Why is it so hard to achieve lasting, significant change in your corporate culture? Because your organization is like a living organism, an organism that wants to maintain homeostasis against a changing environment.
In his book The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive, Brian Christian explained that “the first branch of computer science was what’s come to be known as computability theory, which doesn’t care how long a computation would take, only whether it’s possible or not. Take a millisecond or take a millennium, it’s all the same to computability theory.” However, as Christian also noted, “computer scientists refer to certain problems as intractable – meaning the correct answer can be computed, but not quickly enough to be of use.”
At this week’s CFO Corporate Performance Management Conference in New York, Jonah Keri, author of 2011’s The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First, told how the Tampa Bay Rays managed to reach the playoffs three out of the last four years with one of the lowest payrolls in baseball.