We watched the ’60 Minutes’ report tonight on the risks to commerical airliners from the plethora of shoulder-fired ground-to-air missles throughout the world. [Summary: we’re cruisin’ for a bruisin’; Senator Charles Schumer wants to spend $10b to outfit the US commercial airlines with counter-measures; the process, if you can call it that, is moving very slowly.
It’s almost as if they want occassional catastrophes, Jane mused, as an excuse for continuing to clamp down on civil liberties..
Could be, but there are simpler reasons. All you have to do is look at the way large institutions so often fail to act in their own interests — due to inertia, distraction, turf issues, procedural obstacles, ego and so many more reasons. We’ve seen many clients walk away from large and certain financial returns — for example from eco-efficiency initiatives — due to one sort or another of an organizational inability to make the decision. The technical issues are simple, compared to the orneriness of minds ands organization.
This is where the art of change unfolds: finding the way for the right thing to happen anyway. Fortunately, it can be done.
(And lest we forget, this is not just a problem for corporations an dgovernments; we’ve all seen these same difficulties in families, relationships, and our own individual beings, too.)