I’m not sure effective is the right word for my message today but let’s start.

One key objective for any business is to have an effective organisation to either get profitable or maximize profitability.

Being effective. What does that mean? I take help from the concept of Lean Manufacturing, or Lean Production.

Essentially lean is centered on preserving value with less work

So when we talk business – things like this is very evident – ofcourse we must strive to preserve value to the greatest extent but with as little work as possible. Even when we talk individual – at least I for one think daily in terms of how I can be more effective. Why? Because I want to preserve value (energy) with less work. It’s not that I am lazy. I just want to maximize my days. Maximize my life.

Let’s talk society. How is society at large contributing to preserving value with less work? Perhaps a very open and fuzzy question, but it’s because I am just starting to reflect on it.

I’ll give you an example: The process of collecting personal information. Today I send my personal information to multiple institutions or businesses asking or needing my information. Unless we’re talking about bank accounts and pincodes, most of my personal information is actually not so personal in the sense of me needing to keep it a secret. Not to anyone really. And it should be the same for everyone? We could for example have a standard of what info is available and by that seriously improving this continuous process.

Mr John McCarthy has passed away and leaves a huge Artificial Intelligence community in mourning. John McCarthy created the programming language LISP and coined the term “Artificial Intelligence” 1956. What he also did was to strive for a great society. On his websitehe writes:

Here’s a standard curriculum vita.

Remark: Ideally one would put all the information that one considers public about oneself on a page like this. When asked to fill out a form, one would simply put down the URL in place of any information that is on the page and tell the recipient of the form to just look it up.

One step beyond that is that any program needing this public information would just take it from the somewhat standardized web page.

More precisely, here’s a proposed new civil right. No Government agency, educational institution or business should ever be able to require anyone to supply anew information that the institution already has or is publicly available.

Mr John McCarthy was a genius.