But to the extent that there is an answer, I think the answer is to work on both the short term and long term at the same time. This applies to both individuals and organizations.

Some years ago, when I was between careers, I did a variety of odd jobs so I could pay the rent. These included scrubbing toilets, testing airplane slides and helping ninth-graders learn math. But I also went to school and got experience so I could move into a new field.

Now that field — journalism — is losing a lot of jobs. But I’ve been going to school and making some connections and contributions and building new things outside of work.

For companies, consider “The Innovator’s Solution.” One of the book’s points is to always have at least a two-prong strategy: improving for your current customers and new products or services for nonconsumers or low-end customers.
http://www.theinnovatorssolution.com/

Friedman is a US journalist and a fantastic analyst. He has looked into the causes and impacts of globalization and, among many other things, reveals how the USA have been loosing status for the past couple of decades because of this focus on what you are calling “instant gratification”. Do you know that for years now there are more foreign than american engineers coming out of USA schools? That the % of american patents is also going down? He believes USA may be heading to a big surprise when your realise many in the world are leaving you behind.

The book also presents a good analysis of what is needed at an individual basis (education, employability, career) to compete in this new flat world. And the approach connect very well with what Nick’s been promoting here and elsewhere.

In summary, if you are worried about what Nick is exposing in this post and others, I suggest you take the time to read this book. It may help you to understand what is going on and what we all need to do to cope with it

Who exactly should have written the software you mentioned? Who would have bought it? Sure, people gripe that the software isn’t there, but no one is going to write it if the market isn’t there!

We don’t need “someone” to push writing the software ahead of time, we need to make an environment where companies can identify and respond to such needs quickly. We are straying far from that with all the regulations in the name of “making things work better.”

Could it be that some of the behavior taken to task in this blog is really a result of that “we’ll save you from yourself” government regulation? An HR department may serve as a shield against such regulation, rather than just the wasteful group it is portrayed as. (It is still wasteful, but its reason for existence may need closer examination.)

Brad

Yah, Intel is on the bleeding edge, and that’s good. (I just wish the stock would go back up to 90.) Microsoft and Sun could be leading the software charge, but something tells me it’s the education industry that’s dropping the ball in the software domain. Frankly, Intel is embarrassing the rest of the tech world, and the stock market is blind to what’s going on. I’ll take hardware advances over no advances at all. But where are the programmers going to come from? Five years? Yah. That’s when schools will be ready to start teaching new software development methods. Meanwhile… those severed arms are piling up… and my Intel stock won’t go up til software techniques catch up.

Isn’t Intel an American company though? Don’t they do at least some research to be able to create these new chips and show why they are better than the ones created last year? On the one hand you want to say there isn’t the innovation but then the American company is the one doing some innovating in coming out with the new product, no? As an aside, Intel has also come out with some new cheap chips that seem to be selling like hotcakes if you hear about Intel Atom sales. Now, there are other software that can try to take advantage of this new hardware horsepower like virtualization though sometimes we hear that and sometimes not.

There is a bit of a chicken and the egg when it comes to computer hardware and software. Do we try to have fancier hardware first or fancier software? Just think of all the money Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo spend to design their game consoles using some of the latest and greatest. How green can Dell and HP make your PC?

Just some odd ironies to the story though it is an interesting read from my view.

* Yes, Six Sigma stifles innovation.
http://corpintel.wordpress.com/2007/10/16/six-sigma-innovation/

* Yes, short-termism is bad.
http://corpintel.wordpress.com/2007/11/28/quarterly-earnings-guidance/

Instant gratification probably cost me my last job, and stifled innovation at that company, too. Last year, my company decided to make some changes (and I’m not at liberty to discuss specifics, let’s just say it was a major organizational change). I saw that as an opportunity to move the company from a legacy VB6 application to something better. Essentially a rewrite to simpler, more stable code, with a port to .NET technologies. I still would have been stuck on SQL Server 2000 because of the underlying accounting package, but I could have lived with that. Well, I got the initial rewrite done by April, but it was buggy (and of course it was buggy, during the course of development, the other IT person – the network admin – left the company and wasn’t replaced – I had to do it all!). Rather than working through the bugs (and nothing show-stopping), management wanted what it wanted, and wanted it NOW! So much for risk-taking and innovation. So, grudgingly, I ported the old VB6 application over to run in the new organizational structure, then left the company as soon as I could. Now I’m working as a consultant, still in VB6, and wondering when I’m going to be able to make the jump to newer technologies. All because of management’s instant gratification and short-sightedness.

Instant gratification has caused economic bubbles for centuries that end up bursting. When will it end?