How do we navigate in a world without landmarks? We create them. With the rise of mass production businesses turned to psychologists and statisticians to quantify consumer behavior through surveys. Innovators, like sailors, bristled against the certitude of statistics. “If I had asked people what they wanted,” Henry Ford noted, “they would have said faster horses.”
You must obey the forces you want to command. Consider if you were tasked to make Theodore Levitt's proverbial 1/4 inch hole. But what if you had to create the tools to do so? First, you would have to obey the laws of physics and metallurgy to heat the wrought iron to the right temperature. Obey the laws of Newtonian mechanics…
