Move Fast and Break Things
The lionization of reckless innovation…
Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.
- Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook (now Meta)
Speed conveys an advantage in nature and in our modern culture. Brute force overwhelms nuance and narrative. Hot takes beat thoughtfulness. Breaking news crushes patient analysis.
And while the Harvard Business Review declared the era of “Move Fast and Break Things” over, I’m not so sure.
We want instant everything. We want to move fast, fail forward, try stuff, experiment, and learn as we go (if we learn at all).
In social media and entertainment, the fastest applications with the shortest content snippets are winning the day. TikTok is zippier than and beat SnapChat. SnapChat was faster and beat Instagram. Instagram was snazzier and beat YouTube. They all beat scrolling through Facebook for hours on end.
In dating, Tinder changed the game, sped everything up, and eliminated the silly steps like getting to know people or dating. Just swipe left or swipe right and hook up. Skip straight to the payoff.
In finance, fractional trading became a thing. Don’t have enough money for one share of Apple - buy 1/100th of a share and flip it endlessly as the price rollercoaster rolls on. If you wanted to make money even faster, you just bought a worthless crypto token (that lacked any semblance of actual utility or value) and counted the profits (until they crashed and now you’re broke again).
I don’t like Move Fast and Break Things.
Wait, that’s not true.
I hate Move Fast and Break Things.
Why?
I hate it because behind all things are people.
This Substack is called Smaller, Slower, Lesser, Lower for a reason. There is a life of richness and fullness that doesn’t require that we leave a pile of bodies in our wake.
So, instead of this ridiculous modern mantra that puts profit and process over people, I propose an inversion, a different mantra that we’ll unpack next week.
Move Slow and Shape Things.
- KB
