C.K. Prahalad writes on the powers of Dominant Logic,
All of us are prisoners of our own socialization. The lenses through which we perceive the world are colored by our own ideology, experiences, and established management practices. Each one of the groups that is focused on poverty alleviation–the World Bank, rich countries providing aid, charitable organizations, national governments, and the private sector–is conditioned by its own dominant logic.
Makes sense to me. We’ve all had different paths, and each of our paths has shaped our thinking in different ways. This reminds me of something Paul Buchheit said some time ago about the limitation of our own thinking.
In his presentation at Startup School 2007, Paul reminded us that when someone tells you, “That’s impossible†it should be translated as “According to my very limed experience and narrow understanding of reality, that’s very unlikely.†Everyone continuously builds a different set of experiences in their respective lives, and therefore everyone’s understanding of reality is fundamentally different.
I covered that here. Back to the story on why for-profits are generally viewed and treated negatively in their genuine endeavors to do good (and inhibiting them from achieving real success). Prahalad continues,
The policies of the [Indian] government for the first 45 years since independence from Great Britain in 1947 were based on a set of basic assumptions. Independent India started with a deep suspicion of the private sector. The country’s interaction with the East India Company and colonialism played a major part in creating this mindset.
The dominant logic, built over 45 years, is difficult to give up for individuals, political parties, and sections of the bureaucracy. This is the reason why politicians and bureaucrats appear to be vacillating in their positions. Most thinking people know where they have to go, but letting go of their beliefs and abandoning their “zones of comfort” and familiarity are not easy
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