Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly by Kay John

Author:Kay, John [Kay, John]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2011-04-14T07:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

Coping with Obliquity: How to Solve Problems in a Complex World

Chapter 13

THE FLICKERING LAMP OF HISTORY—How We Mistakenly Infer Design from Outcome

John Sculley was chief executive of Apple from 1983 to 1993. He gave an extended account of his tenure to Newsweek magazine, 1 which posed the question “From a champ to a chump?” Sculley’s tenure included a period of great success—Apple’s user-friendly mouse and desktop brought the personal computer within the capabilities of everyone. But Sculley’s time at Apple also included a period of major failure—Microsoft achieved almost complete dominance of the industry. How could one man have been both so right and so wrong?

The magazine’s analysis overlooked the obvious answer—that neither Apple’s success nor its failure had much to do with Sculley, an able corporate bureaucrat who rode both up and down on the roller coaster of high technology. The Aristotelian Alasdair MacIntyre expresses it well: One key reason why the presidents of large corporations do not control the United States is that they do not control their own corporations.... When implied organisational skill and power are deployed and the desired effect follows, all that we have witnessed is the same kind of sequence as that to be observed when a clergyman is fortunate enough to pray for rain just before the unpredicted end of a drought.2

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