Depending on your perspective, it can be exhilarating or terrifying that industries rise and fall according to the level of demand for their products. That no matter the success of any venture, its days are always numbered. Unless it can adapt. And therein lies the key to productive longevity. IBM once made typewriters, and if that were all it tried…
“Only the paranoid survive,” said Founder and former Intel CEO, Andrew Grove, famously. Counsel that is among the most heeded in business in the twenty-five years since he offered it. Because no success is permanent. Because anything can be improved. Because productive people and organizations will seek to improve it. And because buyers will eagerly value those improvements.
Corporate industrial labs have been responsible for some of the world’s greatest innovations. None more so than the Bell Telephone Laboratories during the twentieth century. For example, from Bell Labs came the transistor and the laser, among many others. It is fair to say that much of modern communications we owe to that single organization and its scientists and engineers,…
There is an episode of Netflix’s series The Crown in which the British Royals follow the 1969 Apollo 11 mission. They are portrayed as monitoring the events rapturously, united in a kind of collective awe with virtually the entire world. At the moment of the landing, I was at a professional baseball game, which was interrupted by the announcement to…
Thomas Edison had a practice of committing himself and his team to deadlines for completing inventions they had taken on—dates upon which they had promised to deliver the finished product to some waiting buyer. Imagine the pressure they must have felt when having to not just complete a task by a firm date but actually create something wholly new! I…
Psychologist Abraham Maslow had a theory of motivation which came to be known as the Hierarchy of Needs. Roughly, it claimed that people were motivated to meet their physical and material needs before attempting to meet their spiritual and psychological ones. This principle could also describe the process of production. In Plato’s dialogue Critias, which recounts the story of the…
Speaking at the 1992 Democratic Presidential Convention, Late U.S. Senator Paul Tsongas counseled that, to create sound economic policy, “You cannot be pro-jobs and anti-business at the same time. You cannot love employment and hate employers.” Alternatively, in the spirit of this blog, we might paraphrase him: “You cannot love products and hate producers.” I take him to mean that…
“The rapid economic development of the United States is frequently taken for granted, treated as a nonproblem that requires little formal analysis. To many historians, American prosperity is simply a logical extension of natural abundance.” So writes historian Thomas Doerflinger, in his book A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise. For him, this spirit explains much more fundamentally why some countries prosper…
(This is a re-post of one of the first posts on this blog, on its one year anniversary.) Children’s Television Pioneer Fred Rogers once said: “Imagining something may be the first step in making it happen, but it takes the real time and real efforts of real people to learn things, make things, turn thoughts into deeds or visions into…
To be productive can be extraordinarily rewarding. But it also sometimes comes with side effects, one of which is “burnout.” Usually we think of burnout as resulting from overwork, as overtaxing oneself by spending too much time or effort. But this is not always the case. Sometimes burnout can arise not from how much you do but what you do…