At the CLAC conference this past week, a speaker shared a Jack Welch quote: “If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.” When I went searching for the citation, however, I could only locate this version from the 2000 GE Annual Report: “We’ve long believed that when the rate of change inside an
institution becomes slower than the rate of change outside, the end is in sight.”
I like the second version much better for several reasons – first, it is stated as a shared belief, rather than the preceding more commandment-like statement. It implies that this is an assumption held among a group of people and suggests that they are taking action to keep from ever facing the end. Some will immediately react here with the continued dismissal of anything that can be labelled as technological determinism. But let’s look first at something similar that was said much earlier.
In 1816, Thomas Jefferson wrote: “Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times.”
Who among us would argue that change – social, political, technological, economic, climate etc. is not everywhere? And what about the rate of change, whether in a specific realm or in the interactions among them – do we believe that we are in the midst of exponential increases or are we continuing to bet on the soothing world of daily routines and traditional practices? Yes, we all heard the pronouncements of “the new normal.” But in the vast majority of cases, the changed circumstances were merely defined as a different plateau – a structural readjustment that could be done once and then life, and our institutions, would proceed along an altered, but more similar than divergent, path.
The other reason I prefer the second version of Welch’s words is that “in sight” is so much more specific, so much more declarative, than “near.” Think about it. If you are told a bear is in sight, might not your actions be a bit different if the warning was that it was near?
Assuming that the end is near, not yet in sight, lets institutions and individuals postpone taking consequential action. Jack Welch conveyed a quite different approach in that annual report, implying that GE was actively working to maintain a rate of internal change that was equal to or surpassing what was happening externally. Fifty years after Jefferson asserted that institutions must change with the times, Thomas Edison opened a lab that would become the beginning of General Electric. Today, GE, the 13th largest firm in the United States and the only one remaining from the original group listed on the Dow Jones Index of 1896, is branded as The Digital Industrial Company | Imagination at Work.
I expect that some higher education institutions, and some individuals, can continue to be successful by operating as if the bear is near. But I believe that many more schools and people would be better served by acknowledging that the bear is in sight – approaching ever closer as external changes continue to multiply while internal changes are thought to be more politically difficult and culturally upsetting than assuming that bears don’t really exist.
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