Pretty Good Rules

For Information Age Innovation

  1. The things that surprise you are good indicators of how innovative you are.

  2. Amateurs discuss technology, professionals discuss process.

  3. "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.

  4. A characteristic of Industrial Age processes is that information and decision making are captives of the physical structure.

  5. Information-rich processes are characterized by and sustained with diversity. When diversity is lost, processes typically fail.

  6. A brute-force solution wastes money and effort while remaining inferior to more clever solutions.

  7. 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.

  8. The most trivial type of information in an information-rich process is the location of the physical elements.

  9. Prediction and causality have useful meanings in Industrial Age processes but are problematic for information-rich processes.

  10. 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).

  11. The Laws of Physics still hold. Particularly for information.

  12. If you want a new idea, read an old book.

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