I Reject Your Reality, And Substitute My Own

Adam Savage on MythBusters said that throw-away line during one of the first episodes of the series, and it stuck with me as a post-fact real-world way to explain the way executives and organizations attempt to remake a bad situation (kind of like the Reality Distortion Field).  You can even get a tee-shirt now.

It rarely ends well, but this piece of advice from the PRSA daily news out of Harvard Business Review takes Savage School to some logical, albeit scary, conclusions.

In If You Don't Like Your Future, Rewrite Your Past, Rosabeth Moss Kanter urges organizations and individuals to not let previous events limit where you can go in the future.  Parts of the blog aren't quite as bad as the headline implies -- it speaks to how IBM reshaped its future by putting different emphasis on its past.

Parts, however, are: Leaders who create the future can start by rewriting history.

Overall, it still comes off as really, really bad presentism.

Or, to restate Ms. Kanter's title, as George Orwell put it, Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.