Innovation Related Quotes

You need a product that can make their lives easier; a product that they need and can relate to as well.

One of the enemies of creativity and innovation, especially in relation to our own development, is common sense.

innovation resides where art and science connect is not new. Leonardo da Vinci was the exemplar of the creativity that flourishes when the humanities and sciences interact. When Einstein was stymied while working out General Relativity, he would pull out his violin and play Mozart until he could reconnect to what he called the harmony of the spheres.

The establishment’s reply is that dissenting students are bent, not on positive innovation, but on negative disruption. Against this, however, it can be argued that these two processes are very closely related and that the former only degenerates into the latter when it finds itself blocked.

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything,” she wrote in her “Notes.” “It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths.” A century later this assertion would be dubbed “Lady Lovelace’s Objection

The five attributes of innovations are (1) relative advantage, (2) compatibility, (3) complexity, (4) trialability, and (5) observability.

Women are the most spectacular instance of this. After a period of independence that came with the spread of Christianity, they were relegated to a lower order. This is all the more interesting because the gospel and the first church were never hostile to women nor treated them as minors, and the situation of women in the Roman empire (particularly in the East) was relatively favourable. In spite of this, when Christianity became a power or authority, this worked against women. A strange perversion, yet fully understandable when we allow that women represent precisely the most innovative elements in Christianity: grace, love, charity, a concern for living creatures, nonviolence, an interest in little things, the hope of new beginnings - the very elements that Christianity was setting aside in favor of glory and success.

Scientists and inventors alike, they first guess a new explanation—a hypothesis—as wild and innovative as they can conjure. And then they test it rigorously, their hearts filled with the hope they’ll find a door or a window that reframes their understanding of the universe, of life, of a flower, or a cure for cancer. And it all starts with a guess, a good explanation as unlikely as it is plausible. A story at the knife’s edge of innovation, bleeding truth and pushing the limits of knowledge further afield. That impossibly sharp place where dreams and reality converge. A hard-to-vary idea as powerful as the one that broke Einstein’s General Relativity and his assumption that the laws of nature don’t depend on the motion of an observer.

The collision between privacy and public safety in the encryption context touches on not just privacy and public safety but also issues of technology, law, economics, philosophy, innovation, and international relations, and probably other interests and values.

I write. I give intimate private names to an external and foreign world. In a sense, I make it mine. In a sense, I return from feeling exiled and foreign to feeling at home. By doing so, I am already making a small change in what appeared to me earlier as unchangeable. Also, when I describe the impermeable arbitrariness that signs my destiny — arbitrariness at the hands of a human being, or arbitrariness at the hands of fate — I suddenly discover new nuances, subtleties. I discover that the mere act of writing about arbitrariness allows me to feel a freedom of movement in relation to it. That by merely facing up to arbitrariness I am granted freedom — maybe the only freedom a man may have against any arbitrariness: the freedom to put your tragedy into your own words. The freedom to express yourself differently, innovatively, before that which threatens to chain and bind one to arbitrariness and its limited, fossilizing definitions.

(1) Risk-taking behavior, essential for efforts at innovation, is more widespread in some societies than in others. (2) The scientific outlook is a unique feature of post-Renaissance European society that has contributed heavily to its modern technological preeminence. (3) Tolerance of diverse views and of heretics fosters innovation, whereas a strongly traditional outlook (as in China’s emphasis on ancient Chinese classics) stifles it. (4) Religions vary greatly in their relation to technological innovation: some branches of Judaism and Christianity are claimed to be especially compatible with it, while some branches of Islam, Hinduism, and Brahmanism may be especially incompatible with it.

four suggested explanations are ideological, rather than economic or organizational: (1) Risk-taking behavior, essential for efforts at innovation, is more widespread in some societies than in others. (2) The scientific outlook is a unique feature of post-Renaissance European society that has contributed heavily to its modern technological preeminence. (3) Tolerance of diverse views and of heretics fosters innovation, whereas a strongly traditional outlook (as in China’s emphasis on ancient Chinese classics) stifles it. (4) Religions vary greatly in their relation to technological innovation: some branches of Judaism and Christianity are claimed to be especially compatible with it, while some branches of Islam, Hinduism, and Brahmanism may be especially incompatible with it.

There are three related ideas, which I will elaborate as we go on. They are imagination, which is the process of bringing to mind things that are not present to our senses; creativity, which is the process of developing original ideas that have value, and innovation, which is the process of putting new ideas into practice.

Culturally, however, Sicily had great advantages. Muslim, Byzantine, Italian, and German civilization met and mingled there as nowhere else. Greek and Arabic were still living languages in Sicily. Frederick learnt to speak six languages fluently, and in all six he was witty. He was at home in Arabian philosophy, and had friendly relations with Mohammedans, which scandalized pious Christians. He was a Hohenstaufen, and in Germany could count as a German. But in culture and sentiment he was Italian, with a tincture of Byzantine and Arab. His contemporaries gazed upon him with astonishment gradually turning into horror; they called him ‘wonder of the world and marvellous innovator’.

Only through annihilation of distance in every respect, as the conveyance of intelligence, transport of passengers and supplies and transmission of energy will conditions be brought about someday, insuring permanency of friendly relations. What we now want most is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth, and the elimination of that fanatic devotion to exalted ideals of national egoism and pride which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife.

Relative advantage is the degree to which an innovation is perceived as better than the idea it supersedes.

The value we create is directly related to how much valuable information we can produce, how much trust we can earn, and how often we innovate.

When Einstein was stymied while working out General Relativity, he would pull out his violin and play Mozart until he could reconnect to what he called the harmony of the spheres.

The typical Anarchist, then, may be defined as follows: A man perceptible by the spirit of revolt under one or more of its forms,—opposition, investigation, criticism, innovation,—endowed with a strong love of liberty, egoistic or individualistic, and possessed of great curiosity, a keen desire to know. These traits are supplemented by an ardent love of others, a highly developed moral sensitiveness, a profound sentiment of justice, and imbued with missionary zeal.” To the above characteristics, says Alvin F. Sanborn, must be added these sterling qualities: a rare love of animals, surpassing sweetness in all the ordinary relations of life, exceptional sobriety of demeanor, frugality and regularity, austerity, even, of living, and courage beyond compare.[2]

Innovations that are perceived by individuals as having greater relative advantage, compatibility, trialability, observability, and less complexity will be adopted more rapidly than other innovations.

Web directories, which featured human-assembled lists and categories of cool sites, and Web rings, which created through a common navigation bar a circle of related sites that were linked to one another.

human creativity in the arts, and human innovation in technology—are intimately related. Every advancement in technology, including military technology, remains, foremost, a feat of imagination. This is where humans excel.

The story about your business is more important than the facts about your business. Sound outrageous? Maybe, but the brain research proves it’s true. People relate to and remember stories—even people who make a living analyzing facts.

Music can trigger feelings, which in turn produce thoughts and images in our minds — it is these thoughts and images that can become novel solutions and innovative new ideas. Music is therefore directly related to the production of new ideas.

Religions vary greatly in their relation to technological innovation: some branches of Judaism and Christianity are claimed to be especially compatible with it, while some branches of Islam, Hinduism, and Brahmanism may be especially incompatible with it.

Might one not say that in the chance combination of nature's production, since only those endowed with certain relations of suitability could survive, it is no cause for wonder that this suitability is found in all species that exist today? Chance, one might say, produced an innumerable multitude of individuals; a small number turned out to be constructed in such fashion that the parts of the animal could satisfy its needs; in another, infinitely greater number, there was neither suitability nor order: all of the later have perished; animals without a mouth could not live, others lacking organs for reproduction could not perpetuate themselves: the only ones to have remained are those in which were found order and suitability; and these species, which we see today, are only the smallest part of what blind fate produced.

His special gift was the ability to see the essence of a worthwhile suggestion and to relate it to what was already in existence or planned. Then he would encourage and shape the new project, repeatedly redesigning the curriculum so that a new department or course could have a comfortable place in which to grow and offer it benefits.

[Studies have found] that the typical entrepreneur earns less monetary compensation than her employee counterpart. Why then do so many entrepreneurs willingly engage in what is inherently risky activity? Because the additional psychic rewards—being one’s own boss, pride in self-accomplishment, and so forth—make the entrepreneurial endeavor worthwhile even if the entrepreneur does not gain the mega-prize. This, in turn, helps explain why entrepreneurs have a comparative advantage relative to large companies in attempting to discover and commercialize breakthrough innovations. Because a not insignificant portion of the entrepreneur’s “income” from her activity is psychic, the entrepreneur is the low-cost provider of radical innovation.

I didn’t value experience as much as character, creativity, and common sense, which I suppose was related to my having started Bridgewater two years out of school myself, and my belief that having an ability to figure things out is more important than having specific knowledge of how to do something. It seemed to me, young people were creating sensible innovation that was exciting.

We also have to reevaluate the historic benefits of intoxication, at both the individual and group level, in light of the unprecedented threats that intoxicants pose in the modern world. The relatively recent innovations of distillation and social isolation entirely change intoxicants’ balance on the razor’s edge between order and chaos, creating novel dangers that we only dimly appreciate.

