The last post talked about engineering change as though it were difficult to bring about but uniformly a good thing. In this post, I would like to talk about change as if it were a force with a life of its own and often collateral damage. It can be a source of both hope and suffering.

Joseph Schumpeter, said by Wikipedia to be an Austrian American economist, used the term creative destruction to describe the “process of industrial mutation” which is always changing the current economic structure to create a new one. We have all seen that one man’s progress is another man’s joblessness. It is also not news that the pace of creative destruction is exponentially faster because of the speed of communication of discovery, the number of players in this global economy, the technological improvements in the tools used to make discovery, and the use of artificial intelligence.

When you cannot feed your kids because you have lost your job in an outdated company, it is hard to embrace creative destruction. It becomes easier to embrace philosophies that endorse a belief that things must be a certain way and not change.

How has creative destruction affected you? Are you surviving economic Darwinism?