Leading for Innovation: And Organizing for Results

16.2. The New Noodlers and New Ways of Advancing Knowledge

In the intellectual panic that follows, French noodler René Descartes comes up with a way of thinking problems through without error by reducing each to its simplest component parts. Descartes' reductionism kick-starts science and the modern world of hi-tech arcana, where success has come to mean this: knowing more and more about less and less and inventing vocabulary so esoteric that only the infield specialists can explain what it means and in this way become indispensable. Thanks to Descartes, knowledge proliferates and differentiates. By 1970, for instance, the single, medieval discipline of botany has split to become botany, biology, organic chemistry, histology, embryology, evolutionary ...