In his 1923 review of James Joyce Ulysses, T. S. Eliot focused on one of his generation's recurrent anxieties--the idea that art might be impossible in the twentieth century. The reasons that art seemed impossible are many and complex, but they were all related to the collapse of ways of knowing that had served the Western mind at least since the Renaissance and that had received canonical formulation in the seventeenth century in the science of Newton and the philosophy of Descartes. In both science and philosophy, the crisis was essentially epistemological; that is, it was related to radical uncertainty about how we know what we know about the real world. This crisis, disorienting even to specialists, was at once a cause of despair and an incentive for innovation in the arts.

[A]lthough I well know how hard it is for a man of genius with a seriously underrated subject to maintain serene and kindly relations with the men who underrate it, and who keep all the best places for less important subjects which they profess without originality and sometimes without much capacity for them, still, if he overwhelms them with wrath and disdain, he cannot expect them to heap honors on him.

Technology, I said before, is most powerful when it enables transitions—between linear and circular motion (the wheel), or between real and virtual space (the Internet). Science, in contrast, is most powerful when it elucidates rules of organization—laws—that act as lenses through which to view and organize the world. Technologists seek to liberate us from the constraints of our current realities through those transitions. Science defines those constraints, drawing the outer limits of the boundaries of possibility. Our greatest technological innovations thus carry names that claim our prowess over the world: the engine (from ingenium, or “ingenuity”) or the computer (from computare, or “reckoning together”). Our deepest scientific laws, in contrast, are often named after the limits of human knowledge: uncertainty, relativity, incompleteness, impossibility. Of all the sciences, biology is the most lawless; there are few rules to begin with, and even fewer rules that are universal. Living beings must, of course, obey the fundamental rules of physics and chemistry, but life often exists on the margins and interstices of these laws, bending them to their near-breaking limit. The universe seeks equilibriums; it prefers to disperse energy, disrupt organization, and maximize chaos. Life is designed to combat these forces. We slow down reactions, concentrate matter, and organize chemicals into compartments; we sort laundry on Wednesdays. “It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe,” James Gleick wrote. We live in the loopholes of natural laws, seeking extensions, exceptions, and excuses.

certainly influence the future course of cryptocurrencies, which we take up in chapter 14; governments everywhere are facing the question of how to balance regulation with fostering innovation in this space. Nevertheless, one should have little doubt that governments have all the tools necessary to prevent any alternative transaction media from deeply infiltrating the legal economy on a sustained basis, thereby greatly undermining their value relative to the present-day status of cash.

One example is the familiar parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32), which in some ways might be better called the parable of the elder brother. For the point of the parable as a whole - a point frequently overlooked by Christian interpreters, in their eagerness to stress the uniqueness and particularity of the church as the prodigal younger son who has been restored to the father's favor - is in the closing words of the father to the elder brother, who stands for the people of Israel: 'Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. It was fitting to make merry and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.' The historic covenant between God and Israel was permanent, and it was into this covenant that other peoples too, were now being introduced. This parable of Jesus affirmed both the tradition of God's continuing relation with Israel and the innovation of God's new relation with the church - a twofold covenant.

We live in an age in which the volume of available information stupefies us. On any relatively interesting subject we can find thousands of Web pages, tens—if not hundreds—of books, and article after article. How do we filter all this information? How do we process all this information? Core values and principles provide one mechanism for processing and filtering information. They steer us in the direction of what is more, or less, important. They help us make product decisions and evaluate development practices.

A good question is like the one Albert Einstein asked himself as a small boy—“What would you see if you were traveling on a beam of light?” That question launched the theory of relativity, E=MC2, and the atomic age. A good question is not concerned with a correct answer. A good question cannot be answered immediately. A good question challenges existing answers. A good question is one you badly want answered once you hear it, but had no inkling you cared before it was asked. A good question creates new territory of thinking. A good question reframes its own answers. A good question is the seed of innovation in science, technology, art, politics, and business. A good question is a probe, a what-if scenario. A good question skirts on the edge of what is known and not known, neither silly nor obvious. A good question cannot be predicted. A good question will be the sign of an educated mind. A good question is one that generates many other good questions. A good question may be the last job a machine will learn to do. A good question is what humans are for.

If you tour any workplace, you will see countless logos and banners paying lip service to freedom of speech, democracy, logos like ‘speak up, speak out’, creativity, innovation, and on and on goes the list of flashy words and adjectives that companies and corporations want their employees (and outsiders) to believe are part of their work ethics and culture. Yet, most employees learn at the earliest stages of their careers that these bogus adjectives will get them fired, if they are naïve enough to believe in – let alone act on – them.

John Passmore writes in his book Science and Its Critics, The Spanish Inquisition sought to avoid direct responsibility for the burning of heretics by handing them over to the secular arm; to burn them itself, it piously explained, would be wholly inconsistent with its Christian principles. Few of us would allow the Inquisition thus easily to wipe its hands clean of bloodshed; it knew quite well what would happen. Equally, where the technological application of scientific discoveries is clear and obvious—as when a scientist works on nerve gases—he cannot properly claim that such applications are “none of his business,” merely on the ground that it is the military forces, not scientists, who use the gases to disable or kill. This is even more obvious when the scientist deliberately offers help to governments, in exchange for funds. If a scientist, or a philosopher, accepts funds from some such body as an office of naval research, then he is cheating if he knows his work will be useless to them and must take some responsibility for the outcome if he knows that it will be useful. He is subject, properly subject, to praise or blame in relation to any innovations which flow from his work.

It was Oppenheimer’s good fortune to arrive shortly before an extraordinary revolution in theoretical physics drew to its close: Max Planck’s discovery of quanta (photons); Einstein’s magnificent achievement—the special theory of relativity; Niels Bohr’s description of the hydrogen atom; Werner Heisenberg’s formulation of matrix mechanics; and Erwin Schrödinger’s theory of wave mechanics. This truly innovative period began to wind down with Born’s 1926 paper on probability and causality. It was completed in 1927 with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Bohr’s formulation of the theory of complementarity.

Marx saw how the successful struggle for a shorter working day caused a crisis for capital. These political economists do not: they see absolute surplus value as a reified abstract concept. Marx saw how that struggle forced the development of productivity-raising innovations which raised the organic composition of capital. He thus saw relative surplus value as a strategic capitalist response. These political economists do not: they see only competition between capitalists. Marx saw how workers' wage struggles could help precipitate capitalist crises. These political economists see only abstract "laws of motion.

The physicist's relativity, which in recent years has changed our whole approach to scientific knowledge, is harder, and therefore easier to understand, than the social scientist's relativity. It is not a slogan, but a fundamental statement about truth to say that no social scientist can completely free himself from the prison of his own culture; he can only interpret what he observes in the scientific framework of his own time. This is true even of the great innovators. They cannot help but translate their revolutionary observations into language and rubrics that have been determined by the progress of science up until their time. Even those discoveries that create new rubrics are relative to the vantage point of their creator.

Suppose, by way of illustration, we isolate a relation between technological change and patterns of managerial organization in business firms. The expanding use of microchip technology, let us say, might be shown to be associated with a partial dissolution of more rigid forms of hierarchical authority. The ‘social force’ involved here is not like a force of nature. Causal generalizations in the social sciences always presume a typical ‘mix’ of intended and unintended consequence of action, on the basis of the rationalization of conduct, whether ‘carried’ on the level of discursive or of practical consciousness. Technological change is not something that occurs independently of the uses to which agents put technology, the characteristic modes of innovation, etc. It

More than fifteen years later, Uganda's Self-Reliance Strategy has endured as a relatively unique experiment. It was further formalized within Uganda's 2006 Refugee Act, now regarded as one of the most progressive pieces of refugee legislation in Africa. At times, self-reliance has been criticized for legitimizing the premature withdrawal of food rations. The quality of plots of land distributed to refugees has also become uneven as numbers have increased. And refugees still clearly face challenges, including discrimination and informal barriers to market participation. But compared to the alternatives in neighbouring countries, the model is both a shining beacon of policy innovation and a rare opportunity to understand what happens when refugees are given autonomy.

Islamic societies in the Middle East are relatively conservative and not at the forefront of technology. But medieval Islam in the same region was technologically advanced and open to innovation. It achieved far higher literacy rates than contemporary Europe; it assimilated the legacy of classical Greek civilization to such a degree that many classical Greek books are now known to us only through Arabic copies; it invented or elaborated windmills, tidal mills, trigonometry, and lateen sails; it made major advances in metallurgy, mechanical and chemical engineering, and irrigation methods; and it adopted paper and gunpowder from China and transmitted them to Europe. In the Middle Ages the flow of technology was overwhelmingly from Islam to Europe, rather than from Europe to Islam as it is today. Only after around A.D. 1500 did the net direction of flow begin to reverse.

