A Renewing Mind

I’m watching a presentation by Accenture trying to convince us that we need them to rethink our long-term content strategy. One slide suggests that in the 1930s 80% of all work followed standard processes and rules. Today 80% of all work requires judgement and flexibility - stressing the importance of good content to enable good judgement. If correct, this begs the question, why do we spend so much time, effort, and money stressing development of processes? Wouldn’t we get a better payback by focusing on the judgement side of work? If only 20% of my work even lends itself to process-oriented decision making, then most of my work is custom, one-offs. That suggests I’d be better off developing my ability to work with knowledge than trying to develop processes that optimize just 20% of my work.

I really like what Chuck Colson has to say today about the election results this week. Specifically, that the republicans lost because they deserved to because of their hypocrisy. The Foley scandal, Tom Delay’s violation of campaign finance laws, Bob Ney and the Jack Abramoff mess - there are many more and I’m not going to name them all. You can find it all on Google. Colson is right. Republicans came to power expressing conservative values (which, among other things include preserving moral order) and their disdain for corruption amongst their liberal colleagues. They said this, then they turned around and did the same thing.

The democrats will fare no better, I think. In time, they too will become corrupt. “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” as Lord Acton said. The real problem, I think, is our ethics (actually, our lack of ethics) and our inability or unwillingness to demand moral character from our leaders.