“Is everything old new again?” asks Tom Davenport, pointing to an article about a surprising increase in postcard sales in the UK. He goes on to wonder whether we might see a return to so-called “old” business practices, such as regulation and “paternalistic” management. The postcard thing reminded me of an article I read in Billboard last fall about the rise of vinyl album sales. I prefer to see it as objective vs. subjective. Technological development tends towards objectivity, whereby we can measure, ever more precisely, speed, volume, cost, efficiency, popularity… Technology eventually overdelivers those values while failing to address our subjective (or “softer,” or “warmer”) needs. Richard Sennett has argued that supposedly “democratizing” or “liberating” technologies actually make people feel useless as mere office holders, bound by performance metrics, unable to cultivate genuine personal mastery and trust. My proposal for managing this cycle is a return to “old-fashioned philosophy”: the attempt to understand the ambiguous, imprecise, softer, warmer, more malleable aspects of human nature and life. All of these “new” problems are just different manifestations of the same old unanswered question…