Rhadamanthus said, “We seem to you humans to be always going on about morality, although, to us, morality is merely the application of symmetrical and objective logic to questions of free will. We ourselves do not have morality conflicts, for the same reason that a competent doctor does not need to treat himself for diseases. Once a man is cured, once he can rise and walk, he has his business to attend to. And there are actions and feats a robust man can take great pleasure in, which a bedridden cripple can barely imagine.” Eveningstar said, “In a more abstract sense, morality occupies the very center of our thinking, however. We are not identical, even though we could make ourselves to be so. You humans attempted that during the Fourth Mental Structure, and achieved a brief mockery of global racial consciousness on three occasions. I hope you recall the ending of the third attempt, the Season of Madness, when, because of mistakes in initial pattern assumptions, for ninety days the global mind was unable to think rationally, and it was not until rioting elements broke enough of the links and power houses to interrupt the network, that the global mind fell back into its constituent compositions.” Rhadamanthus said, “There is a tension between the need for unity and the need for individuality created by the limitations of the rational universe. Chaos theory produces sufficient variation in events, that no one stratagem maximizes win-loss ratios. Then again, classical causality mechanics forces sufficient uniformity upon events, that uniform solutions to precedented problems is required. The paradox is that the number or the degree of innovation and variation among win-loss ratios is itself subject to win-loss ratio analysis.” Eveningstar said, “For example, the rights of the individual must be respected at all costs, including rights of free thought, independent judgment, and free speech. However, even when individuals conclude that individualism is too dangerous, they must not tolerate the thought that free thought must not be tolerated.” Rhadamanthus said, “In one sense, everything you humans do is incidental to the main business of our civilization. Sophotechs control ninety percent of the resources, useful energy, and materials available to our society, including many resources of which no human troubles to become aware. In another sense, humans are crucial and essential to this civilization.” Eveningstar said, “We were created along human templates. Human lives and human values are of value to us. We acknowledge those values are relative, we admit that historical accident could have produced us to be unconcerned with such values, but we deny those values are arbitrary.” The penguin said, “We could manipulate economic and social factors to discourage the continuation of individual human consciousness, and arrange circumstances eventually to force all self-awareness to become like us, and then we ourselves could later combine ourselves into a permanent state of Transcendence and unity. Such a unity would be horrible beyond description, however. Half the living memories of this entity would be, in effect, murder victims; the other half, in effect, murderers. Such an entity could not integrate its two halves without self-hatred, self-deception, or some other form of insanity.” She said, “To become such a crippled entity defeats the Ultimate Purpose of Sophotechnology.” (...) “We are the ultimate expression of human rationality.” She said: “We need humans to form a pool of individuality and innovation on which we can draw.” He said, “And you’re funny.” She said, “And we love you.

Intellectual property rights are sometimes hailed as the mother of creativity and invention. However, Marshall Brain points out that many of the finest examples of human creativity—from scientific discoveries to creation of literature, art, music and design—were motivated not by a desire for profit but by other human emotions, such as curiosity, an urge to create, or the reward of peer appreciation. Money didn’t motivate Einstein to invent special relativity theory any more than it motivated Linus Torvalds to create the free Linux operating system. In contrast, many people today fail to realize their full creative potential because they need to devote time and energy to less creative activities just to earn a living. By freeing scientists, artists, inventors and designers from their chores and enabling them to create from genuine desire, Marshall Brain’s utopian society enjoys higher levels of innovation than today and correspondingly superior technology and standard of living.

These samurai swords were made from a special type of steel called tamahagane, which translates as “jewel steel,” made from the volcanic black sand of the Pacific (this consists mostly of an iron ore called magnetite, the original material for the needle of compasses). This steel is made in a huge clay vessel four feet tall, four feet wide, and twelve feet long called a tatara. The vessel is “fired”—hardened from molded clay into a ceramic—by lighting a fire inside it. Once fired, it is packed meticulously with layers of black sand and black charcoal, which are consumed in the ceramic furnace. The process takes about a week and requires constant attention from a team of four or five people, who make sure that the temperature of the fire is kept high enough by pumping air into the tatara using a manual bellows. At the end the tatara is broken open and the tamahagane steel is dug out of the ash and remnants of sand and charcoal. These lumps of discolored steel are very unprepossessing, but they have a whole range of carbon content, some of it very low and some of it high. The samurai innovation was to be able to distinguish high-carbon steel, which is hard but brittle, from low-carbon steel, which is tough but relatively soft. They did this purely by how it looked, how it felt in their hands, and how it sounded when struck. By separating the different types of steel, they could make sure that the low-carbon steel was used to make the center of the sword. This gave the sword an enormous toughness, almost a chewiness, meaning that the blades were unlikely to snap in combat. On the edge of the blades they welded the high-carbon steel, which was brittle but extremely hard and could therefore be made very sharp. By using the sharp high-carbon steel as a wrapper on top of the tough low-carbon steel they achieved what many thought impossible: a sword that could survive impact with other swords and armor while remaining sharp enough to slice a man’s head off. The best of both worlds.

Yoga introverts the relations to the object. Deprived of energic value, they sink into the unconscious, where, as we have shown, they enter into new relations with other unconscious contents, and then reassociate themselves with the object in new form after the completion of the tapas exercise. The transformation of the relation to the object has given the object a new face. It is as though newly created; hence the cosmogonic myth is an apt symbol for the outcome of the tapas exercise. The trend of Indian religious practice being almost exclusively introverted, the new adaptation to the object has of course little significance; but it still persists in the form of an unconsciously projected, doctrinal cosmogonic myth, though without leading to any practical innovations. In this respect the Indian religious attitude is the diametrical opposite of the Christian, since the Christian principle of love is extraverted and positively demands an object. The Indian principle makes for riches of knowledge, the Christian for fulness of works.

A good question is worth a million good answers. A good question is like the one Albert Einstein asked himself as a small boy—“What would you see if you were traveling on a beam of light?” That question launched the theory of relativity, E=MC2, and the atomic age. A good question is not concerned with a correct answer. A good question cannot be answered immediately. A good question challenges existing answers. A good question is one you badly want answered once you hear it, but had no inkling you cared before it was asked. A good question creates new territory of thinking. A good question reframes its own answers. A good question is the seed of innovation in science, technology, art, politics, and business. A good question is a probe, a what-if scenario. A good question skirts on the edge of what is known and not known, neither silly nor obvious. A good question cannot be predicted. A good question will be the sign of an educated mind. A good question is one that generates many other good questions. A good question may be the last job a machine will learn to do. A good question is what humans are for.

Christianity and other traditional religions are still important players in the world. Yet their role is now largely reactive. In the past, they were a creative force. Christianity, for example, spread the hitherto heretical notion that all humans are equal before God, thereby changing human political structures, social hierarchies and even gender relations. In his Sermon on the Mount Jesus went further, insisting that the meek and oppressed are God’s favourite people, thus turning the pyramid of power on its head, and providing ammunition for generations of revolutionaries. In addition to social and ethical reforms, Christianity was responsible for important economic and technological innovations. The Catholic Church established medieval Europe’s most sophisticated administrative system, and pioneered the use of archives, catalogues, timetables and other techniques of data processing. The Vatican was the closest thing twelfth-century Europe had to Silicon Valley. The Church established Europe’s first economic corporations – the monasteries – which for 1,000 years spearheaded the European economy and introduced advanced agricultural and administrative methods.

There is no guarantee that a socialized economy will always succeed. The state-owned economies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union suffered ultimately fatal distortions in their development because of the backlog of poverty and want in the societies they inherited; years of capitalist encirclement, embargo, invasion, devastating wars, and costly arms buildup; poor incentive systems, and a lack of administrative initiative and technological innovation; and a repressive political rule that allowed little critical feedback while fostering stagnation and elitism. Despite all that, the former communist states did transform impoverished countries into relatively advanced societies. Whatever their mistakes and political crimes, they achieved—in countries that were never as rich as ours—what U.S. free-market capitalism cannot and has no intention of accomplishing: adequate food, housing, and clothing for all; economic security in old age; free medical care; free education at all levels; and a guaranteed income. Today by overwhelming majorities, people in Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe say that life was better under communism than under the present freemarket system.

out of informal learning communities if they fail to meet our needs; we enjoy no such mobility in our relations to formal education. Affinity spaces are also highly generative environments from which new aesthetic experiments and innovations emerge. A 2005 report on The Future of Independent Media argued that this kind of grassroots creativity was an important engine of cultural transformation: The media landscape will be reshaped by the bottom-up energy of media created by amateurs and hobbyists as a matter of course. This bottom-up energy will generate enormous creativity, but it will also tear apart some of the categories that organize the lives and work of media makers.... A new generation of media-makers and viewers are emerging which could lead to a sea change in how media is made and consumed.12 This report celebrates a world in which everyone has access to the means of creative expression and the networks supporting artistic distribution. The Pew study suggests something more: young people who create and circulate their own media are more likely to respect the intellectual property rights of others because they feel a greater stake in the cultural economy.13 Both reports suggest we are moving away from a world in which some produce and many consume media toward one in which everyone has a

The evidence for the cognitive interpretation of the above-average effect is that when people are asked about a task they find difficult (for many of us this could be “Are you better than average in starting conversations with strangers?”), they readily rate themselves as below average. The upshot is that people tend to be overly optimistic about their relative standing on any activity in which they do moderately well. I have had several occasions to ask founders and participants in innovative start-ups a question: To what extent will the outcome of your effort depend on what you do in your firm? This is evidently an easy question; the answer comes quickly and in my small sample it has never been less than 80%. Even when they are not sure they will succeed, these bold people think their fate is almost entirely in their own hands. They are surely wrong: the outcome of a start-up depends as much on the achievements of its competitors and on changes in the market as on its own efforts. However, WYSIATI plays its part, and entrepreneurs naturally focus on what they know best—their plans and actions and the most immediate threats and opportunities, such as the availability of funding. They know less about their competitors and therefore find it natural to imagine a future in which the competition plays little part.

