At his death, a debate arose about what exactly Steve Jobs had done for Apple Inc., the company he co-founded and led as CEO for many years. Some even wondered whether he had contributed much of anything, and therefore might be getting too much credit for Apple’s extraordinary success. After all, he hadn’t produced the drawings for the iPhone or…
Amid the pain of a pandemic, the world awaits vaccines and treatments, currently being pursued by a long list of medical researchers. Yet in a recent column in The New York Times, Bret Stephens ruefully observes that “one lesson from this pandemic is how dependent we are for our survival on an innovative and robust pharmaceutical industry. Maybe we should…
In the context of a pandemic, “first responders” are those who take the earliest action on behalf of others in medical distress — nurses, doctors, EMTs, police, firefighters, etc. They are skilled and brave, willing to risk their own health, physical and emotional. They are heroes in the truest sense. But there is another sense of “first response” relevant to…
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…