thingamy

Unlearn or Challenge?

What's the diff?

David Heinemeir Hansson of 37signals and Ruby on Rails fame spoke at Stanford the other day - Unlearn your MBA!

Good concept of course, provocative title for a talk for business students, and old stuff is old and new stuff is new so hard to build new using old, catchy.

Albeit, a small logical flaw there - the old is there, new is only new in relation to the existing. Better is only better compared to something worse.

Hence, you need to know the old, you need to know it damned well in fact - without that you cannot position your new product or business model. You need to know all about building houses before you can create a better one.

 

And worse, without knowing the existing you cannot create. Creating is another form of reusing, or rather reusing in another form!

The crux lies in "challenging", learning and then challenge what you learned. Question everything, do not take anything for true or granted. That will create new things and ways.

In other words, not "learn then unlearn" but "learn then challenge".

But alas, I heavily suspect that is a personality trait not easily "learned". You know the types, always sceptical, heretics even. I like heretics, they create the new - and I bet you that they know the existing extremely well!

If you're not into questioning all and everything, perhaps the simple solution is to unlearn, but then you might end up with the shack above.

Jasper Johns

Stumbled over a quote by said gentleman:

"Do something, do something to that, then do something to that."

Yess, that's Business Model building in thingamy. Just do it, then do it more. Business Model building as art. Heh.