Progress doesn't abolish constraints. It moves them.
Entrepreneurship is the capacity to move with them.
AI will increase intelligence. One way to describe intelligence is as a way to create possibilities through understanding. Use this tool. Adopt or improve this process. Manage your supplier like this. Intelligence understands how best to approach any number of problems and opportunities.
But understanding has to be applied in order to create value. I can tell you how to change the production flow of your factory but you still have to do that to realize the potential. And you need to weigh that possibility against other changes you could make. Analysis that merely sits in a report does not change any outcomes. It has to be applied. And as we - and everyone with AI - are better able to generate more intelligence, more potentially useful changes, our ability to execute those plans, to exploit those possibilities will determine our success.
As you make progress, limits to more success shift. At one stage you need startup capital. At another level you need to hire the right people. At the next you need to find the right suppliers. And so on. Each new resource or plan gives you insights into where to focus next, which limit you now face and need to overcome on Monday when you come back in to work.
An entrepreneur is not a specialist who continues to focus on the supplier management. Or optimizing the factory layout. Or motivating and managing employees. An entrepreneur is good enough at all of these to move forward and address the issue and - even more importantly - move to the next and the next and the next constraint.
Jensen Huang, Nvidia's CEO, has created the most valuable company in the world by systematically doing just this. He continually talks about constraints and how they are shifting or have shifted. And he moves his attention and company resources to the next constraint, to address that.
Intelligence creates more possibilities. You know so much of what you might do. AI will amplify that. And then the limit shifts to your ability to move with the constraints within your company, your industry, the economy. A specialist, a knowledge worker, may be an expert in dealing with one issue, like factory flow or materials design. An entrepreneur moves like water through the various elements of the system, identifying the next place where the flow is halted or diverted and addressing that. The ultimate goal? To create a clear stream from possibility to outcomes, a flow of interlocking pieces of the system that can translate possibility into value the customer experiences.
