That was the title of the presentation I delivered on July, 15th at Munich Technical University
It was a rather hot and humid day last Thursday when I made my appearance at 5.30 p.m. in lecture room number 1100 in order to speak as the last of the orators in the series „Innovative Entrepreneurs“ / Summer Semester 2010 – Leading Growth-Oriented Enterprises. To me, the room temperature felt like approximately 30 degrees Celsius. Consequently, seeing all those people in the audience made me quite happy.
The organizer had advised me to speak about “Relevance of IT in Enterprises”. Consequently, I started my lecture with a rather old but still quite suitable joke:
How do you ruin an enterprise?
There are three answers:
Women – that is the most strenuous approach.
Gambling – that is the most enjoyable approach.
IT – that is where success is guaranteed.
No. Talking about the relevance of IT in enterprises is a little like talking about IT in a car. And I am fairly hopeless when it comes to that.
🙂 So I was permitted to talk about life, knowledge, computer science and ethics.
Here are the milestones of my presentation:
First, I told the audience something of my own life, namely about my first few years in the IT sector. I was lucky enough to witness the pioneer time of a new technology. Consequently, I had a very rewarding time as an apprentice. To be sure, we were not exclusively hilarious, but an immense dynamics prevailed. For us, that meant great opportunities.
In addition, I talked about my entire life, relating the ups and downs of those 60 years of mine that, to me at least, seem to have been rather fulfilled.
I tried to make my audience aware of how privileged we are in the current situation, both with respect to myself and all those listening in the lecture hall. There is a huge gap between our life style and that of other people living at the same time but in other regions and social stratums, but also between our life style and that of people who lived in earlier times.
And I went so far as to wonder if, maybe, my generation is living a golden age. Unfortunately, however, we forget to remember our successors. We did (and do) almost everything possible to make life as hard as possible for future generations.
My next step was to talk about knowledge. What do we know about life and how the human race evolved? Do we really know the evolutionary story of the human and our own history? To what extent do we understand evolution – and ourselves?
Last year, we celebrated the two-hundredth birthday of Darwin. That means that a lot more than 150 years ago, most people were “creativists”. All kinds of evolutionary theories were considered totally absurd by them. The concept of evolution was considered heretic and neither desired nor tolerated.
Language (perhaps 50,000 years old) and writing (maybe 15,000 years old) do not have a very long history, either. The ancestors of homo sapiens started walking upright around 5 to 10 million years ago. And that is how Pandora’s Box was opened. The way towards humans started and the first stages of thinking and knowledge were reached. Now just imagine how long the evolutionary process took until it reached even that stage!
🙂 Of course, this is only true if scientific research has not made any mistakes.
With this in mind, the time during which humans lived even anywhere close to what they (we) consider a matter of course today is extremely short. If you put this time span in relation with the long evolution of the earth and life thereon, it is even less than small: it has a limiting value of zero. I feel strongly about this and wanted to point it out to you.
I also took the opportunity to remind my audience of the excellent lectures on evolution organized by the Carl-von-Linde-Akademie (Prof. Dr. Mainzer) at TUM in 2009 because of the Darwin jubilee.
In my presentation, I continued by outlining the technological advances of the last 1,000/500 years, of modern times, of the last 50 years, and in particular of the last decade. In this respect, too, it was my intention to point out how the evolutionary process currently seems to be accelerating.
I tried to “cluster” the technologies developed by humans in a rational order. I structured cultural skills and technologies by separating those where information is processed (informatics) from those that realize physical processes.
As I see it, informatics will continue to be more and more dynamic in future decades, while the “physical” (old) technologies seem to have reached the end of their potential as far as “further, faster, higher” is concerned.
Cynically spoken, you can say that the sole purpose of those technologies was to burn oil and coal and use up resources. Now we are confronted with an irreparable pile of shards. The problem will certainly not be solved if we insist on technologically conservative ways of thinking and antiquated problem solving strategies.
The blind use of “old technologies” probably even created an irreversible situation. The best new concepts and a different approach to business can hope to achieve is a mild cushioning of the detrimental effects. As I talked about this, I also mentioned the great presentation given by Martin Lees (secretary general of the “Club of Rome”) in January 2010 at TUM.
Sociologically, the consequence of this economic development based on technology was the sprouting of great capital companies and enterprises in the late 19th and 20th centuries. This caused a strong concentration of economic power in the hands of anonymity and the rise of globally acting concerns that rule the world. As a consequence of this, we now no longer have any sustainability.
The next step would have to be us asking: what is an enterprise, no matter what size?
In my definition, an enterprise is an eco-social system with many stakeholders. We are talking systems with their own rules of communication, their own rituals and basic values. They develop their individual culture and will be judged by their external balance. And they are threatened internally by typically systemic dangers, for example system fascism, and externally by change.
Of course, the next milestone in my presentation had to be about leadership and ethics.
What is a decision? What requirements must be met in order to make a development in an enterprise a sustainable one? How can the employees themselves help to prevent the enterprise from drifting into perversion, thus keeping detrimental effects for the enterprise itself and its stakeholders, as well as for the environment, at bay? I tried to make a few simple proposals.
Finally, I concluded that a sustainable and humane development of enterprises can only be achieved where many free and autonomous people cooperate. This can only work if people are prepared to build up their own consensus-oriented value system in a critical and enlightened way, and if they are also willing to apply it to everyday life. In order to realize this, freedom is absolutely necessary.
The only way to get anywhere near solving future problems and foreseeable catastrophes is for us to develop “new, just and free” social systems based on the consensus of many, such as enterprises and other communities. Simultaneously, a re-structuring of our society would also have to take place.
This is true both for major and minor aspects, as well as for the sustainable development of an enterprise and our global human community.
I finished my lecture with a citation of Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling:
Der ist beglückt,
der sein darf was er ist,
der Bahn und Ziel
mit eignem Auge misst.
Happy is – who is permitted to be what he is – who measures the way along with the end – with his own eyes)
Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling
Many thanks to the audience for your attention and the numerous questions!
RMD
(Translated by EG)
P.S.
Here is the graphical support of my lecture, prepared by Johannes Naumann:
P.S.1
TUM recorded my lecture on video tape. As soon as I get it, I will try to publish some of it on Youtube.
P.S.2
I took the pictures of TU München from the central media archive Wikimedia Commons. They were taken by Rufus46 (tower at Gabelsbergerstraße, July, 29th, 2006), Benson.by (TUM Audimax, July, 7th, 2005) and Martinroell (Parablen, March, 22nd, 2005).
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