Member-only story
If you’ve ever worked even seven seconds in an office, you know complacency is a very real thing. Some companies will know they need to change an aspect of how they work for about 25 years — and still not do it. Why? Change is hard, and most of these types of “change management initiatives” go to HR first, where they die a slow, buzzword-laden death. Change management plans subsequently end up terrifying most everyone involved — is there a threat of layoffs? — and even though they’re important, they die out. Complacency rules the day.
(The other reason all that stuff happens is called homophily, or the clustering of like-minded execs.)
But what if complacency has moved into all aspects of our lives, too?
Complacency, or “How America Gave Up On Change”
That’s the title of this new article, which features this sassy little part:
I think there’s several different layers of the complacent class in this country. If you’re an educated elite, you’re already in a very comfortable position, and, in essence, you simply have to avoid losing what you have. If you’re lower-middle class, and maybe life is tougher, you’ve seen some wage stagnation. It may sound like those people are not complacent, but if you compare them to earlier times in American history — the 1930s, or the…
