WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us

by Tim O'Reilly

“The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.”

When the best leader leads, the people say “We did it ourselves.”

General McChrystal give at the New York Times New Work Summit in the summer of 2016, he said, “I tell people, ‘Don’t follow my orders. Follow the orders I would have given you if I were there and knew what you know.’”

“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”

Laws should specify goals, rights, outcomes, authorities, and limits. If specified broadly and clearly, those laws can stand the test of time.

OODA loop (“Observe-Orient-Decide-Act”) to describe why agility is more important in combat than pure firepower. Both fighters are trying to understand the situation, decide what to do, and then act. If you can think more quickly, you can “get inside the OODA loop of your enemy” and disrupt his decision making.

Goodhart’s Law: “Targeting any variable long enough undermines the value of the variable.”

“There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer. . . . It is the customer who determines what a business is. It is the customer alone whose willingness to pay for a good or for a service converts economic resources into wealth, things into goods. . . . The customer is the foundation of a business and keeps it in existence.”

We know what the good life looks like. We have the resources to provide it to everyone. Why have we constructed an economy that makes it so difficult to achieve?

Knowledge sharing goes from the spoken to the written word, to mass production, to electronic dissemination, to embedding knowledge into tools, services, and devices.

This design pattern, that the future is built before it can be bought, is an important one to recognize. The future is created by people who can make and invent things and those who can tinker and improve and put inventions into practice. These are people who learn by doing.

“You have to go to war with the army you have.” Yes, it’s essential to bring in new talent with the latest skills, but retraining your existing team and building new ways for people to work together is also essential.

“Work,” not “jobs,” should be the organizing principle for our map of the future labor economy.