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Pretty Good Rules for
Information Age Innovation
- The things that surprise you are good indicators of how innovative you are.
- Amateurs discuss technology, professionals discuss process.
- "Innovations" that do not improve your process more than 3- to 10- fold are mere improvements and not likely worth upsetting the status quo to implement.
- A characteristic of Industrial Age processes is that information and decision making are captives of the physical structure.
- Information-rich processes are characterized by and sustained with diversity. When diversity is lost, processes typically fail.
- A brute-force solution wastes money and effort while remaining inferior to more clever solutions.
- All the information about a system is contained in the system. Extracting and acting on the information, however, is the most difficult task facing decision makers.
- The most trivial type of information in an information-rich process is the location of the physical elements.
- Prediction and causality have useful meanings in Industrial Age processes but are problematic for information-rich processes.
- Information Technology has about as much to do with Information Age processes as the internal combustion engine has to do with Industrial Age processes (See Rule #2).
- The Laws of Physics still hold. Particularly for information.
- If you want a new idea, read an old book.