Old advice from Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel (back when Intel was killing it), from a 2007 Esquire interview:
Not all problems have a technological answer, but when they do, that is the more lasting solution.
The problem, as anyone who has used an EHR or any other enterprise software, is that the problem being solved (e.g. optimal billing) may itself create a wealth of downstream problems (e.g. frustrating, inefficient healthcare).
Satisfaction doesn’t come in moments but in periods of time.
Beware the arrival fallacy.
Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.
This is ironic in that post-Grove Intel entirely missed the boat on mobile an increasing fraction of everyone’s devices utilize the ARM architecture.
It’s also so painfully clear that this manifests in the lack of institutional and cultural knowledge that plagues schools, organizations, and the government. We rest on the status quo when it works until it doesn’t.
But the problems compound when we then forget the parts that got us there in the first place in our desire for improvement.
Sometimes inefficiency is a critical piece of the puzzle (like we saw with Covid supply chain issues). Other times, we are unaware of the lessons from the past and miss the negative externalities of our panicked interventions.
Profits are the lifeblood of enterprise. Don’t let anyone tell you different.
We have to live in the world as it is.
There’s never enough time.