticky notes, my work is more likely to sit on night tables and beside couches. Alex’s work can be used by groups to collaborate, while the experience I work to create is intended to be more personal, experienced alone. To become productive, you need to master multiple modes of work, both fast and slow. To get things done we need to be efficient, creating OODA loops through observing, orienting, deciding and acting. At the same time, we need to take time to explore and reflect, so that we can recognize when the need arises to step out of the loop and go off in a new direction. As I wrote years ago in "Harvard Business Review," everyone can be creative. Despite decades of searching, researchers have never identified a “creative personality” or any such thing. What the evidence does show is this: to create work that is meaningful and original, we need to protect the time and mental space where meaningful, original work actually happens.
Summer Reading List: 17 Revolutionary Books | Digital Tonto
One observation I’ve made is that countries tend to have their preferred season for rising up. In Ukraine, quite maddeningly, it is the dead of winter. I still remember freezing with so many others on Kyiv’s Maidan during the Orange Revolution in November 2004, then seeing so many of my friends freezing the same way
Why Resistance to Change So Often Defies Logic | Digital Tonto
When we feel passionately about something, our first instinct is to often go and try to convince the skeptics. We’re sure that once they understand the idea, they will embrace it. That’s almost never true. More likely is that they will work to undermine what you’re trying to achieve in ways that are dishonest, underhanded and deceptive. In How Minds Change, author David McRaney found that people involved in cults or believed in conspiracy theories didn’t change their opinions when confronted with new facts, but when they changed their social environment. We tend to adopt the ideas of those around us. The best indicator of things we think and do is what the people around us think and do. The truth is that the status quo always has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully. People spend years being absorbing existing paradigms. Embracing something new means rewiring their brains, incurring switching costs and and pushing against the pull of their social networks. That’s why opposition to change, even when the stakes are life or death, can be completely irrational. The status quo has many champions—our brain chemistry, our social networks and our need for psychological safety. It feels normal and right, so challenging it can feel like a betrayal of what we’ve come to trust. Ideas that are new and different are, as Pixar’s Ed Catmull has put it, like ugly babies and they need to be protected. You don’t need to convince everybody all at once. Go out and find others who are as enthusiastic about the idea for change as you are, who are willing to nurture it until it can gain traction and scale. If an idea is important, don' t leave it vulnerable to those who want to kill it. Protect it, find others who love it as much as you do and give it a real chance to succeed.
How We Got Here—and What Needs To Come Next | Digital Tonto
In his first inaugural address, Ronald Reagan declared, “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem,” and vowed to unleash the private sector. His deregulation led to the Savings and Loan crisis. Then came the dotcom bubble and crash, two long and destructive wars, the Great Financial Crisis, and the Covid pandemic. Each time there was a villain to execrate: Big Business, Wall Street, Neocons, The Military-Industrial complex, Big Banks, Big Pharma and, of course, nameless government bureaucrats (sometimes also known as public servants). At this point, there’s no one left to blame but us. We can kick the bums out, disrupt our systems and invent new theories of the case, but at some point, we will also have to point the finger at ourselves. In Eastern Europe, I saw how broken societies crumble. Yet I also saw how they can rebuild. When I first arrived in Poland in 1997, it seemed like nothing worked. Today, it is an advanced economy. Warsaw—having suffered the double misfortune of being destroyed by Hitler and rebuilt by Stalin—is now a modern metropolis, with clean streets, bustling shops and low crime. They were able to achieve all this because they chose a better way. Once we accept that we are the problem, it becomes clear that we can also be the solution. There are no heroes coming to save us. We need to accept that the America we knew is gone and the current order—or disorder—cannot stand. Rebuilding isn’t just about systems, it's about understanding our bonds to each other and renewing shared values so that we can regain a shared sense of purpose and common endeavor.” The end of one order always marks the beginning of another. It is now a time to rebuild. As Bill Clinton said in his first inaugural, “There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.” We got here by making bad choices. We need to start making better ones. The only way out is through—and it starts with ourselves.
