Today’s pioneers have embarked on a new frontier, some in search of riches, others in search of freedom, all in search of the new. Unlike the West of old this frontier is not one of place. It is a frontier of technologies, ideas, and values. The new pioneers celebrate individuality over conformity among their employees and customers alike. They deploy technology to distribute rather than consolidate authority and creativity. They compete through resilience instead of resistance, through adaptation instead of control. In a time of dizzying complexity and change, they realize that tightly drawn strategies become brittle while shared purpose endures. Capitalism, in short, is merging with humanism.

“Every act of imagination is the discovery of likenesses between two things which were thought unlike,” says the mathematician Jacob Bronowski in The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination. In a similar vein the humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow in 1964 defined invention as “a sudden integration of previously known bits of knowledge not yet suitably patterned.”

The proof is overwhelming. After spending two years watching research scientists conduct hundreds of experiments, Kevin Dunbar of McGill University in Montreal concluded that they “rely largely on analogy-the process of applying knowledge in one area to solve problems in another. In a study based on 630,000 U.S. patents, the Israel Institute of Technology asserted, “Innovation is essentially a process of coupling.” The highly itinerant Quakers accelerated the industrial revolution in England by skillfully applying the practices of one industry to another. For instance, they used coke, a high-energy fuel developed for: the brewing process, as a substitute for charcoal in the production of a new and stronger cast iron, without which the steam engine would never have taken off. By contrast, societies that centrally managed technological development, as the emperors of ancient China did, were highly stable but produced little material wealth.

Such bold advances often arise from nothing more than a heightened awareness of everyday living. “The innovator needs a very concrete vision of the new invention that she thinks will succeed before she can go about acquiring the necessary knowledge,” Flores says. This demands a sharp eye for “marginal practices,” he goes on, for spotting “something that someone else is doing, which is not central to us, and could even belong to another industry. As leaders, we need to fall in love with the cultivation of marginal practices, because this is where we see the future before it happens.”

Rowe Furniture—Forging a Process

After several weeks of plant-wide pandemonium [at the Rowe Furniture plant in West Virginia], the pieces at last fell into place, causing productivity and quality to shoot through the roof. Before long the factory was delivering custom-made goods to the consumer within thirty days; several months later the lead time had reached merely ten days, a stunning accomplishment in an industry accustomed to working on lead times of as long as six months. A culture of speed permeated the plant. When a technology specialist named Ken Potter wanted to install a state-of-the-art frame-cutting tool, he was stunned to win management’s instant approval. “It’s exciting to feel like you’re on the cutting edge,” he said as the new computer-controlled machine buzzed behind him. “In the past we were told to wait until someone else in the industry got one.”

The Rowe Furniture turnaround is meaningful on many levels. It dramatizes the range of initiative that people display when freed to do their best work. It reveals the creative power of human interaction. It suggests that efficiency is intrinsic; that people are naturally productive; that when inspired with vision, equipped with the right tools, and guided by information about their own performance, people will build on each other’s actions to a more efficient result than any single brain could design. In fact it’s rather like saying that being good in business calls on being good at being human.

Bolder Bank—Responding to Customers

Responding to customers may involve nothing more complex than pure human empathy. A banker I know in Colorado, Steve Bosley, built a tiny community institution called the Bank of Boulder into a regional powerhouse by projecting himself into the position of his customers. For one, Bosley preferred conducting his own banking in front of a human teller. When other banks began cutting back on drive-through teller windows in favor of ATM machines, he went the other way, expanding drive-through service with live tellers twenty-four hours a day. The service was not profitable in itself, but it generated an image of customer service that advertisements could never buy. Bosley launched a ten-kilometer run called the Bolder Boulder, which became one of the most popular in the world, drawing thousands of contestants into his bank branches every year for entry forms. He offered an extra quarter-point of interest on certain certificates of deposit when the University of Colorado won a big game, the kind of premium that cost very little but that drew massive deposits to the bank.

Once, running just a little behind schedule, Bosley found himself banging on the door of a dry cleaner at one minute past closing as a punk clerk inside the store silently shook his head and pointed to his watch; from that moment forward the Bank of Boulder never closed a branch door earlier than 5:39 P.M. Does this stuff pay off? Always a moneymaker, the Bank of Boulder was once ranked the most profitable community bank among the thousands in America.

Please don’t get me wrong; we’re not about to do away with money. What is changing is this: Money is mainly about accounting for individual transactions, and transactions are less important than relationships. Businesses are coming to realize that pushing around a lot of nickels and dimes is less useful than sustaining continuous collaborations.