Have you read The Ugly American? I would assume so.
Insurgents have to be carefully nurtured. This seems to be, for whatever reason, something that Americans have never grasped. We seem to just go in, look around, and say to ourselves "Okay, this has to change. Uuuuunnnnghhh... hmm, well, okay, guess that didn't work," and then we bail.
I remember reading that in an organization bad ideas often have more power than good ones. Nobody wants to recognize a bad idea because somebody will have to take the fall for it and it might be them, so you end up with a sort of conspiracy of silence regarding bad ideas. But the only person who has a stake in a good idea is the person who came up with it. It generally, in a big-business amoral short-term sort of way, actually behooves everyone else to quash the good idea so as to keep down the competition.
Seems more true all the time.
-BLT |
