All Up In Newton’s Business

Sir Isaac Newton: Scientist Mind, Rock Star Hair

Because the scientific method underpins how we quantify and manage businesses today, let’s look at what underpins scientific method. Here we find Sir Isaac Newton.

Oddly, Newton preached a kind of Incrementalism, in which “to explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. ‘Tis much better to do a little with certainty, and leave the rest for others that come after you, than to explain all things.” Talk about passing the buck. Or, more positively, talk about perpetuating a career field for subsequent centuries of philosophers and scientists. Maybe Newton was a businessman at heart, creating a new category with ideas…

Newton departed from Descartes by insisting that inquiry into the natural world be rooted in careful observation and inductive reasoning rather than working forward from metaphysical concerns. This is the backbone of statistics and other social research methods, the key ways businesses gather information to make decisions about what to do next.

His thought, featured in his Principa and evinced in his theories of motion, also became the underpinning framework for strategic business thinking – create theories and hypotheses, test them, analyze and then arrive at a conclusion (that informs action). Consider the first of his three laws of motion and the way it impacts modern business theory and practice:

The Law of Inertia: Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.

In a nutshell, this means there is a tendency for objects to keep doing what they’re doing, resisting changes in their state of motion.

Isn’t that exactly the point of the modern business organization? To create a reliable system (open or closed) that acculturates, enculturates and perpetuates itself? Why is it that so many companies have trouble innovating or effecting change? The law of inertia appears to provide a good explanation.

But is this really a description of a naturally occurring phenomenon, or are the Newtonian laws of science creating a restrictive framework – a self-fulfilling prophesy – for business cycles? Does inertia in some way dictate rather than explain the progression through corporate birth, maturity, need for change and then reinvention or death (or a fire sale to the highest bidder)?

It’s a case of questioning our assumptions: are there other ways in which statistical thought and quantification set the limits of our understanding of the business universe? Are we perceiving only select bandwidths of the true spectrums of business world using an outmoded viewfinder? Or is the education of business executives – steeped in the Newtonian influence over statistics and mathematics – creating psychological limitations on how they go about managing business?

Quantum theory was a reaction to the phenomena Newtonian physics couldn’t explain in the “hard” sciences. Let’s look there to see if Quantum mechanics has an answer for business.

The New Science of the Post-Newtonian Economy

For a change, I’d like to tell the CEOs out there what keeps me awake at night.

Almost 100 years after Einstein’s theory of relativity, why don’t you yet realize that Newtonian science — the underpinnings of “modern” business quantification and management — is not enough?

Would it take an economic meltdown the likes of which we’ve never seen before to do it? Put a check in that box.

We need a new science — Quantumnomics — that helps us understand all things beyond the mechanical business cycles — risk, greed, world unrest, techology, psychology, mindsets. A science that isn’t about knowability, but about navigating unknowables. In short, Quantum Mechanics applied to the Newtonian world of business.

Now we need to answer: what would this science look like? What should be studied? How should we prove our assertions?

I’m thinking, I’m thinking…