To Innovate, Leaders Need To Empower The Edges | Digital Tonto
In thinking about social justice, the philosopher John Rawls proposed a thought experiment known as the Veil of Ignorance. What kind of society would you design if you didn’t know what position you’d occupy in it—rich or poor, Black, white, or brown, gay, straight, or trans? While Rawls was focused on justice, not innovation, the Veil of Ignorance offers a useful model for thinking about how access and influence are structured within organizations. When coaching business leaders, I often pose a similar question: If a junior employee had a game-changing idea, how would they get it implemented and scaled throughout the organization? How do transformational ideas and practices ideas filter up to the top? For most, the exercise is an eye-opening experience. The truth is, very few organizations are designed to incorporate new ideas. They’re built to deliver on a specific mission—whether that’s serving customers, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, or enforcing laws. But over time, the very structures that ensure consistency and reliability also reduce adaptability. That’s why it’s incredibly hard for an enterprise to be both optimized for today’s mission and responsive to tomorrow’s possibilities. Yet the situation is far from hopeless. You can equip people with the knowledge and skills to drive change from within, to identify important problems, build a core team of enthusiasts, develop a Keystone Change project and leverage networks to grow scale. As Rita McGrath has pointed out, change originates at the edges. Leaders, by definition, are at the center with limited access to those edges and limited resources to get there. If you want your organization to be ready for change you don’t just need better ideas—you need better changemakers who can help those ideas gain traction, build momentum and scale to impact.
The Evidence Behind Why Big Transformations Start Small | Digital Tonto
The most common mistake that leaders make when pursuing change is to assume that once people understand it, they will embrace it. So they approach transformation with a typical project management approach, looking to create a sense of urgency, build awareness, remove obstacles and quickly show progress against a timeline. Yet we have decades of research and experience, with every type of change imaginable, that shows that’s not how transformation really works. What we know is that change comes from the outside and takes hold among a small group of enthusiasts. They adopt the idea cautiously at first, but their success encourages others to adopt it more aggressively. As leaders, we can empower this process along, by supporting those early adopters, helping them to succeed and giving them resources they can co-opt to help change spread. To do that, we must shift from a traditional manager mindset—centered on consensus, predictability, and execution—to a changemaker mindset that emphasizes building coalitions, embracing uncertainty, and fostering exploration. We need to follow the evidence. Change doesn’t have to fail. It follows a distinct pattern that we can leverage to achieve what we want to. By recognizing and embracing this pattern, we can avoid the pitfalls of transformation theater so many leaders fall into and consistently bring about genuine change. In an era of disruption, the only viable strategy is to adapt and leaders who can inspire change have a distinct competitive advantage. Transformation can’t be mandated or forced, it can only be inspired and empowered.
Culture Is How An Enterprise Honors It Mission | Digital Tonto
In his book, "Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance," Lou Gerstner wrote, “Culture isn’t just one aspect of the game, it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value… What does the culture reward and punish – individual achievement or team play, risk taking or consensus building?” Every organization, whether consciously or not, develops norms and rituals that shape behaviors. In a positive organizational culture, norms and rituals support behaviors that honor the mission of the enterprise. Negative cultures undermine that mission. A common problem with many transformation initiatives is that they focus on designing incentives to alter behaviors, ignoring the underlying norms and rituals. Home Depot built a high-touch culture around serving the customer and sputtered when Bob Nardelli tried to impose a six-sigma mindset. Netflix, quite famously, has a culture deck that explicitly describes the norms that it expects its people to embrace. Amazon has built a writing culture around its six-page memo. No leader has full visibility into their organization, and wise leaders recognize that control is an illusion. You can’t force your people to do what you want—there’s many of them and only one of you—but you can inspire them to want what you want by honoring a mission that they care about and can devote their energy and talents to. When you empower people to achieve, they have a way of surprising you.
