9.
The ParadigmThat Failed?
THERE ARE OBSERVERS WHO maintain that much of what goes on in business organizations comes down to a struggle between those who see the enterprise largely through the lens of the numbers—sales figures, costs, budgets—and those who focus instead primarily on people, their energies, ambitions, and limitations. A gross oversimplification, of course, but one that approximates the argument between the two schools of strategy.
To see how and why the numbers people won out—at least until recently—we need to kick the debate even higher, to the level of competing paradigms. The concept of a paradigm was originally enunciated by the late Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In fields like physics ...
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