There's a lot of fantastic nuggets in there, that's for sure, but I have a nasty feeling that in a few years time this one will have become firmly entrenched in the vile lexicon of management wank-speak:
31. (Mo's Law of Evolutionary Development) You can't get to the moon by climbing successively taller trees.
I heard something similar from people who worked on Navy subs - an engineering assistant fresh out of college was told "you may have gotten partial credit in school, but a sailor at the bottom of the ocean doesn't care if you did your work partly right".
> (Mo's Law of Evolutionary Development) You can't get to the moon by climbing successively taller trees.
There's no gradual path to some goals. It's annoying beyond belief to only know something well enough to solve toy problems, and not have any way to see how you can extend your knowledge so you can solve non-toy problems.
I read it as the other way. Acknowledging that iterative improvements on fixed assumptions goes nowhere is quite liberating.
Perhaps I have been watching too much Gurren Lagann lately, but my corollary to rule 31 would be: if you are underground, you can only find sunlight by digging up.
Actually that image perfectly represents the concept. To get to the moon they had to abandon puller rockets (like the one in the image), and use pusher rockets instead. That isn't just a higher tree, that's completely re-imagining the way a rocket works.
So "higher trees" might be a good way to learn how to re-engineer the idea so that you can get to the moon.
God I started saying that one pretty early. I may have still been in college when I started saying it. Working while going to school is a very different experience than doing them in order.
Until 42, that was a buzzkill