People have lost sight of the original intention of COBOL’s designers. To quote one of them, Jean Sammet: The users for whom COBOL was designed were actually two subclasses of those people concerned with business data processing problems. One is the relatively inexperienced programmer for whom the naturalness of COBOL would be an asset, while the other type of user would be essentially anybody who had not written the program initially. In other words, the readability of COBOL programs would provide documentation to all who might wish to examine the programs, including the supervisory or management personnel. Little attempt was made to cater to professional programmers…

Much of the ability to help other people arises from personal power, but it would be naive to assert that nothing else is required. In large organizations, there are many resources available to a leader — money to pay for training, support staff, office space, tools to make work more efficient, access to helpful people. Such resources are not evenly distributed, and one of the requirements for becoming a problem-solving leader is to acquire organizational power so as to obtain resources for other innovators.

In this business, it takes all the running you can do just to stay in the same place.