We Need To Break The Disruption Mindset | Digital Tonto
The dumbest thing anybody ever said about change is that you want to start by creating a sense of urgency. If the change is truly urgent then everyone already know it. The reason why so many change leaders cling to this "burning platform" mentality is because it ennobles the change leader, not the change itself. It’s been roughly 25 years since Clayton Christensen inaugurated the disruptive era and what he initially intended to describe as a special case has been implemented as if it were a general rule. Disruption is increasingly self-referential, used as both premise and conclusion, while the status quo is assumed to be broken and inadequate as an a priori principle. The truth is that creating a sense of disruption doesn’t accelerate transformation—it undermines it. It impairs creativity, drains morale, fuels change fatigue, and triggers resistance. We need to abandon the disruption mindset, pursue fewer changes and make sure we bring people along and make sure that we see them through. If you want to bring genuine change about you need to start by creating a sense of safety around the change conversation. You do that by approaching transformation with a sense of empathy, identifying shared values and building trust. Meaningful change can’t be mandated or forced, it can only be empowered. Change that lasts is always built on common ground. Read the full post below:
Why You Can’t Afford to Ignore Resistance to Change | 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. Yet today’s cult of disruption demands that we constantly change and pivot only to change and pivot some more. The simple truth is that every change initiative starts out weak and vulnerable, without a track record of success. People are bound to be suspicious. They already have everyday struggles and don’t want someone else’s idea to add to their burden. Leader’s who ignore this simple reality are abdicating their duty to be responsible stewards of their organizations. As innovation expert Stephen Shapiro explains in his book, Pivotal, the answer isn’t always something different, but something deeper. That’s why we need to take resistance to change seriously, because not every change is a good one. We need to make wise choices about the stress we put on our enterprises and its stakeholders. Then when we make the decision to pursue change, we need to anticipate resistance and build strategies to overcome it. Perhaps most of all, you need to accept that resistance is part of change and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, skeptics can often point out important flaws in your idea and make it stronger. The difference between successful change leaders and mere dreamers is that those who succeed anticipate resistance and build a plan to overcome it.
How Unexpected Connections Can Lead To Surprising New Breakthroughs | Digital Tonto
When I arrived in Palo Alto for a publishing course at Stanford in 2006, I'd never heard of Srdja Popović or Duncan Watts—but their stories were about to become tangled up with mine. Facebook was just taking off and "social networks" were the hot new thing. I was running a sizable digital business, and it seemed that networks were something I should learn about. That led me to Duncan's work, and it immediately struck a chord. It felt deeply relevant to my own experience during Ukraine's Orange Revolution two years earlier. That's how I got hooked on studying change movements—and eventually, it led to my friendship with Srdja, who introduced me to his repeatable model for overthrowing authoritarian regimes. Over time, I kept digging. The more I explored, the more it became clear that Duncan and Srdja's work were deeply intertwined. I also began to see how their ideas could apply to business transformation—something I'd learned a lot about running media companies in post-communist Eastern Europe. In business, just like in revolutions, change rarely succeeds through top-down mandates. It spreads through networks. That's what led to the research that eventually became my book, "Cascades." Sometimes I joke that I stole half the book from Duncan and the other half from Srdja—my contribution being that Duncan knows nothing about Srdja and Srdja knows nothing about Duncan. But that's not really true. As the legendary mathematician G.H. Hardy once wrote: "The case for my life, then, or for that of any one else who has been a mathematician in the same sense in which I have been one, is this: that I have added something to knowledge, and helped others to add more; and that these somethings have a value which differs in degree only, and not in kind, from that of the creations of the great mathematicians, or of any of the other artists, great or small, who have left some kind of memorial behind them." Most people have never heard of my book—or of Srdja or Duncan, for that matter. But just as their work has made a difference for me, I hope mine has made a difference for others. Some have told me that it has. And they, in turn, can do the same for others. Slowly, slowly, we creep along—making progress where we can. Sometimes the world's problems can feel so vast that it seems pointless to try. But in doing what we can, we find purpose—and maybe help others find theirs too. That, I think, is what Camus meant by existential rebellion.
