Culture

For a bit over a month now I've been trying to get my head and heart around the situation of a former mobile industry heavyweight finally exiting the business by selling "substantially all" of its operations related to its core business. Retrospection is fine and dandy and everyone has a theory and nobody has the data to back it up, but sufficient to say, I think it has to do with the decline in culture and general confusion which took hold of people. But, more interestingly I've been thinking about why I feel so bad about the future as well.

With my background in technology, I'm of course biased to view things from that angle. And technology has, for better and for worse, over the course of history allowed people to improve things by harnessing natural phenomenons and exploiting them to achieve different goals and solve different problems. Tool building at its core. The sad thing when looking around is to notice that these days people who have formal education in engineering have gone far from their roots and are no longer building useful things. Instead a type of cargo cult behavior has taken over and some have even forgot what it is like to do things with ones hands. That's also evident by looking at higher education statistics, where young people are more often than not avoiding "hard" subjects and the natural sciences.

But ok, what has this to do with the subject at hand? Well, for years I've been frustrated as the company I've seen fall has, to an extent, been plagued by confusion where people think that success comes from optimizing the bill of materials and squeezing your suppliers, from clever marketing tricks, or worse yet, from strategizing and other similar things, while in the end at the core is the product. Technology, which is packaged and produced in a way that it solves real problems, is elegant, and has a certain amount of artisan spirit forged into it. And with the product divisions sold away, what little culture in product creation was left is now finally sold away and what remains is an empty shell of people who shovel paper and Powerpoint in an illusion that they are doing something productive. But with the product culture finally extinguished, how can one of an engineering background be happy in such a brave new world?