Letter from the publisher: Do we always need to challenge the status quo?
Have you heard of Larry Tesler? He didn’t have the athletic stardom of Kawhi Leonard. Nor did he have the political stardom of Chrystia Freeland. Tesler was more comfortable in the background. He is credited with a handful of inventions that have made our work lives insanely easier. Tesler, a pioneer of personal computing was credited with creating the cut, copy, and paste function. He passed away about a week ago at the age of 74 in San Francisco.
Why celebrate Tesler?
Tesler was not nearly as well known even within the global technology community. He didn’t create a flashy product like the iPod or the Nintendo. But he was dedicated to innovations that simplified and improved work. He played an early, central role in making computers accessible to everyone. The cut and paste command was reportedly inspired by the old method of editing that involved actually cutting portions of printed text and gluing them elsewhere — a function Tesler originated. A Stanford University graduate, Tesler was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1945, and worked in the genesis age of computers in the 1960s, aiming to make them more user-friendly and intuitive. He invented the cut and paste command alongside his colleague Tim Mott at Xerox. The command was incorporated into Apple’s software on the Lisa computer in 1983 and on the original Macintosh the following year. The rest is history.
Copy and paste hasn’t really changed since 1983. But does it need to? It’s one of those things we use every day, we don’t know how it got here, and we take it for granted. Can you imagine life without copy and paste? Yet disrupting copy and paste would likely get you riots around the world.
What does copy and paste have to do with social impact?
Before we go changing something, let’s take the time to understand the journey and history of today’s status quo.
“Let’s disrupt the status quo” or “the status quo needs to end” or even “we cannot maintain the status quo” are phrases I now hear often, especially in the world of social impact. A quick Amazon search offers close to 1000 books on disrupting, challenging, and even escaping the status quo. There is a lot of status quo in social impact. And there is a lot that we should challenge and disrupt — from inaccessible buildings to charity regulation. But we also take a lot for granted, often forgetting that a lot of what is status quo today was at the fringes some time ago.
I’m reminded of a conversation I had with Premal Shah, co-founder of the microfinance platform Kiva, a few years ago. Sitting in the heart of San Francisco, arguably the world’s most disruptive place, at SOCAP, the world’s largest impact investing conference, we asked one another, “what do we take for granted in the world of social impact today?”
We quickly came up with a list of things that used to be fringe but are now status quo and we take for granted: Blue box recycling was a fringe thing — and now status quo. Seat belts in cars were a fringe thing — and now status quo. Having a nutrition label on foods was a fringe thing — and now status quo. There must have been another 15 things that we came up with. Most of us don’t know who came up with the idea of a “blue box” for a recycling bin or who came up with the simple design of the nutrition label, but we benefit from them every single day.
These inventions aren’t flashy, they are status quo, and most of us take them for granted — which is easy to do because they are just there, in the air we breathe so to speak. In a world where there is no shortage of old ways that need disruption, let’s pause to understand their creation journeys and how a status quo became a status quo.
While writing this, I cut and pasted 22 times without thinking about it.
Vinod Rajasekaran
Publisher & CEO
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