Why Leaders Need To Master Tribal Signals | Digital Tonto
Humanity’s superpower is collective action. We collaborate in large numbers and in incredibly complex ways. That’s how we managed to hunt animals larger than ourselves, build shelters for protection, and pass knowledge down through generations—something no other species does. Our tribal instincts made all of that possible. Yet tribal instincts can also go awry. Our need to signal identity and belonging can lead to group polarization. Moderate voices are drowned out and extreme views dominate. Members engage in “moral outbidding,” a purity spiral ensues and those deemed insufficiently loyal are ostracized and cast out while outsiders are viewed with extreme suspicion and attacked. Still, as Michael Morris points out, wise leaders can harness tribal instincts to build a better future. “Precedent signals” help root new ideas in the cherished traditions of the past. “Prestige signals” encourage people to excel and be recognized. “Peer signals” drive us to seek out best practices and implement them in our own activities. Tribal identities aren’t necessarily fixed. They can grow and evolve over time, incorporating new clans and new ideas to take on new challenges. “Identity can be used to divide, but it can and has also been used to integrate,” Francis Fukuyama wrote in his book on the subject. That insight is key to understanding how to make our tribal instincts work for us. Wise leaders don't ignore tribal instincts, but channel them to evolve a greater whole
The Science Behind Why Massive Change Seems To Happen All At Once | Digital Tonto
In my book, "Cascades," I described a pivotal moment when I awoke one morning in the fall of 2004, surprised to see my fiancée wrapping a bright orange bandana around her neck as she prepared to go out. It seemed particularly early for a Saturday, and she has never been an early riser so I asked, “Where are you going?” “I’m going out to a demonstration,” she said. “I thought you didn’t care about politics.” “I didn’t, but it's enough already, and it’s time to do something about it.” And just like everything changed. Ukraine was about to join the wave of popular uprisings that came to be known as the Color Revolutions, which swept across Eastern Europe in the first decade of the 21st century. The movement included Serbia, the Georgian Republic and, of course, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. For many years, how that all happened was a mystery, but over time I began to unravel the science behind it all, which is what led to my book. I learned there are natural laws that govern change and that these laws can be learned and applied by anyone, in any context, to overcome the status quo and bring about the change that they want to see. The Orange Revolution began with a student group called Pora. They didn’t have power or money, but they were fed up with the corruption and incompetence of their leaders. They slowly started forming connections to other students and those students had mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles who became linked through their activities. Then a cascade triggering event occurred—the poisoning of the opposition candidate, Viktor Yushchenko. That lowered resistance thresholds of all those mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, who were not students or activists, but marketing managers and accountants and had connections to other professionals like my fiancée, who started attending demonstrations. These triggered peer instincts and even more hit the streets. That’s why transformational change so often happens gradually, then suddenly. It happens when small groups, loosely connected, become united by a shared purpose and then an unexpected event tips the system into a cascade. Wise leaders build their movement to prepare for that moment, and are able to shape the future in a more positive direction.
Why Intention Will Be Central To The AI Economy | Digital Tonto
When Christopher Columbus set sail in 1492, he was looking for an alternative to the Silk Road to reach India. He found America instead. In a similar way, when Jennifer Doudna set out to study an obscure defense mechanism in bacteria, she had no idea that she would discover the revolutionary gene editing technology we now know as CRISPR. Yet it was their basic human yearning to explore that drove them to discover new things. Over the years, I’ve gotten to meet and learn from many genuine changemakers. Both of my books explored the question of what makes these people different. Time and again, I found that those who make an outsized impact start with a question they so desperately wanted answered that they were willing to devote years, even decades to the search. Artificially intelligent systems do exactly the opposite. They train on data from the past and are able to create answers that far surpass any living person, or perhaps all of humanity. Yet, there are lots of things machines will never do. Machines will never strike out at a Little League game, have their hearts broken in a summer romance or see their children born. Those may seem like trivial things, but genuine human experiences are crucial to shaping the yearning that forms the basis of intent. While machines are masterfully rational, humans are prosocial. We live for each other. We thrive on connection and purpose. That’s what drives us to delve into the unknown and discover new things that lead to bold, unpredictable leaps. Therein lies the enormous opportunity of artificial intelligence. It’s not that it can give us all the answers, but that it can help us explore the questions that matter to us.
