The phrase “paradigm shift” should be enough to send chills down any manager’s spine. It is what consultants say when they don’t know what else to recommend. Or economists, when all their predictions have just gone up in smoke. “What you need now, dear client, is a ‘paradigm shift’. Here’s my bill and I’ll be off.”
But since the failure of many financial institutions to predict or manage through the economic crisis, this is what many economists and business academics are calling for – a “paradigm shift” in how we think about the balance between human judgment and the efficiency of scale in running a profitable business.
In a recent piece in the Harvard Business Review, Amar Bhidé blamed the financial crisis “judgment deficit” on too many black box computer models and too few humans making decisions for themselves.