Chapter 13: Profits and Technology

1. Businesses, like bumblebees, turn profits into information. In an expanding industry, a company's profit usually is reinvested.

2. Unsung but important advances in an industry often come when a worker or designer struggling with a knotty problem decides to "borrow an idea" from a completely unrelated field.

3. The human capacity to imagine, to consciously pull together unrelated pieces of knowledge and productive new answers, is what makes economic evolution happen so much faster than biological evolution.

4. Fashioning a way of life that consistently earns profits is difficult, because the economic and natural environments are crowded, competitive, and risky.

5. The common strategy employed by organizations and organisms is to develop a way of getting by that is just a little bit different from that of any other species.

6. Three species of supermarkets, for example, remain in business: high-price/high-service conventionals, ultra-low-price/bare-bones warehouses, and low-price/wide-selection super-warehouses.

7. Since companies have no control over the prices their competitors charge, they have no alternative but to keep finding subtle ways to cut costs.

8. Such laborsaving innovations seem trivial. But such prosaic innovations are the very stuff of economic progress under capitalism.

9. The only evolutionary certainty is that people working in the grocery industry today will continue to find new ways to improve performance while shaving tiny increments off the cost of doing business.

10. There is no end to the process of recycling today's profits into the technology that will define the structure of tomorrow's economy. The evolution of capitalism will continue as long as business organizations keep searching for ways to cut costs and differentiate themselves from competitors.