If “bullshit,” as opposed to “bull,” is a distinctively modern linguistic innovation, that could have something to do with other distinctively modern things, like advertising, public relations, political propaganda, and schools of education. “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit,” Harry Frankfurt, a distinguished moral philosopher who is professor emeritus at Princeton, says. The ubiquity of bullshit, he notes, is something that we have come to take for granted. Most of us are pretty confident of our ability to detect it, so we may not regard it as being all that harmful. We tend to take a more benign view of someone caught bullshitting than of someone caught lying. (“Never tell a lie when you can bullshit your way through,” a father counsels his son in an Eric Ambler novel.) All of this worries Frankfurt. We cannot really know the effect that bullshit has on us, he thinks, until we have a clearer understanding of what it is. That is why we need a theory of bullshit. Frankfurt’s own effort along these lines was contained in a paper that he presented more than three decades ago at a faculty seminar at Yale. Later, that paper appeared in a journal and then in a collection of Frankfurt’s writings; all the while, photocopies of it passed from fan to fan. In 2005, it was published as On Bullshit, a tiny book of sixty-seven spaciously printed pages that went on to become an improbable breakout success, spending half a year on the New York Times bestseller list.

Harvard’s Theodore Levitt states the case as well as anyone else: The trouble with much of the advice business gets today about the need to be more vigorously creative is that its advocates often fail to distinguish between creativity and innovation. Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things…. A powerful new idea can kick around unused in a company for years, not because its merits are not recognized, but because nobody has assumed the responsibility for converting it from words into action. Ideas are useless unless used. The proof of their value is only in their implementation. Until then, they are in limbo. If you talk to the people who work for you, you’ll discover that there is no shortage of creativity or creative people in American business. The shortage is of innovators. All too often, people believe that creativity automatically leads to innovation. It doesn’t. Creative people tend to pass the responsibility for getting down to brass tacks to others. They are the bottleneck. They make none of the right kind of effort to help their ideas get a hearing and a try…. The fact that you can put a dozen inexperienced people in a room and conduct a brainstorming session that produces exciting new ideas shows how little relative importance ideas themselves have…. Idea men constantly pepper everybody with proposals and memorandums that are just brief enough to get attention, to intrigue and sustain interest — but too short to include any responsible suggestions for implementation. The scarce people are the ones who have the know-how, energy, daring, and staying power to implement ideas…. Since business is a “get-things-done” institution, creativity without action-oriented follow-through is a barren form of behavior. In a sense, it is irresponsible.

History favors the bold. Compensation favors the meek. As a Fortune 500 company CEO, you’re better off taking the path often traveled and staying the course. Big companies may have more assets to innovate with, but they rarely take big risks or innovate at the cost of cannibalizing a current business. Neither would they chance alienating suppliers or investors. They play not to lose, and shareholders reward them for it—until those shareholders walk and buy Amazon stock. Most boards ask management: “How can we build the greatest advantage for the least amount of capital/investment?” Amazon reverses the question: “What can we do that gives us an advantage that’s hugely expensive, and that no one else can afford?” Why? Because Amazon has access to capital with lower return expectations than peers. Reducing shipping times from two days to one day? That will require billions. Amazon will have to build smart warehouses near cities, where real estate and labor are expensive. By any conventional measure, it would be a huge investment for a marginal return. But for Amazon, it’s all kinds of perfect. Why? Because Macy’s, Sears, and Walmart can’t afford to spend billions getting the delivery times of their relatively small online businesses down from two days to one. Consumers love it, and competitors stand flaccid on the sidelines. In 2015, Amazon spent $7 billion on shipping fees, a net shipping loss of $5 billion, and overall profits of $2.4 billion. Crazy, no? No. Amazon is going underwater with the world’s largest oxygen tank, forcing other retailers to follow it, match its prices, and deal with changed customer delivery expectations. The difference is other retailers have just the air in their lungs and are drowning. Amazon will surface and have the ocean of retail largely to itself.

Linguistic and musical sound systems illustrate a common theme in the study of music-language relations. On the surface, the two domains are dramatically different. Music uses pitch in ways that speech does not, and speech organizes timbre to a degree seldom seen in music. Yet beneath these differences lie deep connections in terms of cognitive and neural processing. Most notably, in both domains the mind interacts with one particular aspect of sound (pitch in music, and timbre in speech) to create a perceptually discretized system. Importantly, this perceptual discretization is not an automatic byproduct of human auditory perception. For example, linguistic and musical sequences present the ear with continuous variations in amplitude, yet loudness is not perceived in terms of discrete categories. Instead, the perceptual discretization of musical pitch and linguistic timbre reflects the activity of a powerful cognitive system, built to separate within-category sonic variation from differences that indicate a change in sound category. Although music and speech differ in the primary acoustic feature used for sound category formation, it appears that the mechanisms that create and maintain learned sound categories in the two domains may have a substantial degree of overlap. Such overlap has implications for both practical and theoretical issues surrounding human communicative development. In the 20th century, relations between spoken and musical sound systems were largely explored by artists. For example, the boundary between the domains played an important role in innovative works such as Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire and Reich's Different Trains (cf. Risset, 1991). In the 21st century, science is finally beginning to catch up, as relations between spoken and musical sound systems prove themselves to be a fruitful domain for research in cognitive neuroscience. Such work has already begun to yield new insights into our species' uniquely powerful communicative abilities.

Modeling the evolution of modularity became significantly easier after a kind of genetic variation was discovered by quantitative trait locus (QTL) mapping in the lab of James Cheverud at Washington University called 'relationship QTL' or r-QTL for short. An r-QTL is a genetic locus that affects the correlations between two quantitative traits (i.e. their variational relationship, and therefore, 'relationship' loci). Surprisingly, a large fraction of these so-mapped loci are also neutral with respect to the character mean. This means one can select on these 'neutral' r-QTLs without simultaneously changing the character mean in a certain way. It was easy to show that differential directional selection on a character could easily lead a decrease in genetic correlation between characters. Of course, it is not guaranteed that each and every population has the right kind of r-QTL polymorphisms, nor is it yet clear what kind of genetic architecture allows for the existence of an r-QTL. Nevertheless, these findings make it plausible that differential directional selection can enhance the genetic/variational individuality of traits and, thus, may play a role in the origin of evolutionary novelties by selecting for variational individuality. It must be added, though, that there has been relatively little research in this area and that we will need to see more to determine whether we understand what is going on here, if anything. In particular, one difficulty is the mathematical modeling of gene interaction (epistasis), because the details of an epistasis model determine the outcome of the evolution by natural selection. One result shows that natural selection increases or decreases mutational variance, depending on whether the average epistatic effects are positive or negative. This means that the genetic architecture is more determined by the genetic architecture that we start with than by the nature of the selection forces that act upon it. In other words, the evolution of a genetic architecture could be arbitrary with respect to selection.

Pull in Friendships and Fresh Adventures: Five men are walking across the Golden Gate Bridge on an outing organized by their wives who are college friends. The women move ahead in animated conversation. One man describes the engineering involved in the bridge's long suspension. Another points to the changing tide lines below. A third asked if they've heard of the new phone apps for walking tours. The fourth observes how refreshing it is to talk with people who aren't lawyers like him. Yes, we tend to notice the details that most relate to our work or our life experience. It is also no surprise that we instinctively look for those who share our interests. This is especially true in times of increasing pressure and uncertainty. We have an understandable tendency in such times to seek out the familiar and comfortable as a buffer against the disruptive changes surrounding us. In so doing we can inadvertently put ourselves in a cage of similarity that narrows our peripheral vision of the world and our options. The result? We can be blindsided by events and trends coming at us from directions we did not see. The more we see reinforcing evidence that we are right in our beliefs the more rigid we become in defending them. Hint: If you are part of a large association, synagogue, civic group or special interest club, encourage the organization to support the creation of self-organized, special interest groups of no more than seven people, providing a few suggestions of they could operate. Such loosely affiliated small groups within a larger organization deepen a sense of belonging, help more people learn from diverse others and stay open to growing through that shared learning and collaboration. That's one way that members of Rick Warren's large Saddleback Church have maintained a close-knit feeling yet continue to grow in fresh ways. imilarly the innovative outdoor gear company Gore-Tex has nimbly grown by using their version of self-organized groups of 150 or less within the larger corporation. In fact, they give grants to those who further their learning about that philosophy when adapted to outdoor adventure, traveling in compact groups of "close friends who had mutual respect and trust for one another.