First, Try Not To Fool Yourself, Because You are The Easiest One To Fool | Digital Tonto
It would be nice if everyone could have the experience of writing a book and having it thoroughly fact checked. In each of my books, I had dozens of errors in the original manuscript. Many of the them were corrected by my publisher’s fact checkers looking online for reference materials to verify what I had written. But they can only do so much, which is I also sent sections of my work to primary sources for verification. Even then at least one minor error got through on my first book (a publicist for a source didn’t catch it when I sent the section). That’s how I caught a terrible error about Blockbuster CEO John Antioco and was able to fix it. He was also generous enough to offer additional insight and write a blurb for my book. Yet that doesn’t change the fact that I repeated the error in multiple articles, even though I had read the accurate version in Gina Keating’s book about the subject. My version was then picked up by others and repeated in their work. As the great physicist Richard Feynman famously said “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that.” We need to be disciplined about what we think we know. The first step is to be hyper-vigilant and aware that our brains have a tendency to fool us. We will quickly grasp on the most readily available information and detect patterns that may or may not be there. Then we seek out other evidence that confirms those initial hunches while disregarding contrary evidence.. It happens to the best of us and, if you are going to put work out in the world you are going to have to accept the risk of getting things wrong. Once you embrace that, you have a chance to make a positive impact on the world.
3 Strategic Tools Every Changemaker Needs In Their Toolbox | Digital Tonto
When I was researching my book, Cascades, I noticed that change movements all started out very differently. The activists in the 19th century and early 20th tended to be women, like Susan B. Anthony, Ida B. Wells, and Alice Paul. For most of the 20th century, they were mostly men in their 30s and older, like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela. In the 60s, student groups became more predominant. Yet despite their differences, I noticed a consistent pattern over the past two centuries. A movement would start with a grassroots effort, begin to gain traction and then experience a tragic failure, such as the Women’s Suffrage Procession, Gandhi’s Himalayan Miscalculation and the massacre at Sharpeville. The successful movements learned from their experience and changed tactics. The unsuccessful movements never did. To this rule, there was one major exception: The Civil Rights Movement in the United States and there is a clear reason why. They learned the successes and failures of those who came before them. Some, like James Lawson, travelled to India and studied directly under Gandhi’s disciples and then trained young activists, like John Lewis, Marion Barry, and Diane Nash who became leaders in their own right. You can do the same. Every effort to drive change faces challenges in maintaining unity, but creating a “contract” that encourages people to explicitly commit to shared values is a proven way to build cohesion. Creating resources that others can co-opt to achieve their own goals allows initiatives to scale organically, while designing dilemmas offers a powerful strategy to discredit those working to sabotage and undermine your efforts. These principles are just as effective for driving organizational change. One thing history has shown is that transformational change is possible in even the most difficult contexts. The key isn’t the righteousness of the cause of even the commitment of those working for change, but the ability to learn use the right tools with skill, discipline and wisdom. Yet despite their differences, I noticed a consistent pattern over the past two centuries. A movement would start with a grassroots effort, begin to gain traction and then experience a tragic failure, such as the Women’s Suffrage Procession, Gandhi’s Himalayan Miscalculation and the massacre at Sharpeville. The successful movements learned from their experience and changed tactics. The unsuccessful movements never did. To this rule, there was one major exception: The Civil Rights Movement in the United States and there is a clear reason why. They learned the successes and failures of those who came before them. Some, like James Lawson, travelled to India and studied directly under Gandhi’s disciples and then trained young activists, like John Lewis, Marion Barry, and Diane Nash who became leaders in their own right. You can do the same. Every effort to drive change faces challenges in maintaining unity, but creating a “contract” that encourages people to explicitly commit to shared values is a proven way to build cohesion. Creating resources that others can co-opt to achieve their own goals allows initiatives to scale organically, while designing dilemmas offers a powerful strategy to discredit those working to sabotage and undermine your efforts. These same principles are just as effective for driving organizational change. One thing history has clearly shown is that truly transformational change is possible in even the most difficult contexts. The key isn’t the righteousness of the cause of even the commitment of those working for change, but the ability to learn use the right tools with skill, discipline and wisdom.
