My daughter is the latest in a line of fine tennis players in our family, so we have an annual end-of-summer dad-and-daughter tradition of spending a day at the U.S. Open. The other day we were on the phone together when early bird tickets went on sale, and within minutes we scored great seats. At one point, as we were looking at an online chart of Arthur Ashe Stadium, my late-Millennial kid asked, “I can’t imagine how you bought tickets before you had the internet.”
Yeah, it’s even hard for me to remember a lot about the Before Times – before the Digital Age. For tickets, you would show up at a box office, or call on the phone and hope for the best. A lot of things were less convenient, or just took longer. We wrote letters and looked forward to a response. Long-distance phone calls were expensive, and you had to hope somebody was near their phone if you called. Accessing information required looking up stuff in, say, a phone book or an encyclopedia.
But the digital revolution not only brought convenience; it speeded up everything. And if you’re in business – or in any organization, really – you know that the biggest change has been in decision-making. It’s faster at every level. Jeff Bezos says that Amazon is successful because of what he calls “velocity” in the corporate culture. About a dozen years ago, Mark Zuckerberg coined the phrase “move fast and break things” – encouraging at Facebook a mindset of innovation and a willingness to experiment, even if it meant making mistakes. Zuckerberg believed that errors resulting from moving too fast were a secondary concern – that fear of failure would lead his company to move too slowly and miss opportunities.
That idea of speed over all is now the standard in American organizational culture – and it has pushed aside the value formerly placed on strategic planning and consideration of potential consequences. But I’d say it also has led, consequentially, to a culture of recklessness, and disregard for the impact of decisions on stakeholders.
The “move fast and break things” school clearly includes Elon Musk – and you’d have to say that it has worked for him, because he has become the richest person in the world, and his companies have built a lot. But there’s a place where such cash-over-culture recklessness does not work: in government. Musk has moved on from his leadership of the Trump administration’s experiment in radical restructuring – after creating chaos, upending countless lives, ruining important initiatives.
The problem is that the recklessness of the internet era appeals to old Donald Trump – he who was born just a year into the first term of Harry S Truman. Trump has never been one for thoughtful decision-making – that process of exploring different perspectives, and considering consequences, and earning buy-in from stakeholders before reaching a conclusion.
It's telling that when Trump reversed course on his global tariff initiative – I mean, the first time, in mid-April – he offered a simple explanation for how he would decide the level of tariffs and when they would be introduced. He said, “It’s really more of an instinct than anything else.”
Great. We are being governed by the instincts of the first twice-impeached, criminally convicted, multiply-bankrupted president. As he has shredded political norms, Trump has intentionally thrown out traditional deliberative procedures for making decisions. And the man has little impulse control, clearly. So life in this country and in many places around the world is subject to the leader’s moods, desires and grievances.
There’s a role for gut instinct in executive decision-making. But humans have the capacity for something higher than the gut – for reasoning, for thoughtfulness, for empathy. That’s what gets lost in the rush of move-fast-and-break-things decision-making in the digital era.
I’m grateful to live in the internet age, with the capacity to see and learn things that could only be imagined when I was a kid. There’s so much information and understanding now at our fingertips – including those tickets my daughter and I scored for that end-of-summer tennis tournament. But we live in complex times, with high stakes connected to decisions our nation faces. It’s not good to break things when the stuff you’re breaking includes the world economy, matters of war and peace, and democracy itself. Call me old-fashioned, but I wish we had a leader who respected and practiced the decision-making standards of an earlier time.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.