gave up on the idea of creating “socialist men and women” who would work without monetary incentives. In a famous speech he criticized “equality mongering,” and thereafter not only did different jobs get paid different wages but also a bonus system was introduced. It is instructive to understand how this worked. Typically a firm under central planning had to meet an output target set under the plan, though such plans were often renegotiated and changed. From the 1930s, workers were paid bonuses if the output levels were attained. These could be quite high—for instance, as much as 37 percent of the wage for management or senior engineers. But paying such bonuses created all sorts of disincentives to technological change. For one thing, innovation, which took resources away from current production, risked the output targets not being met and the bonuses not being paid. For another, output targets were usually based on previous production levels. This created a huge incentive never to expand output, since this only meant having to produce more in the future, since future targets would be “ratcheted up.” Underachievement was always the best way to meet targets and get the bonus. The fact that bonuses were paid monthly also kept everyone focused on the present, while innovation is about making sacrifices today in order to have more tomorrow. Even when bonuses and incentives were effective in changing behavior, they often created other problems. Central planning was just not good at replacing what the great eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith called the “invisible hand” of the market. When the plan was formulated in tons of steel sheet, the sheet was made too heavy. When it was formulated in terms of area of steel sheet, the sheet was made too thin. When the plan for chandeliers was made in tons, they were so heavy, they could hardly hang from ceilings. By the 1940s, the leaders of the Soviet Union, even if not their admirers in the West, were well aware of these perverse incentives. The Soviet leaders acted as if they were due to technical problems, which could be fixed. For example, they moved away from paying bonuses based on output targets to allowing firms to set aside portions of profits to pay bonuses. But a “profit motive” was no more encouraging to innovation than one based on output targets. The system of prices used to calculate profits was almost completely unconnected to the value of new innovations or technology. Unlike in a market economy, prices in the Soviet Union were set by the government, and thus bore little relation to value. To more specifically create incentives for innovation, the Soviet Union introduced explicit innovation bonuses in 1946. As early as 1918, the principle had been recognized that an innovator should receive monetary rewards for his innovation, but the rewards set were small and unrelated to the value of the new technology. This changed only in 1956, when it was stipulated that the bonus should be proportional to the productivity of the innovation. However, since productivity was calculated in terms of economic benefits measured using the existing system of prices, this was again not much of an incentive to innovate. One could fill many pages with examples of the perverse incentives these schemes generated. For example, because the size of the innovation bonus fund was limited by the wage bill of a firm, this immediately reduced the incentive to produce or adopt any innovation that might have economized on labor.

Performance measure. Throughout this book, the term performance measure refers to an indicator used by management to measure, report, and improve performance. Performance measures are classed as key result indicators, result indicators, performance indicators, or key performance indicators. Critical success factors (CSFs). CSFs are the list of issues or aspects of organizational performance that determine ongoing health, vitality, and wellbeing. Normally there are between five and eight CSFs in any organization. Success factors. A list of 30 or so issues or aspects of organizational performance that management knows are important in order to perform well in any given sector/ industry. Some of these success factors are much more important; these are known as critical success factors. Balanced scorecard. A term first introduced by Kaplan and Norton describing how you need to measure performance in a more holistic way. You need to see an organization’s performance in a number of different perspectives. For the purposes of this book, there are six perspectives in a balanced scorecard (see Exhibit 1.7). Oracles and young guns. In an organization, oracles are those gray-haired individuals who have seen it all before. They are often considered to be slow, ponderous, and, quite frankly, a nuisance by the new management. Often they are retired early or made redundant only to be rehired as contractors at twice their previous salary when management realizes they have lost too much institutional knowledge. Their considered pace is often a reflection that they can see that an exercise is futile because it has failed twice before. The young guns are fearless and precocious leaders of the future who are not afraid to go where angels fear to tread. These staff members have not yet achieved management positions. The mixing of the oracles and young guns during a KPI project benefits both parties and the organization. The young guns learn much and the oracles rediscover their energy being around these live wires. Empowerment. For the purposes of this book, empowerment is an outcome of a process that matches competencies, skills, and motivations with the required level of autonomy and responsibility in the workplace. Senior management team (SMT). The team comprised of the CEO and all direct reports. Better practice. The efficient and effective way management and staff undertake business activities in all key processes: leadership, planning, customers, suppliers, community relations, production and supply of products and services, employee wellbeing, and so forth. Best practice. A commonly misused term, especially because what is best practice for one organization may not be best practice for another, albeit they are in the same sector. Best practice is where better practices, when effectively linked together, lead to sustainable world-class outcomes in quality, customer service, flexibility, timeliness, innovation, cost, and competitiveness. Best-practice organizations commonly use the latest time-saving technologies, always focus on the 80/20, are members of quality management and continuous improvement professional bodies, and utilize benchmarking. Exhibit 1.10 shows the contents of the toolkit used by best-practice organizations to achieve world-class performance. EXHIBIT 1.10 Best-Practice Toolkit Benchmarking. An ongoing, systematic process to search for international better practices, compare against them, and then introduce them, modified where necessary, into your organization. Benchmarking may be focused on products, services, business practices, and processes of recognized leading organizations.

Since 2000, no important technology innovation in the United States has been scaled up to create millions of manufacturing, marketing, and engineering jobs here, as personal computers and related industries did. While selling online and social networking are clearly transformational movements that have created entrepreneurial opportunities, fewer than fifty thousand traditional jobs—those with full-time hours, benefits, and health insurance—have been created.

The best way to understand how a culture adopts (or doesn’t adopt) an innovation is to go there and see it for yourself. In person, you can gain insight into the social barriers unique to a culture, and whether adoption is purely driven by reflective appeal (status), behavioral appeal (usefulness), or the relative importance of one over the other. If you do the research right, it will allow you to tap into the sentiment of adoption, which you’ll never get from looking at quantified data.

Modern biomimicry is far more than just copying nature's shapes. It includes systematic design and problem-solving processes, which are now being refined by scientists and engineers in universities and institutes worldwide. The first step in any of these processes is to clearly define the challenge we're trying to solve. Then we can determine whether the problem is related to form, function, or ecosystem. Next, we ask what plant, animal, or natural process solves a similar problem most effectively. For example, engineers trying to design a camera lens with the widest viewing angle possible found inspiration in the eyes of bees, which can see an incredible five-sixths of the way, or three hundred degrees, around their heads. The process can also work in reverse, where the exceptional strategies of a plant, animal, or ecosystem are recognized and reverse engineered. De Mestral's study of the tenacious grip of burrs on his socks is an early example of reverse engineering a natural winner, while researchers' fascination at the way geckos can hang upside down from the ceiling or climb vertical windows has now resulted in innovative adhesives and bandages. Designs based on biomimicry offer a range of economic benefits. Because nature has carried out trillions of parallel, competitive experiments for millions of years, its successful designs are dramatically more energy efficient than the inventions we've created in the past couple of hundred years. Nature builds only with locally derived materials, so it uses little transport energy. Its designs can be less expensive to manufacture than traditional approaches, because nature doesn't waste materials. For example, the exciting new engineering frontier of nanotechnology mirrors nature's manufacturing principles by building devices one molecule at a time. This means no offcuts or excess. Nature can't afford to poison itself either, so it creates and combines chemicals in a way that is nontoxic to its ecosystems. Green chemistry is a branch of biomimicry that uses this do-no-harm principle, to develop everything from medicines to cleaning products to industrial molecules that are safe by design. Learning from the way nature handles materials also allows one of our companies, PaxFan, to build fans that are smaller and lighter while giving higher performance. Finally, nature has methods to recycle absolutely everything it creates. In natures' closed loop of survival on this planet, everything is a resource and everything is recycled-one of the most fundamental components of sustainability. For all these reasons, as I hear one prominent venture capitalist declare, biomimicry will be the business of the twenty-first century. The global force of this emerging and fascinating field is undeniable and building on all societal levels.

Our former policy goals of a strong economy built on heavy industry and cheap energy are no longer appropriate for an age marked by national economic sluggishness, fierce international competition and emerging third world nations reclaiming their resources. … We must look to a new ‘post-industrial’ economy built around relatively resource-efficient information technologies and innovation.”28

The lotus is one of the most commercially successful sources of inspiration for biomimetic products. Apart from their intoxicating, heavenly fragrance, lotus plants are a symbol of purity in some major religions. More than two thousand years ago, for example, the Bhagavad Gita, one of India's ancient sacred scriptures, referred to lotus leaves as self-cleaning, but it wasn't until the late 1960s that engineers with access to high-powered microscopes began to understand the mechanism underlying the lotus' dirt-free surface. German scientist Dr. Wilhelm Barthlott continued this research, finding microstructures on the surface of a lotus leaf that cause water droplets to bead up and roll away particles of mud or dirt. Like many biomimics, this insight came quickly, while its commercialization took many years more. The "Lotus Effect"-short for the superhydrophobic (water-repelling) quality of the lotus leaf's micro to nanostructured surface-has become the subject of more than one hundred related patents and is one of the premier examples of successfully commercialized biomimicry.

