Go back in time six hundred years. It’s hard for me to get my mind around the 1400’s. All that comes to my mind is that this time period was DARK. The end of the dark ages, I guess.
In the 1400’s scribes, mostly monks, were ensuring that knowledge was transfered and that all was not lost. Painstakingly, they transcribed book after book. Can you imagine their joy when in the later end of the century a guy named Gutenberg invented the “movable type.” All of a sudden, almost overnight, the role of the scribe was replaceable. Here’s what happened next. Do NOT miss this. This is HUMAN nature, I’ve come to believe.
The scribes began to organize to preserve their “profession.” They fought the inevitable. They held onto the old way of doing things even in the face of daunting evidence to the contrary. One of the smartest monks decided that he was not going to take this without a fight. He wrote a book about the value of the scribe. Here was his mistake. Since he was in a hurry to get it “published,” he had it PRINTED.
What change in your “profession” are you fighting?
What is the evidence that this is the right fight?
Where are you getting your information to come to this conclusion?
Try hitting a news site like Digg and see what your competitors are seeing.
BTW, the story about the scribe was modified from one told in the book by Clay Shirky titled appropriately…
Here Comes Everybody.
Check it out and while you’re at it you might enjoy reading The Long Tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Mavericks at Work, A Perfect Mess, The Organization Man, Free Agent Nation, A Whole New Mind, Influence, Why We Buy, Stumbling on Happiness, The Social Animal, Predictably Irrational, and anything by Seth Godin.
Are you writing this down?
You’re more than a scribe, aren’t you?
BUILT TO LEAD 