About NEW Tools and Knowledge in Industrial Revolutions [7 pages]

e.g., Computers and the Internet

An excerpt from

Notes for Aji IFP Leaders written by Toby Hecht.

At the heart of understanding the nature of industrial revolutions and how to exploit their new competitive situations to earn a living or become rich, rather than succumb to them and fail to save enough money for decades of old age,

… is understanding the true nature and operations of tool use by human beings.

The media speaks about The Fourth Industrial Revolution (IR#4), which began in the 1980s, as if computers did it.

This is not true. Computers don’t do anything. They have no intentions or skills to produce outcomes.

Smart, ambitious and competitive businesspeople created IR#4 by inventing ways to make money that exploit the new tactical, strategic and competitive capabilities computers make possible.

One way or another, they quit using IR#3 business orientations, intentions and skills decades ago, and began using a competitive, fundamental strategy instead, such as Aji. Now they are rich.

What’s most important to know about industrial revolutions, and remember, is people, not their tools, produce them and keep them going by continually inventing new ways to use tools tactically, strategically and competitively to create new goods and services that create new standards for value throughout the marketplace.

In other words, it’s people like you who produce industrial revolutions. You do it the moment you begin producing steady streams of offers, practices, narratives and strategies that are fresh, new, highly valued and scarce relative to demand, instead of mediocre, and that you use strategically, instead of to get jobs done.

In IR#4, new standards of value — or what is considered important, useful and worthwhile to buy — are produced with new OPNS, and new goods and services, throughout the day in as little as 15 minutes.

Aji is a business philosophy that enables businesspeople who continue to use business skills invented long before computers and the internet to quit using them and thwarting their financial intentions forever.

Using Aji enables businesspeople gripped by IR#3 business culture to pivot and learn how to compete strategically and successfully enough to double their productivity, value and incomes.

It shows businesspeople how to exploit the new tactical, strategic and competitive capabilities and advantages their computers and the internet make possible for the first time in history, which are not obvious to common sense,

… so they can see for themselves how to compete successfully.

About Tools

(especially computers and the internet)

People use tools to increase their capabilities to produce practical outcomes they need to survive, adapt as they and their situations change, and live a good life with their family and in society. Designing, producing, using and improving tools is fundamental to human existence.

The people and businesses who design and build the best tools and invent the best practices to use them to produce outcomes that fulfill their intentions (new technologies), make the most money.

Contrary to claims made on the internet and in the news, tools don’t do anything. Computers and the internet don’t do anything. They don’t intend to help anyone. They just sit on shelves and desks, or in bags.

The value of businesspeople’s computers is not inherent. It is in the new competitive practices they make possible for people to invent when they use them.

The point is, no tool that is used to make money does businesspeople or businesses any good in a rapidly changing and intensely competitive situation until they learn new competitive capabilities, or invent new practices, that enable them to produce new competitive outcomes that keep up with the speed of change around them.

Tools are not technologies, as popular culture casually claims. They are devices people use to produce outcomes to fulfill their intentions.

Hammers are the same as computers in this way. They don’t do anything. They don’t intend to help anyone.

A hammer’s value is in its use or utility. It is the practice of hammering nails to produce highly valued outcomes that their existence makes possible.

If people don’t know how to hammer a nail, hammers don’t show them how to do it. They don’t build anything themselves.

But, when people invent how to use a hammer, the hammer’s existence makes it possible for them to significantly increase their productivity, value and incomes.

Technologies are human actions and practices to produce practical outcomes and not the devices people use to perform them.

Knowing the difference between devices, which are things, and technologies, which are human practices, changes “everything”, especially businesspeople’s focuses and the interpretations they make about how to compete successfully.

Technologies are:

1. The practices people like you invent to produce new tools such as computers and the internet.

2. The practices people like you design and execute to exploit the new tactical, strategic and competitive capabilities your computers and the internet make possible to make money.

Understanding this changes everything.

Aji shows businesspeople why and how to produce their own new technologies.

The fundamental reason human beings invent tools is to increase or expand their capabilities to produce practical outcomes that fulfill their intentions.

Tools are usually artifacts such as hammers and computers, but can be found objects as well such as rocks and sticks.

New knowledge is required to build a new tool, by definition, because it is a new outcome in a given set of circumstances.

That knowledge, or the practices people use to produce the new tool, is called a technology.

The more quickly new tools such as new computer-driven devices and applications are created, and the faster newer tactics and strategies become possible to invent because of them,

… the faster and more competitively important it becomes for businesspeople and businesses to use their computers and the internet

… to design fresh, new offers, practices, narratives and strategies (OPNS)

… that are highly valued and scarce relative to demand.

Summary

“Computer technology” is the:

1. Practices people design and use to make a computer

2. Practices they design and execute with their computers to produce outcomes, or new OPNS, including goods and services.

Technologies are never the devices, tools or computers themselves.

Those are artifacts, not human practices.

It is businesspeople who design and execute their own OPNS using their computers and the internet who are producing new technologies.