I just wanted to share with everyone a project my firm is working on
that I think you will find interesting and informative. We recently put up
a web site on the project(http://www.fastforward400.com) and would love your
feedback. Also, does anyone know of any other web sites that are used solely
for research purposes that provide a forum for theoretical discussion?
Mitchell and Company is a management and financial consulting firm
in Boston that specializes in stock price growth, and whose clients are
mainly Fortune 500 companies. Mitchell and Company also runs five related
organizations. To briefly give you some background, the project is called
the "400 Year Project." We're funding the project because we want to use
our consulting experience to help companies help society. The project aims
to telescope into 20 years the expected progress and benefits of the next
400 years and looks at how we can achieve these social and economic
advancements much sooner using companies. Our hypothesis is that companies
can accelerate progress using existing technology and education in
innovative ways.
Too often, companies are bogged down by existing ways of doing
things. They run into what we call "stalls," or psychological blocks to
progress. We are also using historical examples to illustrate this. For
instance, moveable type for printing European languages and the increase in
literacy that followed probably could have happened a lot sooner. Social
"stalls" as well as trade secrets were some of human obstacles that slowed
things down. This idea translates to companies as well, which focus too
heavily on best practice approaches to measure and target their own
performance. We feel companies need to set higher targets, using a
"theoretical best practice" approach as a guide. However, we need to
maximize the beneficial aspects of progress and try to balance people's
interests. Thus, we need to continually question ourselves and the Project
and create an on-going dialogue about these issues.
In part, the Project looks at how we might overcome stalls and
seeks examples of different kinds of stalls and ways that individuals and
companies have dealt with them. Besides our interactive web site we are
writing a book about the project. Both are designed to encourage people to
participate and share their ideas. We'd especially like input from the
academic community and ideas for how we might be able to integrate the
project into management curriculum. Is there any way we could organize the
site to make it more useful to educators? Again, I'd love people's feedback
on the site and hope you enjoy it.
Thanks,
Jason