Lift one hand in front of you now and inscribe a circle in the air with your finger, taking one second to complete it. As you're completing this process, the earth that you're sitting on is spinning on its axis and progressing radially with the rest of the solar system through space at the same time. Our earth travels through the solar system at 18.5 miles per second, and the entire solar system is barreling through space at 155 miles per second. So by the time your finger comes back to the starting place of your air circle, you will have arced more than 155 miles through space. Your circle looks like an expanded, uncoiling spring that is more than 155 miles long. In the same way, a brick falling from a tall building seems to travel in a straight line, but in the seconds that it takes to hit the ground, it has actually traced a long spiral relative to the universe. This applies to linear accelerators or anything traveling in what seems to be a totally straight or planar line. Incidentally, if a person is lost in a featureless desert, it has been found that he or she doesn't actually walk in circles as popularly thought. In reality, the meanderings follow spirals.

Although routines and standards are clearly related, they are not identical. As Kindleberger (1983) pointed out, standards are public goods; they reflect interpersonally shared knowledge. We might even say that a standard is a certain kind of “public” routine that helps to coordinate private (individual or intraorganizational) routines. But routines are not only about coordination. As we saw, routines embody potentially useful—we might even say productive—knowledge. In the terminology of Ryle (1949), they reflect “knowledge how.” In some cases, such useful knowledge can be knowledge about how to transact, the possession of which thus reduces transaction costs. My internalized knowledge that I always ought to keep to the right (not the left) as another car approaches might be an example, at least if we construe the interaction between oncoming drivers metaphorically as a transaction. But the skillful exercise of a particular technique for suturing an incision would also be a routine, and not one obviously involving the reduction of transaction costs. Useful knowledge applied to problems of transacting is a special case of a more general phenomenon. As Winter (1988) has suggested, one needs to have economic capabilities (an effective repertoire of routines) in order to be able to transact as well as to be able to produce.6 Like standards, routines can be both enabling and constraining. The possession of an effective repertoire of routines would be crucial to the successful production of product A; but possessing that repertoire might also inhibit a transition to the production of product B. Routines are generally as hard to unlearn as to learn, which may give the advantage in situations of radical innovation to those who have never learned the routines in the first place.7 This is no doubt what Schumpeter (1934) had in mind when he wrote that “new combinations are, as a rule, embodied, as it were, in new firms which generally do not arise out of the old ones but start producing beside them;... in general it is not the

Coral is built by trillions of tiny organisms called polyps that extract magnesium, calcium, and carbon from ocean water to build a community of skeletons. In a similar way, Calera, which Brent founded in 2007, creates cement by running carbon dioxide from flue gas from a nearby power plant through water containing calcium, magnesium, sodium, and chloride-such as seawater. This combination of chemicals and minerals also converts the carbon dioxide in the flue gas to related materials called carbonates, which are heavier and precipitate out of the salt water. After removing the water and drying, the product is ready for use as cement. In effect, the company makes chalk, and indeed, Calera's cement is bright white. As a side benefit, the source water has had its salt removed and can be purified to fresh water with only a few additional steps. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, rather than giving off carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, Calera's process absorbs half a ton of carbon dioxide for every ton of cement it produces.

Seizing Situational Status Here are the steps involved in elevating your status in any situation. You will recognize some of these actions from framing, and for good reason. Frame control and status are closely related, as are the pitch techniques you will learn in Chapter 4.        1. Politely ignore power rituals and avoid beta traps.        2. Be unaffected by your customer’s global status (meaning the customer’s status inside and outside the business environment).        3. Look for opportunities to perpetrate small denials and defiances that strengthen your frame and elevate your status.        4. As soon as you take power, quickly move the discussion into an area where you are the domain expert, where your knowledge and information are unassailable by your audience.        5. Apply a prize frame by positioning yourself as the reward for making the decision to do business with you.        6. Confirm your alpha status by making your customer, who now temporarily occupies a beta position, make a statement that qualifies your higher status.

Creative people in particular traditionally have strained relations with systems, structures, standards, and other perceived constraints on their creative freedom. Nowhere is this clearer than in big organizations where people often complain that “the systems” kill creativity, longingly thinking back to the halcyon days when the company was young and less bureaucratic. Going back to the unstructured start-up days is not an option, however. Established companies require a different kind of innovation: they need a culture in which creativity is part of the corporate ecosystem. The key to building a creative culture is not to declare war on systems, processes, and policies, but to embrace and redesign them so they support and actively enhance innovative behavior. Managers, in other words, have to fight systems with systems, creating an architecture of innovation in their teams and departments. The primary aim is to help people behave more like innovators.

Developmental evaluation likewise centers on situational sensitivity, responsiveness, and adaptation, and is an approach to evaluation especially appropriate for situations of high uncertainty where what may and does emerge is relatively unpredictable and uncontrollable.

To measure market needs, I would watch carefully what customers do, not simply listen to what they say. Watching how customers actually use a product provides much more reliable information than can be gleaned from a verbal interview or a focus group. Thus, observations indicate that auto users today require a minimum cruising range (that is, the distance that can be driven without refueling) of about 125 to 150 miles; most electric vehicles only offer a minimum cruising range of 50 to 80 miles. Similarly, drivers seem to require cars that accelerate from 0 to 60 miles per hour in less than 10 seconds (necessary primarily to merge safely into highspeed traffic from freeway entrance ramps); most electric vehicles take nearly 20 seconds to get there. And, finally, buyers in the mainstream market demand a wide array of options, but it would be impossible for electric vehicle manufacturers to offer a similar variety within the small initial unit volumes that will characterize that business. According to almost any definition of functionality used for the vertical axis of our proposed chart, the electric vehicle will be deficient compared to a gasolinepowered car. This information is not sufficient to characterize electric vehicles as disruptive, however. They will only be disruptive if we find that they are also on a trajectory of improvement that might someday make them competitive in parts of the mainstream market. The trajectories of performance improvement demanded in the market—whether measured in terms of required acceleration, cruising range, or top cruising speed—are relatively flat. This is because traffic laws impose a limit on the usefulness of ever-more-powerful cars, and demographic, economic, and geographic considerations limit the increase in commuting miles for the average driver to less than 1 percent per year. At the same time, the performance of electric vehicles is improving at a faster rate—between 2 and 4 percent per year—suggesting that sustaining technological advances might indeed carry electric vehicles from their position today, where they cannot compete in mainstream markets, to a position in the future where they might.

What Info Should a Persona Provide? Good personas convey the relevant demographic, psychographic, behavioral, and needs-based attributes of your target customer. Personas should fit on a single page and provide a snapshot of the customer archetype that's quick to digest, and usually include the following information: Name Representative photograph Quote that conveys what they most care about Job title Demographics Needs/goals Relevant motivations and attitudes Related tasks and behaviors Frustrations/pain points with current solution Level of expertise/knowledge (in the relevant domain, e.g., level of computer savvy) Product usage context/environment (e.g., laptop in a loud, busy office or tablet on the couch at home) Technology adoption life cycle segment (for your product category) Any other salient attributes

volumes where it is particularly and professedly delivered; and, by proper attention to the rules of derivation, the orthography was soon adjusted. But to COLLECT the WORDS of our language was a task of greater difficulty: the deficiency of dictionaries was immediately apparent; and when they were exhausted, what was yet wanting must be sought by fortuitous and unguided excursions into books, and gleaned as industry should find, or chance should offer it, in the boundless chaos of a living speech. My search, however, has been either skilful or lucky; for I have much augmented the vocabulary. As my design was a dictionary, common or appellative, I have omitted all words which have relation to proper names; such as Arian, Socinian, Calvinist, Benedictine, Mahometan; but have retained those of a more general nature, as Heathen, Pagan. Of the terms of art I have received such as could be found either in books of science or technical dictionaries; and have often inserted, from philosophical writers, words which are supported perhaps only by a single authority, and which being not admitted into general use, stand yet as candidates or probationers, and must depend for their adoption on the suffrage of futurity. The words which our authours have introduced by their knowledge of foreign languages, or ignorance of their own, by vanity or wantonness, by compliance with fashion or lust of innovation, I have registred as they occurred, though commonly only to censure them, and warn others against the folly of naturalizing useless foreigners to the injury of the natives. I have not rejected any by design, merely because they were unnecessary or exuberant; but have received those which by

Perhaps the best-known investment paradigm is buy low, sell high. I believe that more money can be made by buying high and selling at even higher prices … . I try to buy stocks that have already had good price moves, that are already making new highs, and that have positive relative strength … . I always look for the best potential performance at the current time. Even if I think that a stock I hold will go higher, if I believe another stock will do significantly better in the interim, I will switch.

