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Comment by Mistletoe | Hacker News Reader

There’s a great book by the guy that wrote The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel that is out right now and I’m really enjoying it. It’s called Same as Ever.

Because what never changes is humans and our source code, our DNA. Expecting Google to not turn into IBM is like expecting wings to sprout from our back. The great delusion we tell ourselves is that each business is different, but each business is powered by the same human engine. That engine evolves at a glacial pace on an evolutionary time scale. When I read about the Dutch East Indian company or a guy in Mesopotamia that can’t get good quality copper from his suppliers and his servant was treated rudely, it’s all the same.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nāṣir

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I don't think it's literally impossible to avoid the same mistakes as our predecessors. But I do think that the default position that "oh we modern innovative companies won't end up like those stodgy old companies" is a recipe for repeating history. As they say in AA: the first step to solving a problem is admitting you have it.

Because yes by default you will absolutely repeat history unless you acknowledge that those old timey crazy people were fundamentally no different than you.

> I don't think it's literally impossible to avoid the same mistakes as our predecessors.

Our predecessors didn’t make mistakes; they made rational choices that led to outcomes we don’t like.

We (for some subset of us that become business leaders) will make similar choices that those who come after us will view as mistakes.

They will rightfully think that we made the “same” “mistakes” because our rational decisions will be made in response to similar pressures.

For example, we are going to make short term optimal/long term detrimental decisions, just like our predecessors, because we are subject to the same demands from investors for short term gains and from our leadership to hit short term goals in exchange for increased compensation.

Don’t hate the players, hate the game.

Things tend to repeat but it's not completely impossible to have large and lasting changes. Ursula K. Le Guin used to say how people thought inescapable the divine rights of kings.

On the other hand, Google did change the world. Everything's just more mature nowadays. There's less blue ocean in its business segments.

I wonder if a company could stay "evergreen" by constantly finding new business areas and somehow spinning off old ones? Apple for example almost died in between before really coming back with the iPhone.

3M does something like this, with a rule that 30% of the company's profit must come from products introduced within the last 4 years:

https://hbr.org/2013/08/the-innovation-mindset-in-acti-3

Humans have great capacity to learn from our mistakes. Our source code or DNA have no encoding related to running business in a certain way. We mourn old google the revolutionary place, the likes of which could not have existed 100 years ago. But we forget that it was such a revolutionary place that its mere existence was an anomaly of sorts, and also that it spurned us to create several such new places, and that learning will continue us to create many more.

But we have created new types of social institutions despite having the same DNA as our ancestors! Most notably the corporation and the nation-state.

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