Fumbling the Future

If you aren’t familiar with the history of industry that includes the technologies that arose from Xerox PARC, you should be ashamed of yourself. These pioneers invented OOP, Ethernet, GUIs, multitasking, the mouse, and many other things over the course of a few short years. Even so, the value of these innovations was never realized by the company that funded their creation, primarily due to poor leadership and lack of empowerment.

Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer, was first published in 1988, the year that I graduated from high school. The lessons we learn from it are no less pertinent today than they were in in 1988, or in the early 1970s when the subject of the book takes place.

You should read this book for the several timeless lessons of it illustrates.

1. Executives with Harvard MBAs are perfectly capable of making the same mistakes that your boss makes. Or that you make. Or that I have made.
2. The principles of Agile and Lean applicable beyond the realm of software development and the same mistakes that plague a copier company in 1970 continue to plague large organizations today.
3. Perfect is often the enemy of good.
4. Acting on customer feedback will turn good ideas into great products. In order to do this, you must often open your robes enough to be vulnerable. This is hard.
5. If you don’t try, you can’t win.

It is baffling to me that Xerox’s behaviors of failure are often repeated in organizations today. Do people seriously not study history? Perhaps it is merely the organic nature of large organizations to trend toward self protection that causes things like Xerox’s failure and our current Wall Street debacle.