This acceleration reflects not only the flood of new products, but also our growing willingness to embrace these strange new devices, and put them to use.

Evolution advances by taking available resources and cobbling them together to create new uses.

The secret to organizational inspiration is to build information networks that allow hunches to persist and disperse and recombine. Instead of cloistering your hunches in brainstorm sessions or R&D labs, create an environment where brainstorming is something that is constantly running in the background, throughout the organization, a collective

boundaries grow as you explore those boundaries.

revolves around the job that the technology in question lets you do.

every four hours they spend working on official company projects, the engineers are required to spend one hour on their own pet project, guided entirely by their own passions and instincts. (Modeled on a similar program pioneered by 3M known as “the 15-percent rule,” Google’s system is officially called “Innovation Time Off.”)

The evolutionary theorist François Jacob captured this in his concept of evolution as a “tinkerer,” not an engineer; our bodies are also works of bricolage, old parts strung together to form something radically new.

Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality.

The only requirements are that they give semiregular updates on their progress to their superiors. Most engineers end up drifting from idea to idea, and the vast majority of those ideas never turn into an official Google product.