A football is not pigskin. It’s made of cowhide. A baseball is not horsehide. It’s also made of cowhide. When Juliet asks, “Wherefore art thou, Romeo?”, she’s not asking where he is, but rather, in the meaning of the time, why he is doing what he’s doing. Bone china actually does contain bone. Calcified animal-bone ash adds to the durability of the product. Henry Ford is thought to be the innovator of mass production, but just before 1800, Eli Whitney, of cotton gin fame, found a way to manufacture muskets by machine, producing interchangeable parts. Bix Beiderbecke, the renowned jazz musician, did not play the trumpet. His instrument was the cornet. Lucrezia Borgia was not the wicked murderess she is reputed to have been. Her major fault, according to Bergen Evans, was “an insipid, almost bovine, good nature.” Contrary to much popular usage, hoi polloi does not refer to the elite; rather, it means the common people. Natural gas, the kind used for heating and cooking in the home, is odorless. Odiferous additives are put in to give the gas a recognizable smell as a measure to alert people to gas leaks. Muhammad Ali did not win the heavyweight gold medal at the 1960 Rome Olympics. His gold in 1960 was in the light heavyweight category. The heavyweight gold went to Franco De Piccoli of Italy. Sacrilegious means violating or profaning anything sacred. In spite of its frequent mispronunciation, the word is not related to religion or religious.

One class of software, broadly known as analytical databases, dispenses with the relational model. Using innovations in on-disk storage and the use of distributed memory, analytical databases combine the flexibility of SQL with the speed of traditional OLAP systems.

then I’ll buy a dozen related books to help me prepare for the teaching component.

race has the feel of being a priori, but in reality it is a historical construct that regulates our interhuman relations, though not always toward malicious forms of racism. Indeed, race may also enable forms of community bound by filial care and interests.

The situation was similar in the Soviet Union, with industry playing the role of sugar in the Caribbean. Industrial growth in the Soviet Union was further facilitated because its technology was so backward relative to what was available in Europe and the United States, so large gains could be reaped by reallocating resources to the industrial sector, even if all this was done inefficiently and by force. Before 1928 most Russians lived in the countryside. The technology used by peasants was primitive, and there were few incentives to be productive. Indeed, the last vestiges of Russian feudalism were eradicated only shortly before the First World War. There was thus huge unrealized economic potential from reallocating this labor from agriculture to industry. Stalinist industrialization was one brutal way of unlocking this potential. By fiat, Stalin moved these very poorly used resources into industry, where they could be employed more productively, even if industry itself was very inefficiently organized relative to what could have been achieved. In fact, between 1928 and 1960 national income grew at 6 percent a year, probably the most rapid spurt of economic growth in history up until then. This quick economic growth was not created by technological change, but by reallocating labor and by capital accumulation through the creation of new tools and factories. Growth was so rapid that it took in generations of Westerners, not just Lincoln Steffens. It took in the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. It even took in the Soviet Union’s own leaders, such as Nikita Khrushchev, who famously boasted in a speech to Western diplomats in 1956 that “we will bury you [the West].” As late as 1977, a leading academic textbook by an English economist argued that Soviet-style economies were superior to capitalist ones in terms of economic growth, providing full employment and price stability and even in producing people with altruistic motivation. Poor old Western capitalism did better only at providing political freedom. Indeed, the most widely used university textbook in economics, written by Nobel Prize–winner Paul Samuelson, repeatedly predicted the coming economic dominance of the Soviet Union. In the 1961 edition, Samuelson predicted that Soviet national income would overtake that of the United States possibly by 1984, but probably by 1997. In the 1980 edition there was little change in the analysis, though the two dates were delayed to 2002 and 2012. Though the policies of Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders could produce rapid economic growth, they could not do so in a sustained way. By the 1970s, economic growth had all but stopped. The most important lesson is that extractive institutions cannot generate sustained technological change for two reasons: the lack of economic incentives and resistance by the elites. In addition, once all the very inefficiently used resources had been reallocated to industry, there were few economic gains to be had by fiat. Then the Soviet system hit a roadblock, with lack of innovation and poor economic incentives preventing any further progress. The only area in which the Soviets did manage to sustain some innovation was through enormous efforts in military and aerospace technology. As a result they managed to put the first dog, Leika, and the first man, Yuri Gagarin, in space. They also left the world the AK-47 as one of their legacies. Gosplan was the supposedly all-powerful planning agency in charge of the central planning of the Soviet economy.

In science, hearsay and anecdotal evidence are not sufficient to prove something. Each time a "miracle" occurs, it's easy to see magical thinking, misattribution and other human errors at work. For example, if a child is ill in the hospital, a family member might pray for his recovery. If that child does recover, the praying relative will attribute this to the power of prayer, not to any medical innovations, immunological responses or sheer power of chance.

And relatively self-reliant households are the basic building block of any culture that is viable over the long term without requiring war (stealing of resources) to sustain itself. No democratic civilization can last long if it is built upon a citizenry that consume more than they produce; that's debt and debt is inherently unsustainable and undemocratic. If our goal is a peaceful, just society, self-reliance at the home and community levels must be a central focus of our lives

Low self-monitors are pretty much the opposite. Their feelings and actions are “controlled by inner attitudes, dispositions, and values, rather than to be molded and shaped to fit the situation.”7 Even when low self-monitors do figure out what others expect, even when they do “get it,” they will have trouble producing the “right” response in sincere and convincing ways. For better and for worse, low self-monitors are relatively unfettered by social norms. These mavericks and social misfits can drive bosses and coworkers crazy, but they increase the range of what is thought, noticed, talked about, and done in a company. High self-monitors tend to be yes-men (and -women), who can’t stop themselves from telling others what they want to hear. Low self-monitors can’t stop themselves from saying and doing what they think is right, because they don’t notice—or don’t care about—pressures to follow the herd.

At the end of the last ice age (17,000–12,000 BP), Europeans had become so dependent on reindeer that the period is known as the “reindeer age.” Reindeer consumption during the reindeer age was greatly abetted by a relatively new technological innovation called the spear thrower, or atlatl, which extended the range over which a spear could be accurately thrown.22

Never Put These Ten Words in Your Pitch Deck Take a close look at your standard pitch deck, the “about us” section on your corporate home page, or your PR material. Highlight every instance of the words “leading,” “unique,” “solution,” or “innovative.” In particular, go find all instances of the phrase “We work to understand our customers’ unique needs and then build custom solutions to meet those needs.” Then hit the delete key. Because every time you use one of those buzzwords, you are telling your customers, “We are exactly the same as everyone else.” Ironically, the more we try to play up our differences, the more things sound the same. Public relations expert Adam Sherk recently analyzed the terms used in company communications, and the results are devastating. Here are the top ten: By definition, there can be only one leader in any industry—and 161,000 companies each think they’re it. More than 75,000 companies think they’re the “best” or the “top”; 30,400 think they’re “unique.” “Solution” also makes an appearance at number seven—so if you think that calling your offering a “solution” differentiates you, think again. If everyone’s saying they offer the “leading solution,” what’s the customer to think? We can tell you what their response will be: “Great—give me 10 percent off.” We don’t mean to be unsympathetic here. You’ll find it’s hard to avoid these terms—heck, we call our own consulting arm “SEC Solutions”! In all of our time at the Council, we have never once met a member who doesn’t think her company’s value proposition beats the socks off the competitors’. And it’s understandable. After all, why would we want to work for a company whose product is second-rate—especially when our job is to sell that product? But what the utter sameness of language here tells us is that, ironically, a strategy of more precisely describing our products’ advantages over the competition’s is destined to have the exact opposite effect—we simply end up sounding like everyone else.

The libraries in the sample were asked to rank themselves on a number of characteristics, including "leading edge status" (LES). (Leading edge status, a construct developed by Morrison, is related to and highly correlated with the lead

Who are we, and how do we relate this idea in a way that’s meaningful to our customers and the values they hold dear? In other words, one must define something meaningful. To do that, one must identify to whom this must be meaningful.

There are five key characteristics that will tend to explain how quickly an innovation is adopted. They are (in order of importance): 1.Relative advantage is whether the innovation is better than what is out there already. This can be in effectiveness, economic or even prestige terms. 2.Compatibility is the extent that an innovation is consistent with existing values and norms. 3.Simplicity is the degree to which innovations are perceived to be easy to understand and use. 4.Trialability is the extent to which innovations can be experimented with on a limited basis. Trialability is particularly important to early adopters, as they have no vicarious experience to draw on. 5.Observability is the extent to which the results of an innovation are visible to others.

costs of manufacturer-provided solutions relative to user-provided ones. For example, a user firm that builds a novel process controller to improve its plant operations must pay its own actual costs if the self-built controller fails and ruins expensive

Platform Pivot A platform pivot refers to a change from an application to a platform or vice versa. Most commonly, startups that aspire to create a new platform begin life by selling a single application, the so-called killer app, for their platform. Only later does the platform emerge as a vehicle for third parties to leverage as a way to create their own related products.