Why Smart Leaders Run Their Organizations With Dignity | Digital Tonto
In "Seeing Around Corners," Columbia Business School’s Rita McGrath emphasizes how important it is for leaders to get more visibility at the edges. When you’re at the center, you are insulated in ways you’re not aware of and there are going to be things that you don’t see. A striking example of these blind spots occured when Portuguese colonists first came across manioc in South America. They were perplexed by the elaborate, multi-day process the indigenous people followed to prepare it. Some steps, like boiling the raw tuber to eliminate its bitterness and prevent digestive issues, appeared practical. Others seemed superstitious. What the Portuguese didn’t realize was that they were seeing survivors—those who had inherited generations of hard-won knowledge about manioc’s dangers. As it turns out, manioc, if not properly processed, has low levels of cyanide, which accumulate over time and cause chronic poisoning. Those who ignored these traditions had died out. When the Portuguese streamlined the process to gain efficiency, they slowly poisoned entire populations, which is a great metaphor for what happens when leaders fail to treat people with dignity. Just like the Portuguese ignored generations of knowledge, leaders who dismiss long-standing institutional wisdom often pay a heavy price. They cut themselves off from crucial channels of information. Eventually that catches up to you. Linus's law states, “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” But the opposite is also true. Without enough eyeballs, all dangers are potentially lethal. That’s why it's so important to treat people with dignity. When you empower those around you, they are that much more capable of delivering the performance you need to compete.
How To Navigate Today’s Media Environment When So Many Are Working To Mislead You | Digital Tonto
Conspiracy theories used to be relatively rare. Sure, we had lots of people claiming that the was a moon landing was a hoax or that Elvis is still alive, but today we are inundated with falsehoods ranging from the complex narratives of Q-Anon to the idea that there are secret biolabs in Ukraine and that its president came to power in a coup. If we are to avoid getting duped, there are a few simple rules of thumb to follow. The first is to consider whether you are hearing from a primary, secondary or tertiary source. Primary sources have first-hand knowledge, either because they are reporting from where an event is happening or because they have underlying knowledge or expertise. Secondary and tertiary sources are merely passing on what they have heard from others. The second thing is to look out for how your own emotions are triggered. The dopamine rushes that come from negative emotions are addictive and many media business models are based on them (recent claims about USAID fit this pattern). If you find yourself tuning into outlets that are constantly driving fear and anger, you need to apply a more stringent standard of proof. Third, we need to apply a critical eye and demand extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims. Yes, it’s possible that there are secret, infallible organizations that affect our lives in important ways but leave no trace, but we should be very doubtful, especially when the news comes from YouTube, a podcast or social media. Perhaps most of all, we need to understand that many have significant incentives to mislead us. Fighter jets are expensive, but social media personalities and bot farms are relatively cheap and nation states like Russia, China and Iran, as well as billionaires, corporations and other interest groups, invest heavily in them to shape what we think. Getting misled has little to do with intelligence or education. We simply need to be more careful.
This Is How Change Fails To Survive Victory (And What To Do About It) | Digital Tonto
The failure to survive victory is always a failure to leverage shared values in favor of differentiating values that allow stalwarts to signal identity and status. The truth is that most change efforts fail and the ones that do succeed almost always have at least one heartbreaking setback along the way. Gandhi had his Himalayan miscalculation. Mandela had Sharpeville. The first march on Washington, in 1913, was a disaster. As Saul Alinsky put it, every revolution inspires its own counterrevolution. That is the physics of change. Yet as Alinsky also wrote, “Once we accept and learn to anticipate the inevitable counterrevolution, we may then alter the historical pattern of revolution and counterrevolution from the traditional slow advance of two steps forward and one step backward to minimizing the latter.” Resistance is inevitable. Anticipating it is how you survive victory. It’s also how you recover from a setback. When your opposition is triumphant, that’s when you should be preparing for your next window of opportunity. Ask yourself: What do I wish I had in place before I began this effort? What could I have built? What connections could I have made? What alliances could I have forged?” The best time to do that is when nobody is watching, when it seems that all is lost and your cause has been all but forgotten. That’s when you have the space to really think things through, to build a strategy without the stress and strain of having to execute on a daily basis. The time to lay the groundwork for victory is before the battle begins. If you want to be an effective changemaker, your first task is to anticipate resistance and build strategies to overcome it. To do that, you need to focus on shared values and always be preparing for your next window of opportunity. Lasting change is built on common ground.
