Doing only What We Know Best

It’s just human nature. We do what we know best.

But what if you are an attorney with no practical banking experience and you are President of a national bank rich in a history of service to clients?

What if you have a specialized surgery practice addressing ailments that everyone experiences in life?

What if you are President of a college with financial commitments to build buildings and services required to sustain “regional” accreditation.

Here’s what you do: You ignore normal administrative procedures required of every “service” business and do not attempt to understand nor adjust to the revolution in information technology!

• The attorney with no experience managing a bank does not improve services the digital revolution demands of financial centers and plays to the crowd by raising employee wages to a minimum of $25 an hour and focuses not on banking but on the brokerage company thus making banking subservient to sales of securities.

• The surgeon performs surgeries but does nothing to inform patients about what that entails.

• And the college President works with his state higher education commission to block entry into the higher education market from Internet education competition.

There are individual explanations for all these “mistakes,” and no one solution, but each displays ignorance of subjects not within their area of competence.

This suggests a major failure in “training” of attorneys, medical professionals and educators about Information Technology which is then left to IT professionals to manage.

In this time when interest in “Anti-Trust” powers of government is on the front burner, the major bank is open to regulations forcing separation or a spin-off of the brokerage company from banking.

The patients of surgeons will shop for more patient-friendly clinics.

College-age students will balk at paying “full tuition” for Online Courses. 

Recent declines in college enrollments can be explained by colleges unprepared to provide competent, low cost, Online Courses during the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet they had twenty years to perfect instructional design of Online Courses and operate at lower cost.

All concerned will learn that doing only what they know best is human, but stupid. Meanwhile their patients, clients and students suffer.

There has got to be a better way of being human!