The first decade of the 21st century has brought us a series of major economic and geopolitical shocks: the dot-com bust, the Sept. 11 attacks on New York, the financial crisis led by the subprime meltdown, and just last week, a fresh bout of terrorist attacks in Mumbai that threatens to destabilize the very significant and growing economy of India.
The most worrisome implication of these successive events is that the world will tailspin into a fear psychosis and all the drivers of progress and prosperity--innovation, entrepreneurship, consumer confidence and reform--will get paralyzed.
I am writing this column on a long flight from San Francisco to Singapore. Among the various books I have read on this flight is Judy Estrin's new book, Closing The Innovation Gap. Estrin, chief executive of JLabs and an adviser on President-elect Barack Obama's transition team, is deeply concerned about this fear psychosis that threatens to stifle innovation. She believes that the "soup" that provides the basis of innovation is currently being poisoned. "The soup starts with some common ingredients, a set of human attitudes and beliefs that are so critical that I call them the five core values of innovation: questioning, risk-taking, openness, patience and trust," Estrin writes. (Here's an excerpt from her book.)
And yet, when the dominant psychological premise of society is fear, how can people access essential factors like openness, risk-taking and trust? Thus, it is of paramount importance right now for us to address the fear issue from taking over human ingenuity.
I've thought long and hard, and watched how the fear epidemic spreads. Just recently, a well-respected Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Sequoia Capital, released a PowerPoint presentation that spread like a plague through the Internet, faster than Obamamania. In it, the esteemed firm made a grand display of irresponsible leadership by circulating the same germs of fear that we desperately need to prevent from spreading.
What did the media do in response? Top bloggers, major business and technology publications and otherwise respectable journalists became willing carriers of the virus. They published the presentation on their blogs and Web sites, and discussed and echoed the very sentiments of negativity that oozed out of Sequoia's presentation.
This is an example of how the epidemic spreads. And this is exactly how the epidemic cannot be allowed to spread going forward. No matter what happens--however dire the world events become--we must not allow fear to rule us like this.
