Monday, February 02, 2009

Perhaps Now Is The Nexus Between Creativity And Opportunity

It seems to me that there may be another way to look at this dire economic melt down. In light of yet another monstrous corporation laying off nearly 7K people, perhaps there is a positive way to spin this.

We need to break the frame of business as usual, and the only way to do it is to free up the talent to concentrate our efforts. If we really do need new green and sustainable businesses, perhaps now we see the nexus between the opportunity and creativity to invent. That is, instead of looking at all these lay offs as negative, we may want to view it as freeing up the talent to move toward inventing better and smarter new businesses. These people who were shackled by their old jobs, now have both the time, the motivation, and perhaps, the energy to do so.

If the many tens of thousands of people that are now freed from their old employment now move to creating green and sustainable operations, we may have to thank George Bush and his cronies for causing this madness. After all, out of adversity, opportunity emerges.

For one example, let's just say, the big three auto companies are left to hang by their own petard. Those laid off have now have the smarts and the training to ply their energies to inventing the cars of the future. Perhaps we may see bands of ex GM employees working together to make automobiles that help rather than hurt our planet. I don't want to be Pollyanna, but it's only through the dust that the phoenix can rise.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...


Better horse collars?

No need for gasohol, horses make their own fuel directly. Better yet, walk.

Fiber to the home would permit most office workers to stay home and be supervised by video.

The car was the solution to streets being knee-deep in horse manure. Horses are why older cities didn't bother to separate storm and sanitary sewers, it was all going into the nearest river untreated.

When the sewing machine came in, hand sewers were unemployed for the next 40 years until they all died. When the transistor came in, not a single US vacuum tube manufacturing plant converted to making transistors.

There's never a direct transfer of employment from one type of manufacturing to another. You're old and unemployed, China or India gets the new plant with the new technology and the new job.

Two guys running 50-ton presses making car bodies will segue into Linux network support. The rest will become part of Palin's claque.