| | | For me, what you wrote really crystallized QCOM's 20+ years of self-inflicted wounds and strategic missteps for me. It hit home, so please accept my thanks for shining a light on the core of the problem.
Too many posters on this group love love LOVE outsourcing their brains entirely to LLMs (guilty confession: when I see "/aimode/" or "Copilot" in the top of a post, I almost always skip the whole thing immediately). But here I will go against my own better judgement and have Sam Altman's Frankenstein weigh in in a historical context in a manner I'm not nearly well-read enough to do myself.
If nothing else (tl;dr, as the kids say) scroll down to last few lines - the "A Unifying Framing" bit - and what should be some sobering reflections for the current C-suite and Board.
/rc/
-----
Strategic blindness in Myth, Literature, and History
Literary / Mythic
Achilles (Iliad)
Achilles is right that Agamemnon wronged him. His withdrawal is morally justified. But he confuses personal honor with strategic necessity. By insisting on being right now, he allows the entire Greek war effort to deteriorate. Core failure: absolutizing justice at the expense of collective outcome.
Odin (Norse myth)
Odin is obsessed with knowledge and being correct about Ragnarök. He gathers wisdom obsessively and is usually right. But his fixation on foresight becomes fatalism: instead of changing outcomes, he reinforces them. Core failure: mistaking knowing the future for mastering it.
Ahab (Moby-Dick)
Ahab is not wrong about the whale’s agency or significance to him. But every successful assertion of dominance over his crew, every rhetorical victory, brings him closer to annihilation. Core failure: turning symbolic truth into totalizing purpose.
Political / Tragic Figures
Creon (Antigone)
Creon is legally and politically correct: law must apply uniformly, especially after civil war. But he cannot see that enforcing law at all costs destroys legitimacy, family, and stability. Core failure: confusing order with justice, and authority with wisdom.
Coriolanus (Shakespeare)
He is right about the fickleness of the mob and the corrosive nature of populism. But he refuses small concessions (rhetorical humility) that would preserve immense power. Core failure: refusing to pay trivial prices for enormous gains.
Folklore / Archetypal figures
Faust (Goethe)
Faust is correct that conventional morality is limiting and that lived experience matters. But he keeps escalating the wager instead of stopping once insight is gained. Core failure: mistaking continual optimization for progress.
The Fisher King (Arthurian legend)
His wound is “rightfully” borne; his suffering is justified. But refusing to ask or answer the right question freezes the entire kingdom. Core failure: personal fixation blocking systemic healing.
A unifying framing - these protagonists all share one fatal flaw:
They optimize locally while destroying global value. Or more sharply: They mistake being right for being wise. They fight symbolic battles as if they were strategic ones, and treat concessions as defeats instead seeing them as investments. |
|
