WPenner's Blog

Note: I originally wrote this piece in 2022. Since then, I've stopped writing about the Canadian space sector, but that's a post for another day…

Aristotle once wrote, “all glory comes from daring to begin.” "Daring" is an interesting word because it suggests "something more" than courage. Included is the idea of taking on risk for the potential profit of the activity.

Daring, risk and venturing, contrasts sharply with the mantra bombarding us the last few years: stay safe. Staying safe suggests reducing risk and minimizing activity to only those acts that will lead to guaranteed results.

In business, this can be thought of as an exploration-exploitation trade off. Exploration is about finding new opportunities, creating new products and service offerings, developing new brands, or entering new markets. Exploitation is meant in the sense of taking advantage of existing processes, people and products to maximize profits, usually by reducing costs (i.e. friction, money, resources) and increasing revenue (i.e. leading to a higher ROI on invested capital).

In general, the more a competent business runs a process, the more optimized it becomes because of institutional learning. This is a key benefit of exploiting something that already exists. The cost of making a first widget is many times more expensive than making the second widget because there are so many things to learn and mistakes to make for the first one. Ideas like Wright's Law and economies of scale come into play when we choose to exploit existing solutions to the best of their abilities

A company can courageously, exploit an opportunity, optimize a process, and bet against a future. It's possible to be courageous without moving from your place.

I'm not being negative about courage or exploitation -- both have their time and place. Indeed, almost all of the best parts of modern life boil down to complex exploitation of the known. Call it "standing on the shoulders of giants," the great artists stealing, learning from history, or task specialization, our world is infinitely richer because of the many ways we learn from and lean on others.

Ultimately, exploitation of the existing knowledge, paradigms, resources, talents, and so on comes to an end. In the physical world there is endless room at the bottom, but not so in society. %%Oh yeah?%%

At this point, exploration becomes important. One must go beyond the known into that unknown country called The Future to find something new and bring it back, often freshly killed, swarming with flies and other predators and scavengers hoping to get a mouthful. Almost by definition this process is full of risk, chaos, uncertainty, and

Exploration, however, requires that "something more" of daring.

The exploitation of our modern society has led too many of us to forget what being human is and the values once cherished as our highest collective aspirations. We have become technically advanced and spiritually stunted. Wendy Wright puts it thus, “Daring to dream what is deepest in our collective longings is what makes us most human and fully alive.”

Carl von Clausewitz councils, “Be audacious and cunning in your plans, firm and persevering in their execution, determined to find a glorious end.”

While exploration is full of risk and turns away cowards and those longing for comfort, Henry Kissinger is right to say that “In crisis the most daring course is often the safest.” In a crisis, we can rely least on previous assumptions, knowledge and processes. Unless artificially suppressed, such junctures in time and space force us to explore the avoided corners of our world for resources previously undervalued, taken for granted or overlooked.¹