Edition #71 | The Dangerous Phrase | Monday, June 1, 2026

The words that cost the most in any craft or business are these: "We've always done it this way."

Let's get into it.

In the years after World War II, the way to make a computer do something was to write long, painstaking strings of machine code. Only a small group of highly trained specialists could do it, and most of them believed this was the only serious, professional way to work with machines.

Grace Hopper, a Navy mathematician, thought the entire approach was backwards. She believed that if you had to speak the machine's private language to get anything done, then the real problem was the language itself. She began building a system that could translate plain, human instructions into the code the computer needed.

The resistance was immediate and fierce. Experts told her computers could only do arithmetic. They said her idea was imprecise and would ruin the discipline. They said it simply would not work. She kept building anyway.

On June 1, 1952 she completed the A-0 system, the first working compiler. A few years later she created FLOW-MATIC, a programming language that used actual English words. That work became the direct foundation for COBOL, the language that would power much of the world's business and government systems for decades.

She didn't just have a better technical idea. She had the courage to keep proving it when the entire establishment had already decided the old way was the only way. That courage created a new standard that let far more people do serious work with computers.

Over time the better system was established. The verse reminds us that human plans are one thing, but when they align with wisdom and courage, they can become something that lasts.

Drucker spent his life watching organizations cling to yesterday's methods long after they stopped serving the real world. He taught that the courage to deliberately let go of the old way, even when it still feels safe and familiar, is what allows new capability to emerge.

This week, sit down with the young person you are shaping and name one area in their work, their training, or a process they follow where the phrase "We've always done it this way" is still in active use.

Write the phrase down. Then ask: If we were designing this from scratch today, with everything we now know, how would we do it differently? Help them create one small, testable improvement and run it for the next seven days.

At the end of the week, talk about what it cost them to question the old way and what they gained by trying something better. The goal is not to be different for its own sake. The goal is to practice the courage to treat "we've always done it this way" as a warning sign instead of a reason to stop thinking.

Happy Monday Friends!