202504051618 Status: #idea Tags: #institutions #business #government #bureaucracy # Creative destruction is required because we haven't solved the succession problem Disruption and creative destruction are frequently lauded in Silicon Valley, but there are real costs to destroying existing institutions. We lose much of the tacit & proprietary knowledge contained in these institutions (see: electrical engineering & computing research after the decline of Bell Labs). Creative destruction is only required because we struggle to successfully transfer skills and power to the next generation leading existing institutions. As a result, the existing institutions decay. The inertia of these institutions makes it such that years or even decades of effort are required to take them over and reform them from the inside. By contrast, a startup can be founded immediately to compete with and ultimately destroy the aging institution. Hence, we need to find ways to get better at preserving existing institutions without hampering the ability to form new startups. ## Related Ideas - [[Maintaining functional institutions requires skill succession and power succession]] - [[Intellectual dark matter holds our society together]] - [[Great institutions require planning and insight from the beginning]] - [[Social technologies are the operating system for a civilization]] - [[Market capitalism is powerful because it defines a system of continuous rejuvenation]] - [[Political systems decay because they lack a system of rejuvenation]] --- # References [[Great Founder Theory]]