Prognosis

Engineers (including those social engineers called “managers” and “administrators”) think about things and use. Marketers think about media and message.

Neither of these perspectives are sufficient. The mid-point of average of these perspectives is not sufficient. Both of these perspective added together is not sufficient.

Only a deeper perspective that accommodates both and relates them in terms greater than either is sufficient.

That deeper perspective is intersubjective and phenomenological, and it is already well on its way to wrenching control of the world from the hands of the objective minds who have dominated the practical world since before Newton, and also the romantic reactionaries who have defined themselves against this tendency who celebrate intuition and feeling at the expense of the rational.

User experience, inside-out branding, new approaches to “human resources” (a term whose days are numbered if there ever was one) such as ROWE, a new appreciation of the importance of “why” (as opposed to “how” and “what”)… It’s taking over because we’re realizing that our biggest problems are subjective, not objective.

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Incumbents fall when they fight the new war with the old strategies that won them their predominance. And that’s what they do, and history’s convection current perpetually churns down the old, and churns up the new.

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