Move Slow and Fix Things

Move Slow and Fix Things0:00/627.2881×The reigning fashion in business prose treats organisational upheaval as a kind of moral achievement. To disrupt is to be vital, to be modern, to be on the right side of whatever curve the consultants are currently invoking. The verb has migrated from a clinical description of competitive dynamics into a slogan that no executive wishing to seem serious can quite afford to do without When the founder of a well-known social media company declared that his motto was "move fast and break things", he was not, by his own later admission, expressing an aesthetic preference. He was articulating an industry-wide theology in which the shattering itself was held to be productive.This way of speaking has consequences. It encourages boards to commission transformation programmes before they have understood why their organisation works to the limited degree that it does. It encourages newly appointed leaders to mistake the inheritance they have received for a…