The tension that Buckley is trying to manage—between innovation and efficiency—is one that’s bedeviling CEOs everywhere. There is no doubt that the application of lean and mean work processes at thousands of companies, often through programs with obscure-sounding names such as ISO 9000 and Total Quality Management, has been one of the most important business trends of past decades. But as once-bloated U.S. manufacturers have shaped up and become profitable global competitors, the onus shifts to growth and innovation, especially in today’s idea-based, design-obsessed economy. While process excellence demands precision, consistency, and repetition, innovation calls for variation, failure, and serendipity.

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“We want to make Facebook into something of an operating system so you can run full applications,” Zuckerberg told me, saying it would be analogous to the platform that Microsoft Windows provides for developers. Outsiders can now develop Internet services on Facebook’s infrastructure, he explains, that will have full access to all its members. Just as it is when someone writes a program for Windows, programmers won’t need any permission from Facebook or any special business relationship with the company.

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Contrarian insight: The real money’s in the shovels, not the gold.

Legacy: The first publicist of the California Gold Rush bought every shovel in San Francisco before he ran through the street shouting, “Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!” Cisco Systems has become a $32B company using a similar strategy, selling the routers and switches that form the backbone of the Internet

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