processes — the engines of flux — are now more important than products.

Our greatest invention in the past 200 years was not a particular gadget or tool but the invention of the scientific process itself.

Our greatest invention in the past 200 years was not a particular gadget or tool but the invention of the scientific process itself. Once we invented the scientific method, we could immediately create thousands of other amazing things we could have never discovered any other way.

Our most important mechanical inventions are not machines that do what humans do better, but machines that can do things we can’t do at all. Our most important thinking machines will not be machines that can think what we think faster, better, but those that think what we can’t think.

What’s important is not just to develop the technology; it’s to develop the processes.

Several leading-edge thinkers in physics suggest that nature is... a flux of processes. The whole notion of flux and process is fundamental to the Indigenous sciences of... Algonkian-speaking peoples... all share a strongly verb-based family of languages that reflects this direct experience.

Alfred North Whitehead summed it up best when he remarked that the greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the idea of invention itself. We had learned how to invent things, and the question of why we invent things receded in importance. The idea that if something could be done it should be done was born in the nineteenth century. And along with it, there developed a profound belief in all the principles through which invention succeeds: objectivity, efficiency, expertise, standardization, measurement, and progress. It also came to be believed that the engine of technological progress worked most efficiently when people are conceived of not as children of God or even as citizens but as consumers — that is to say, as markets.

Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is beer. Oh, I grant you that the wheel was also a fine invention, but the wheel does not go nearly as well with pizza.

In science, it is not speed that is the most important. It is the dedication, the commitment, the interest and the will to know something and to understand it — these are the things that come first.

Get the ongoing process right and it will keep generating ongoing benefits. In our new era, processes trump products. This shift toward processes also means ceaseless change is the fate for everything we make. We are moving away from the world of fixed nouns and toward a world of fluid verbs. In the next 30 years we will continue to take solid things — an automobile, a shoe — and turn them into intangible verbs. Products will become services and processes. Embedded with high doses of technology, an automobile becomes a transportation service, a continuously updated sequence of materials rapidly adapting to customer usage, feedback, competition, innovation, and wear. Whether it is a driverless car or one you drive, this transportation service is packed with flexibility, customization, upgrades, connections, and new benefits.

Your processes are your Way of doing business. Successful organizations see their Way clearly and constantly refine it. Due to lack of knowledge, this secret ingredient in business is the most neglected of the Six Key Components. Most entrepreneurs don’t understand how powerful process can be, but when you apply it correctly, it works like magic, resulting in simplicity, scalability, efficiency, and profitability.

Great inventions are never, and great discoveries are seldom, the work of any one mind. Every great invention is really an aggregation of minor inventions, or the final step of a progression. It is not usually a creation, but a growth, as truly so as is the growth of the trees in the forest.

Get the ongoing process right and it will keep generating ongoing benefits. In our new era, processes trump products.

I regard the essence of the notion of process as given by the statement: Not only is everything changing, but all is flux. That is to say, what is the process of becoming itself, while all objects, events, entities, conditions, structures, etc., are forms that can be abstracted from this process.