Not every productive person is visionary, though all can aspire to be. To be visionary is to see not what is already good, but what would be good if it existed. Not what people value now, but what they would value were it available. Legendary Automobile Executive Bob Lutz, in arguing why customers aren’t always right, explained that they “are…
Last week was the celebration of Thomas Edison’s 174th birthday. In honor of that occasion, here is a link to the Edison Innovation Foundation, which carries on his legacy and includes a page of some of his notable quotes. One of my favorites is, “The man [or woman, to contemporize the language] who doesn’t make up his mind to cultivate…
In the post “First Responses” I argued that the solution to the pandemic ― or any major problem ― is to produce our way out of it. Along with this observation we could make another: that the most important productive acts often come from the largest businesses, who have unique abilities to develop and mass produce novel goods and services.…
In the spirit of both the holidays and my desire to name less typical but nevertheless impressive examples of production, consider transportation in commerce. Especially this holiday season, when about 3 billion packages will be delivered in the US alone (800 million more than last year), as will millions of vials of COVID-19 vaccines, each requiring specialized protection and storage.…
Sometimes the motivation to create great products and services arises from the deep appreciation that others have done the same for you. So says French vlogger Hugo Cotton, who was inspired by a Polish vlogger named Piotr. Cotton, who lives in Poland, at first struggled to make headway learning Polish, even though he spent a year memorizing grammar rules and…
A successful executive once told me that, when he was 15, he was obese. Back then, concerned about his health if he remained that way for long, he adopted a plan to eat well and play sports, hoping to improve. Two years later, he had lost 90 pounds. This moment he described as an “inflection point,” because, having accomplished what…
“[S]ome difference must necessarily exist between individual and individual, for there must be some more exalted than the rest either by their riches or their talents; so in this, there are what you might call the high, the middling, and the low; and this difference will always be more remarkable among people who live by sea excursions than among those…
The first example of mass production in human history was likely brickmaking under Augustus in Rome. But it wasn’t until 18th century Britain and the Industrial Revolution that it arrived upon the scene for good. Indeed, not until the 20th century was the term “mass production” widely used. Since then, much has been written about it ― favorable and unfavorable…
In Jessica Treadway’s novel Lacy Eye, a young girl, upon receiving a diagnosis of a lazy eye, hears instead the words “lacy eye,” a much prettier sounding condition. The error comes to symbolize the novel’s major theme: our sometime preference not for the truth but for what we’d rather be true. Though easy to state but difficult to adopt, a…
“What I had to do, was, to turn the painful discipline of my younger days to account, by going to work with a resolute and steady heart. What I had to do, was, to take my woodman’s axe in my hand, and clear my own way through the forest of difficulty, by cutting down the trees until I came to…