Essay Innovation is Always Good – The Goodness Scale – Management Assignment Help

Assignment Task

In 1903, two crazy young men, without any engineering training or college education, built a machine the world told them couldn’t be made. In the frigid 30-mile-per-hour winds of Kill Devil Hills, a few miles from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, the Wright brothers made the first sustained powered flight with a person at the controls (see Figure 10-1). Orville won the coin toss and flew first, but the brothers took turns, making four flights before calling it a day. As amazing as their accomplishment was, it went unnoticed: five boys from the nearby village made up most of the crowd. Only two small newspapers bothered to report on the event because it was seen as a stunt, not a technological breakthrough. It’s hard to believe, but the Wright brothers landed their plane on a not very interested planet. The world would have to wait another 30 years for the commercial aviation industry to begin.

Measuring innovation: the goodness scale We all think we know what good is, but like all definitions, its shine fades when applied to real life. What might be good for you (finding a thousand dollars in your underwear or waking up on a Maui beach) is probably bad for someone or something else (the person who lost the money, and the hapless sand crabs crushed beneath you). What we casually call good is rarely beneficial to everyone: it depends on who you are and where you stand. As Shakespeare’s character Hamlet said, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” and our diverse thinking on goodness is reflected by the 50 or more definitions for the word good offered by most dictionaries.

As social creatures, we depend on traditions to form communities, governments, and families, and we believe these traditions are important enough to justify sacrificing our lives, or the lives of others, to protect them from change. And the grand irony is that all traditions, even religious ones, began as innovations. There was a day before men wore suits, and a time before Jews, Christians, and Muslims had their first holy texts (or the first churches to pray in). All of these ideas evolved into traditions over time, but only because people were, one day, willing (or forced) to try something new. There’s a circular nature to innovation that’s hard to see, but we’re living inside it all the time. The best philosophy of innovation is to accept both change and tradition and to avoid the traps of absolutes. As ridiculous as it is to accept all new ideas simply because they’re new, it’s equally silly to accept all traditions simply because they’re traditions. Ideas new and old have their place in the future, and it’s our job to put them there.