Have you been to Chiptole recently? It started as a place that gave free drinks to students, really cheap prices and had a distinctly different attitude. Today, they’re revoking the drink idea, scaling back how much food you get and trying to upsell you wherever they can. I think it’s pretty obvious who is calling the shots now. The first approach created value, the second mines it. One is sustainable, the other is not.

One of the people I work for put it nicely – “we do innovation, not exploitation.” The theory is that most of the big Boomer companies haven’t done anything innovative in half a century. And their conservative, publicly traded leadership is incentivized to milk what they already have rather than create something new. But his logic, although it seems counterintuitive, is that it’s actually a lot cheaper to be innovative than it is to pour over spreadsheets for extra pennies.

If you do your research, the 80’s wasn’t the bull market people think it was – mergers and buyouts were just burning off value for temporary stock jumps. Nobody way doing finance, they were just shuffling cards. The only growth came from massive fees which were debited from the accounts of – you guessed it – the innovators of the last generation.

I guess there are some economic explanations for why this is short-sighted and ultimately suicidal. Umair does an amazing job of it. But to me, the debate is deeper than that. Which person would you rather be? The raider or creator? Is that why you get up every morning, to pick up a few extra scraps from an inefficient entrepreneur? You studied six years in college to do someone else’s paperwork?

The people who are writing their memoirs or teaching your college classes have a lot to gloss over. Mainly the fact that their entire way of thinking creating a smoke and mirrors bureaucracy that hasn’t done much besides institutionalize mediocrity. That system is broken. I think you (I) know which person you want to be. It’s also fairly obviously what slots the system wants you to fill. So, do you want to be the host or the parasite? Do you want to innovate or exploit?

“Baby this town rips the bones from your back

It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap

We gotta get out while we’re young

‘Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run”…

There is this amazing anecdote tucked away in Herodotus – I’ve used it before – but I think the moral is worthy enough of a second mention. At the height of their power, Sparta sent soldiers to Teagan to helotize the population – carrying the very chains they intended to enslave them with. Well, Sparta lost. And the soldiers stayed and toiled in the Teagan fields, bound by the fetters they had brought with them.

In many ways, this was Sparta embodied. They’d embark on a course so convinced it was infallible that they’d never consider the consequences. A simple economic accident – that subcitizens labored while men trained for war – dictated every facet of their foreign policy for almost 300 years. Once it was written, it could not be changed. Brasidas, likely the country’s greatest general, was successful almost entirely because he was “un-Spartan.” He was clever and articulate and a rule breaker. Their win in the Peloponnese was ultimately an albatross that they could not bear. The military culture they brought crashing against Athenian walls was the burden that slew Greece. Sparta died in the chains they took against others.

There’s a reason that the conclusion of the 48 Laws looks at formlessness. Sparta had everything else – the power, the brains, the courage, the money – but it meant nothing because they couldn’t think strategically. They could not change courses after they committed.

They lacked the fluidity to survive even in the Ancient world. Today is even faster – you don’t have a century to shift assumptions. It’s really easy to get locked into a path or a mindset. I know I’m more comfortable with certainty or absolutes. But that just isn’t how things work. I don’t want to end up tied to the land I was supposed to conquer. I think that means take nothing for granted, consider the alternatives, and always, always avoid the hubris of thinking there is only ONE way.

References/ Further Reading:

A History of Sparta 950-192 B.C – W.G Forrest (very short)

History of the Peloponnesian War – Thucydides

The Histories – Herodotus (skim)

The Greco-Persian Wars – Peter Green (easy read that explains Thucydides’)