One doesn't have to be a Marxist to be awed by the scale and success of early-20th-cent ury efforts to transform strong-willed human beings into docile employees.

Most of us do more than subsist. From the vantage point of our ancestors, we live lives of almost unimaginable ease. Here again, we have innovation to thank.

We owe our existence to innovation. Our species exists thanks to four billion years of genetic innovation.

What's true for churches is true for other institutions: the older and more organized they get, the less adaptable they become. That's why the most resilient things in our world - biological life, stock markets, the Internet - are loosely organized.

The fact is, society is made more hospitable by every individual who acts as if 'do unto others' really was a rule.

I live a half mile from the San Andreas fault - a fact that bubbles up into my consciousness every time some other part of the world experiences an earthquake. I sometimes wonder whether this subterranean sense of impending disaster is at least partly responsible for Silicon Valley's feverish, get-it-done-yesterday work norms.

Ideas that transform industries almost never come from inside those industries.