The carefully engineered systems of factories were replaced with the “personal productivity” of offices, in which individuals deploy their own ad hoc and often ill-defined collection of tools and hacks to make sense of their jobs, with no one really knowing how anyone else is managing their work.

good folks are pushing hard across the entire range of human endeavors to find new ways to see, better ways to work. Yet I’ve also heard from these same people, time and again, how hard it is to break out of the professional constraints of convention, common practice and assumed continuity. How hard it is to get those with assets and authority to l