Experian Was Being Disrupted by Fintech Startups. Then They Turned the Tables | Digital Tonto
As Robert Gordon explains in "The Rise and Fall of American Growth", the turn of the 20th century was a time of great change. New innovations like electricity, indoor plumbing and the automobile were changing the way people lived, worked and shopped. New supermarkets and department stores were edging out the old corner markets and dry goods dealers. While this created great opportunities, it also created problems. Merchants needed to extend credit no longer knew their customers personally and so there was a great need to verify consumers’ trustworthiness. Experian built a great business being a trustworthy gatekeeper of data that helped those businesses evaluate the credit of hundreds of millions of people. Yet when its consumer business was disrupted by fintech startups, Jeff Softley saw that the same data and technology infrastructure the company had built to serve large enterprises, could also be put to work to empower consumers to improve their access to credit and measurably improve their lives. Somewhere along the line we got it into our heads that large firms can’t innovate and should strive to act like startups. The truth is that they are very different types of organizations and need to innovate differently. While large firms can’t move as fast, they have other advantages. Rather than try to act like startups, they need to leverage other assets. While it’s true that venture-backed startups have a lot of advantages, large enterprises also have deep expertise, proven technology and customer relationships they can put to work for them. You can’t innovate by copying your competitors. Good strategy is always a process of discovery, to identify a relative strength you can bring to bear against the relative weakness of your competition.
How AI Can Help You Make Better Decisions | Digital Tonto
Clearly, we are on the verge of something very different. Individual firms are investing tens of billions of dollars to create AI systems that will bring us every fact ever uncovered, every story ever told, every language ever recorded; all human knowledge at our beck and call. This has the potential to give our rational brain unprecedented power. What it can’t do is replace our innate capacity to wonder and explore. The knowledge of the world is finite, but the universe of possibility is limitless. Our emotional brain, driven by somatic markers in our limbic system from personal experiences, fuels our ability to form intent. An AI system can help us to discern facts, but only we can determine what truly matters and decide the paths we want to pursue. It is through forming intent that we can begin to leverage AI to explore. We can, as Warren Berger suggested in A More Beautiful Question, ask our systems questions such as “Why?” “What if” and “How?” That can lead us to new territory where we can create new knowledge, tell new stories and spark new conversations. AI systems are exceptional at analyzing the past, but they can’t envision a completely different future, much less determine what we want from it. They can inform our decisions by helping us discern baseline knowledge, but only we can decide what possibilities we want to explore and whether, when we examine them, they are to our liking. As we embark on this new era of augmented cognitive capacity, we need to learn to collaborate effectively with intelligent machines. We will have far greater power to inform our decisions, but we will still have to make our own.
3 Types Of Change Problems (And How To Solve Them) | Digital Tonto
People love to quote the pre-socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus about change. Yet pithy aphorisms like "Change is the only constant" and "You cannot step into the same river twice," are popular because they are so imprecise. They point to, as Kafka put it, “some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something too that he cannot designate more precisely, and therefore cannot help us here in the very least.” Every change effort represents a problem, or set of problems, to be solved. A strategic shift starts at the top and needs effective communication and coordination for everybody to play their role. To build high performing teams, individual managers need to help and empower their people to adopt new skills and practices, see blind spots and kill bad habits. Yet often the most important changes involve collective action, which can be maddeningly complex. People adopt things when they see others around them adopt them. Success begets more success, just as failure begets more failure. Big communication campaigns can ignite early resistance and backfire. Individual efforts don’t scale. For collective action problems, we need to focus on, as network science pioneer Duncan Watts put it to me, “easily influenced people influencing other easily influenced people.” You build momentum and reach critical mass not through persuasion, but by empowering early adopters and helping them to build connections with others. To be an effective change leader, you can’t take a one-size fits all approach.. Solutions need to fit the problem, not the other way around. There is no silver bullet.
