Empires of the Mind

Full Title

"The empires of the future are the empires of the mind." - Sir Winston Churchill

Context

• Winston Churchill had learned that physical domination of an empire in the future was not tenable and sought to create others based on shared experiences, like one of the English-Speaking People.
• Interestingly the US has created "The Five Eyes, often abbreviated as FVEY, an intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States."
• The struggle over ideas has eclipsed the struggle over land and capital stock in an Information Age.

Problems

• Having determine that ideas are more profitable than material objects, the manufacture of goods has been relegated to what used to be call "third-world countries". Also, lean manufacturing has wrung out the excess capacity and storage of intermediate products to the smallest extent possible with profit as the primary metric. Now when Supply Chain problems occur, there is no longer a surplus of goods in process to satisfy the demand.
• It has been learned over and over in industry after industry that premature optimization can cause many unexpected problems. Yet the desire for short term profits continues to push any excess out of the Supply Chain and Reliability suffers.