Pen Thoughts

  Why aging organizations fail at technology, and why it is almost never the technology Fifth in a weekly series on how institutions fail and how they come back. Twenty-five years ago I helped install a working system inside a factory that died anyway. Nine years ago I ran a training with no strategic purpose whatsoever, and it turned out to be the thing that carried an organization through a digitization it never asked for. The difference between those two stories has nothing to do with software. The question There were diapers on the desk. Four or five brands, cut open, laid out across the table so the layers could be compared. Somebody in that room had been doing real product analysis, the unglamorous kind, with a blade and a ruler. I was there because the invoicing had just been automated. A software firm I had brought in a few weeks earlier had installed a stock and sales system, and for the first time in the history of that company the sales invoices came out of a mach...

  A parable and a confession Fourth in the Rot and Renewal series. What follows is a parable, narrated by an old lioness. The mechanics of it are not invented. The tenure lengths, the expulsions, the cubs, the year of nothing: all of it comes from what researchers have documented in the field. Only the voice is mine. Afterwards I will tell you why I wrote it, and where I appear in it. The third takeover - the parable I am old now, and I am still here. That is not a boast. The lionesses are always still here. We are born into this pride, we die in it, and in between we watch the males arrive and leave. I have lived through three takeovers. I want to tell you about the third, because it was the one we could have prevented. When I was young, the arrangement was so ordinary that nobody thought to describe it. We hunted. We held the ground. We raised what was born. The male walked the border and met whatever came from outside it. That was his work. It was not a small thing. It wa...

  At 6:06 in the evening on August 4, 2020, I was in my office, streaming a stand-up special while I worked through some financial paperwork. An unremarkable afternoon, the kind Beirut teaches you to treasure precisely because nothing is happening in it. Then the room shook. First like an earthquake. Then harder, until the walls themselves were drumming. I heard what sounded like aircraft. In Lebanon, that sound has never meant panic; we grow up hearing jets break the sound barrier over our heads, and we learn, the way you learn anything you cannot control, to keep working through it. That is what pacification actually feels like from the inside: a sound that should stop your heart, filed instead under background noise. This one did not stay background noise for long. I ran to the window and saw a white cloud rising over the port. Before I could work out what it was, I heard the real sound. The second one. I watched a shape climb into the sky that some part of me recognized be...

  I want to start by correcting something I almost got wrong myself. Cruise control is not, by itself, a sign of a failing organization. Some of the best-run institutions I have ever encountered work exactly like cruise control: a founder, or a generation of leaders, built a system so well designed that it began running itself, delivering results without needing a hand on the wheel every hour of every day. That is not failure. That is craftsmanship. The danger is not the system. The danger is time. Since the 1990s, the environment around every organization has been changing at a pace that keeps compressing: every few years, then every few semesters, now every few months, sometimes every few weeks. A system built for the road of 1995, however well engineered, was not built for the road of today. It can keep running, and keep delivering, for a long time after it has stopped fitting the world it operates in. That is the trap. The most dangerous organizations are not the ones that ...

I was born on a Wednesday in July 1981, in Saint Joseph Hospital, a short drive from the shelter where I would spend much of my childhood. On paper, Lebanon's civil war was six years old that summer. Growing up, I learned it had been rehearsing its provocations long before its official date. My family likes to say I was born in a shelter. It is a metaphor, but only barely. The first nine years of my life kept making it true. The shelter was the minus-one of my grandparents' building: a warehouse of perhaps two hundred square meters, cleaned out and claimed by the families above it. It had two entries, one from the parking, and one from the lobby, where you stepped over a concrete lip and climbed down a ladder someone had built by hand. We strung electric lamps against the dark. When the battles intensified, bread could vanish for weeks at a time. During the worst sieges, it reached us only rationed, passed down through the militias that held the area. My grandmother Teta Victo...