Industry works by ever-changing means. History will tell us which choices worked well. For now we just take notice.
Henry Ford's assembly line has been so successful that it remains hard to talk or think in terms not influenced by that success.
DuPont sold paint to Ford. He also introduced ROI as a measure of success for his conglomerate.
How can we systematize creative work? What ratios imply operational success? Function points per man day? Maybe.
Extreme Programming asked teams to co-locate with their customers. This helped XP work by taking a whole raft of problems off the table.
Open-Source developers achieved many of the same goals as XP by taking organizational hierarchy off the table. Most open source remains highly distributed.
A companies' culture can outlive the tenure of its employees, even its founders. This persistence is captured in the notion of corporate DNA.
Cultures clash in an acquisition. Two successful companies can struggle when combined simply because invisible processes in each don't work with the other.
How is it that Disney could acquire Pixar and import the latter's reframing of animation methodology? Was it a DNA transplant? How?
Tom Love once told me that they founded their company with great ambitions to be different. Month by month they learned the foolishness of yet another ambition. Many business processes solve problems that aren't obvious until you have them.
Clay Shirky calls redeploying our cognitive surplus Looking for the Mouse.
Use muscle, not solar panels, for safe and reliable LED lighting in the third world. website 