Twelve Years Down The Drain
This WSJ opinion piece by Elizabeth Wurtzel yesterday was a bit of a rant, but one paragraph did catch my eye.
The Wall Street atmosphere — in both law offices and investment banks — is not open to dissenting opinion. If you blow the whistle, it’s only to hail a taxi to take you away, because complaining is just not tolerated. So anyone sharp enough to say that these deals were a bad idea in the first place didn’t stay on long enough to make the point. And we all know that organizations that don’t retain thoughtful opposing views are doomed by hubris. Hello, Lehman Brothers!
This, it seems to me, is true not just of Big Law and Global High Finance, but of almost every large organization I’ve come to know over the years. There is some dissenting opinion or set of assumptions that just about every organization can’t tolerate. Sometimes these opinions aren’t as articulate as they could be, aren’t offered at the right time or in the right format for the organization. But for whatever reason, organizations, over time, tend to accrete boundaries around acceptable arguments and discourse. This tends to make organizations innovation resistant, hence the billions spent on innovation conferences, consultants and initiatives over the last couple of decades.
Ms. Wurtzel’s column along with recent columns by Paul Krugman and Nicholas Taleb and many others seem to me yet more indicators of the time of truly wrenching questioning of our institutions and our policies that is taking place.
So the point is this: whatever policies we choose today and tomorrow for Capitalism 2.0, how do we better incorporate dissenting opinion and intelligent questioning of our strategies and motives? Well designed Prediction Markets offer an important way to do that. In future posts we’ll be talking about how Prediction Markets can do this.
