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The Danger of Denial by Marshall Goldsmith
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We all have an incredible ability to deny what we don’t want to see coming—even though it may be obvious to everyone around us.
In the 1980s, I appeared on a videotape that was widely distributed as part of a leadership development course for IBM managers. On the tape, I suggested that small computers—more powerful than existing mainframes—would soon be on desktops everywhere and that they would cost less than $5,000. Anyone could have figured this out. All I had to do was look at the path of technological innovation and make a reasonable guess.
Many people in IBM knew what was coming—they were just in denial about how fast it would happen. After losing billions of dollars, the IBM board woke up and decided to get new leadership. They changed the company, and IBM made a remarkable comeback.
After making my first free VoIP phone call to a friend in Asia, I suggested to a group of AT&T leaders that they were facing an incredible competitive threat. It seemed certain that AT&T’s profit margins on long-distance calls were going to start disappearing and that their historic profit machine was going to go away. I don’t know much about telecommunications—it just seemed obvious.
Several executives laughed at my comments, and said that the “quality of competing technologies was no good” and that their long-successful business would continue to generate huge piles of cash for years to come. They were in massive denial. After watching billions of dollars of profit disappear, the AT&T board finally woke up and decided to get new leadership. In their case, it didn’t work.
I just returned from a trip around the world. As an American, what I observed was sobering. Within the next 20 years there will be millions of brilliant, highly educated knowledge workers flooding the global job market. They will speak fluent English. They will be incredibly motivated to improve the quality of life for themselves and their families. They will have deep expertise in many fields. They will be willing to work for less than supermarket checkout clerks in the United States.
Continued...
Relying on Human Goodness by Margaret J. Wheatley Comments (0)
We have a great need to rely on the fact of human goodness. Human goodness seems like an outrageous "fact." Everyday we are confronted with mounting evidence of the great harm we so easily do to one another. We are numbed by frequent genocide, ethnic hatred, and individual violence committed daily in the world. In self-protective groups, we terrorize each other with our hatred. Of the 240 or so nations in the world, nearly one-fourth of them are at war.
In our daily life, we encounter people who are angry, deceitful, intent only on satisfying their own needs. There is so much anger, distrust, greed, and pettiness that we are losing our capacity to work well together. Many of us are more withdrawn and distrustful than ever. Yet this incessant display of what’s worst in us makes it essential that we believe in human goodness. Without that belief, there really is no hope. continued
The Danger 
Relying on Human Goodness 