2025: The Coming Realignment | Digital Tonto
In 1989, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama published an essay in the journal The National Interest entitled The End of History, which led to a bestselling book. Many took his argument to mean that, with the defeat of communism, US-style liberal democracy had emerged as the only viable way of organizing a society. He was misunderstood. Fukuyama pointed out that even if we had reached an endpoint in the debate about ideologies, there would still be conflict because of people’s need to express their identity. What many thought to be a justification, was actually a warning to expect people to rebel against order imposed on them from outside their communities. I began to better understand this when I went to live in Moscow for a time in 2003. It was my view, as it was of most Americans, that we had won the Cold war. In Poland, where I had lived for six years, people felt similarly. Yet Russians felt otherwise. In their view, they had not lost, but had been betrayed by Gorbachev. “This must have been what Weimar Germany must have felt like,” I remember thinking. “They are biding their time, plotting their return.” The truth is that every revolution inspires its own counterrevolution and the pendulum will continue to swing until there can be some agreement about shared values and how to move forward. Lasting change is always built on common ground and there is precious little of that in this particular moment. Even the lines defining the battle are just now being drawn. We won the Cold War not because we were able to overpower, but because we could attract. Nobody ever truly capitulates, not really. The human need for status and identity are too strong for that. They may surrender and retreat, but they will always be plotting their return. The forces of discontinuity will continue to prevail, until the forces of continuity are able to build strength, and are ready to take over. The future will be shaped by choices we make—or don’t make. While many of these decisions will revolve around technology and economics, both are ultimately shaped by deeper questions about who we are and who we aspire to become. That’s why dominance will always be fleeting. Until we make our minds up about our identity and aspirations, conflict will continue. As Josep Borrell put it, “It’s the identity, stupid.
Top Posts of 2024 | Digital Tonto
2024 was an exhausting year. I don’t remember any period that seemed so chaotic. Roughly 70 countries had elections this year, encompassing half the world’s population, which was a record. In just about every one, the vote went against the incumbent office holder. People made clear that they want something different. We seem to be
The 2024 Digital Tonto Reading List | Digital Tonto
“Thinking and writing are inextricably intertwined. When I begin to write, I realize that my ‘thoughts’ are usually a jumble of half-baked, incoherent impulses strung together with gaping logical holes between them,” Fareed Zakaria once wrote. Others have said similar things, but I like how he said it best. It is especially true when writing books. You can keep an email or a blog post in your head, but tens of thousands of words are too much for a single brain to hold at once. You need to approach writing a book like you would building a ship or a house, starting with a basic structure and then carefully crafting each detail to work together. That’s why in our climate of digital distractions reading books is more important than ever. Reading, like writing, is a form of thinking. You are not only taking in information, but reflecting on it and forming opinions about it. The slow pace enables that private, intimate dialogue between you and the author. Here is the list the books I spent time with this year.
What Gandhi Can Teach Us About Change | Digital Tonto
As one of Gandhi’s followers would later note, before Salt March forced the British to sit down and negotiate with Gandhi as an equal, they “were all sahibs and we were obeying. No more after that.” At that point, Indian Independence was just a matter of time. Many would say Gandhi achieved what he did because he had a natural ability to communicate the plight of the Indians, to differentiate their plight in ways that were meaningful and, that by speaking out against the powerful he was able to get the world to see the injustice that the British Raj was perpetrating against his people. But they’d be wrong. In fact, he did exactly the opposite. He didn’t look for things that differentiated his people from the British, but what they shared, what they could agree on—and then exploited it. That’s what made him a master strategist, because he was able to identify where he was strong and his opponents were weak. Our mistake is that we look back on Gandhi as if he was a saint, when the historical record is clear that he was nothing of the sort. For much of his life, he struggled with his temper, treated his wife poorly and gave into his worst urges. It was only when he was able to learn self-control and discipline himself that he was able to see opportunities that others couldn’t. Most of all, he learned that identity is a trap and once you can escape your own, you can learn to identify the values that you share with others. That is the key to genuinely transformational change. Gandhi didn’t just beat the British, he won them over. When he died, they, like the Indians, celebrated him as a hero.