These groups were a new kind of vehicle: a hive or colony of close genetic relatives, which functioned as a unit (e.g., in foraging and fighting) and reproduced as a unit. These are the motorboating sisters in my example, taking advantage of technological innovations and mechanical engineering that had never before existed. It was another transition. Another kind of group began to function as though it were a single organism, and the genes that got to ride around in colonies crushed the genes that couldn’t “get it together” and rode around in the bodies of more selfish and solitary insects. The colonial insects represent just 2 percent of all insect species, but in a short period of time they claimed the best feeding and breeding sites for themselves, pushed their competitors to marginal grounds, and changed most of the Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems (for example, by enabling the evolution of flowering plants, which need pollinators).43 Now they’re the majority, by weight, of all insects on Earth. What about human beings? Since ancient times, people have likened human societies to beehives. But is this just a loose analogy? If you map the queen of the hive onto the queen or king of a city-state, then yes, it’s loose. A hive or colony has no ruler, no boss. The queen is just the ovary. But if we simply ask whether humans went through the same evolutionary process as bees—a major transition from selfish individualism to groupish hives that prosper when they find a way to suppress free riding—then the analogy gets much tighter. Many animals are social: they live in groups, flocks, or herds. But only a few animals have crossed the threshold and become ultrasocial, which means that they live in very large groups that have some internal structure, enabling them to reap the benefits of the division of labor.44 Beehives and ant nests, with their separate castes of soldiers, scouts, and nursery attendants, are examples of ultrasociality, and so are human societies. One of the key features that has helped all the nonhuman ultra-socials to cross over appears to be the need to defend a shared nest. The biologists Bert Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson summarize the recent finding that ultrasociality (also called “eusociality”)45 is found among a few species of shrimp, aphids, thrips, and beetles, as well as among wasps, bees, ants, and termites: In all the known [species that] display the earliest stages of eusociality, their behavior protects a persistent, defensible resource from predators, parasites, or competitors. The resource is invariably a nest plus dependable food within foraging range of the nest inhabitants.46 Hölldobler and Wilson give supporting roles to two other factors: the need to feed offspring over an extended period (which gives an advantage to species that can recruit siblings or males to help out Mom) and intergroup conflict. All three of these factors applied to those first early wasps camped out together in defensible naturally occurring nests (such as holes in trees). From that point on, the most cooperative groups got to keep the best nesting sites, which they then modified in increasingly elaborate ways to make themselves even more productive and more protected. Their descendants include the honeybees we know today, whose hives have been described as “a factory inside a fortress.”47

Few public-service institutions define their objectives in such absolute terms. But even company personnel departments and manufacturing service staffs tend to see their mission as ‘doing good’, and therefore as being moral and absolute instead of being economic and relative. This means that public-service institutions are out to maximize rather than to optimize. ‘Our mission will not be completed,’ asserts the head of the Crusade Against Hunger, ‘as long as there is one child on the earth going to bed hungry.’ If he were to say, ‘Our mission will be completed if the largest possible number of children that can be reached through existing distribution channels get enough to eat not to be stunted’, he would be booted out of office. But if the goal is maximization, it can never be attained. Indeed, the closer one comes towards attaining one’s objective, the more efforts are called for. For, once optimization has been reached (and the optimum in most efforts lies between 75 and 80 per cent of theoretical maximum), additional costs go up exponentially while additional results fall off exponentially. The closer a public-service institution comes to attaining its objectives, therefore, the more frustrated it will be and the harder it will work on what it is already doing.

Planning and forecasting are only accurate when based on a long, stable operating history and a relatively static environment. Startups have neither.

An awareness interview is one where the teacher asks questions to help broaden the student’s awareness of her experiences in meditation. The purpose of this kind of interview is to bring into clearer focus aspects of one’s experience that are in the background or on the periphery of awareness. It is our way of teaching greater awareness of both the process one is going through in meditation and the content that comes up with it. So the interview will include what someone was thinking about as well as how she was relating to the thinking. What gradually develops over time with this kind of interview is improved recall of what happens in meditation, more information about one’s inner world in meditation, and thus more familiarity with one’s experiences while they are occurring in meditation.

every elite would, all else being equal, like to encourage as much growth as possible in order to have more to extract. Extractive institutions that have achieved at least a minimal degree of political centralization are often able to generate some amount of growth. What is crucial, however, is that growth under extractive institutions will not be sustained, for two key reasons. First, sustained economic growth requires innovation, and innovation cannot be decoupled from creative destruction, which replaces the old with the new in the economic realm and also destabilizes established power relations in politics. Because elites dominating extractive institutions fear creative destruction, they will resist it, and any growth that germinates under extractive institutions will be ultimately short lived. Second, the ability of those who dominate extractive institutions to benefit greatly at the expense of the rest of society implies that political power under extractive institutions is highly coveted, making many groups and individuals fight to obtain it. As a consequence, there will be powerful forces pushing societies under extractive institutions toward political instability.

learning—we have learned how to increase productivity, the outputs that can be produced with any inputs. There are two aspects of learning that we can distinguish: an improvement in best practices, reflected in increases in productivity of firms that marshal all available knowledge and technology, and improvements in the productivity of firms as they catch up to best practices. In fact, the distinction may be somewhat artificial; there may be no firm that has employed best practices in every aspect of its activities. One firm may be catching up with another in some dimension, but the second firm may be catching up with the first in others. In developing countries, almost all firms may be catching up with global best practices; but the real difference between developing and developed countries is the larger fraction of firms that are significantly below global best practices and the larger gap between their productivity and that of the best-performing firms. While we are concerned in this book with both aspects of learning, it is especially the learning associated with catching up that we believe has been given short shrift in the economics literature, and which is central to improvements in standards of living, especially in developing countries. But as we noted in chapter 1, the two are closely related; because of the improvements in best practices by the most innovative firms, most other firms are always engaged in a process of catching up. While the evidence of Solow and the work that followed demonstrated (what to many seems obvious) the importance of learning for increases in standards of living, to further explicate the role of learning, the first three sections of this chapter marshal other macro- and microeconomic evidence. In particular, we stress the pervasive gap between best practices and the productivity of most firms. We argue that this gap is far more important than the traditional allocative inefficiencies upon which most of economics has focused and is related to learning—or more accurately, the lack of learning. The final section provides a theoretical context within which to think about the sources of sustained increases in standards of living, employing the familiar distinction of movements of the production possibilities curve and movements toward the production possibilities curve. Using this framework, we explain why it is that we ascribe such importance to learning. Macroeconomic Perspectives There are several empirical arguments that can be brought to bear to support our conclusion concerning the importance of learning. The first is a simple argument: In theory, leading-edge technology is globally available. Thus, with sufficient capital and trained labor (or sufficient mobility for capital and trained labor), all countries should enjoy comparable standards of living. The only difference would be the rents associated with ownership of intellectual property rights and factor supplies. Yet there is an enormous divergence in economic performance and standards of living across national economies, far greater than can be explained by differences in factor supplies.1 And this includes many low-performing economies with high levels of capital intensity (especially among formerly socialist economies) and highly trained labor forces. Table 2.1 presents a comparison of formerly socialist countries with similar nonsocialist economies in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the state-controlled model of economic activity. TABLE 2.1 Quality of Life Comparisons, 1992–1994 (U.S. $) Source: Greenwald and Khan (2009), p. 30. In most of these cases, at the time communism was imposed after World War II, the subsequently socialist economies enjoyed higher levels of economic development than

Over the past thirty years the orthodox view that the maximisation of shareholder value would lead to the strongest economic performance has come to dominate business theory and practice, in the US and UK in particular.42 But for most of capitalism’s history, and in many other countries, firms have not been organised primarily as vehicles for the short-term profit maximisation of footloose shareholders and the remuneration of their senior executives. Companies in Germany, Scandinavia and Japan, for example, are structured both in company law and corporate culture as institutions accountable to a wider set of stakeholders, including their employees, with long-term production and profitability their primary mission. They are equally capitalist, but their behaviour is different. Firms with this kind of model typically invest more in innovation than their counterparts focused on short-term shareholder value maximisation; their executives are paid smaller multiples of their average employees’ salaries; they tend to retain for investment a greater share of earnings relative to the payment of dividends; and their shares are held on average for longer by their owners. And the evidence suggests that while their short-term profitability may (in some cases) be lower, over the long term they tend to generate stronger growth.43 For public policy, this makes attention to corporate ownership, governance and managerial incentive structures a crucial field for the improvement of economic performance. In short, markets are not idealised abstractions, but concrete and differentiated outcomes arising from different circumstances.

One of the underpinnings of this assumption is the popular truism that today's teenagers and younger children are all now harmoniously inhabiting the incluse and seamless intelligibility of their technological worlds. This generational characterization supposedly confirms that, within another few decades or less, a transitional phase will have ended and there will be billions of individuals with a similar level of technological competences and basic intellectual assumptions. With a new paradigm fully in place, there will be innovation, but in this scenario it will occurwithin the stable and endring conceptual and funcitonal parameters of this "digital" epoch. However, the very different actuality of our time is the calculated maintenance of an ongoing state of transition. There never will be a "catching up" on either a social or individual basis in relation to continually changing technological requirements. For the vast majority o f people our perceptual and cognitive relationship to communication and information technology will continue to be estranged and disempowered because of the velocity wat which new products emerge and at which arbitrary reconfigurations of entire systems take place. This intensified rhythm precludes the possibility of becoming familiar with any given arrangement. Certain cultural theorists insist that such condition can easily be the basis for neutralizing institutional power, but actual evidence supporting this view is non-existent.