I was reading a Harvard Business Review article a while back and it was talking about the dynamic of a self-perpetuating business. An easy example is the classic ‘customer first’ strategy:
If you always put the customer first, the customer is always happy and if the customer is always happy, then they’ll keep coming back and every once in a while, they’ll come back with a friend. As more friends become shoppers, the business grows and more locations can be opened to serve more friends. As more locations are opened and the business scales, it can reinvest in itself, ultimately leading to better customer service. And the cycle continues.
Good customer service is a solution to the problem of bad customer service, but it’s also a solution that creates more solutions. There are other solutions that create more problems. Cost cutting can be an example:
Revenues are down so you look to cut costs to maintain profitability. You realize you can fire your top performing employees who are being paid the most, and replace them with new talent who will work for half as much. Next year’s forecasts are now back in line with corporate targets. Solution?
Probably not. Firing your top performing employees is a quick way to decimate your organizational culture and that leads to lower levels of acquisition, retention, and production. It was a solution in that it was able to achieve reduced costs, but it also created a problem by way of significantly reduced revenues over the long-term.
This isn’t a business concept. It’s a universal concept. It persists in the laws of physics as well as in the truths of philosophy, and it’s one which the world desperately needs to understand.
You have the compassionate crowd who actively fight racism with racism, and actively fight against free speech to protect free speech. It won’t work.
You have the intelligent crowd who spend most of their time picking apart bad solutions, and then defer to whatever benefits them personally, lacking the understanding that this is all a collective effort. That won’t work either.
I’m still trying to understand why intelligence and compassion are at odds with one another, because they also share a very significant connection:
The most intelligence decision you can make is a compassionate one, and the most compassionate decision you can make is an intelligent one.
This isn’t neutral territory between the left and the right, this is the guiding star that we should all be following. Compassion is the compass, intelligence is the map.
My Mental Model 