Shock Therapy

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. Gotta see it. All-time Top 20 movie. Ever. Pretty great book, too.

They used to use shock therapy to make patients sane. The rationale was that people who had epileptic fits were never insane. All epileptics totally have their shizzel together, except for the twitching thing every now and then. So the system was like, "We wanna be like that guy," and doctors tried to induce epileptic fits with shock therapy. A shock to the system would maybe wake up the, um, sanity genes.

Well, in corporate America the same thing happens sometimes. A company continues ploddingly along, making little progress, taking little risk, just repeating whatever they did in the past...and they likely will fade away without shock therapy. Sometimes it works, like when the Board saw this happening at Apple in the early 1990s and then brought in Steve Jobs to fix things. That shock...worked. And sometimes it doesn't...like when Blackberry tried to shock a highly conservative culture in phone-making with Band-Aids, and the once most highly valued company in the world ended up going more or less bankrupt a decade later.

Shocking. Not.