The Inside Track: People, Ideas, & Stories shaping how we work, live, and build the future.

Why it matters: The biggest technological breakthrough of the last 300 years wasn't built by a genius. It was built by thousands of people you've never heard of, making fixes so small nobody wrote them down.

The big picture: Big breakthroughs don't come from genius. They come from people who keep showing up and making things slightly less broken than they were yesterday.

Between the lines: Most teams reward the big launch and ignore the small fix. That's backwards. The small fix is where all the progress is.

The question: What are you tinkering with right now?

In 1765, a Scottish instrument maker named James Watt sat down with a broken model of a steam engine at the University of Glasgow.

His job was simple: fix the thing.

But the more he studied it, the more a specific problem nagged at him. Every cycle, the engine heated a cylinder full of steam, then flooded it with cold water to create a vacuum. Heat it. Cool it. Heat it. Cool it. Over and over — wasting enormous amounts of energy just getting the metal back up to temperature.

Watt didn't have a flash of genius in that moment. What he had was a thermometer, a stubborn streak, and the hands-on instinct of someone who'd spent years making precision instruments for a living. He measured exactly how much steam was being wasted. He tried fix after fix. Most of them didn't work. He experimented for weeks.

And only after that long, unglamorous chain of failed attempts did the insight finally land: stop cooling the cylinder altogether. Move the condensation into a separate vessel. Keep the hot part hot and the cold part cold.

That single change — the separate condenser — is one of the most important engineering breakthroughs in human history.

But here's the part that matters.

William Rosen, in his book The Most Powerful Idea in the World, uses this story to make a blunt point: it wasn't a eureka moment. It was a long chain of practical experiments, failed attempts, and small improvements — until one change finally unlocked the next wave.

It was tinkering.

And the steam engine's entire history is that story on repeat.

Here's the distinction that changed how I think about building things.

We celebrate invention — the brand-new, never-before-seen breakthrough. But Rosen argues the Industrial Revolution wasn't driven by invention. It was driven by improvement. Making machines cheaper. Safer. Smaller. More reliable. Easier to maintain. Not creating something from nothing, but taking something that barely worked and grinding it into something that changed the world.

Thomas Newcomen's original engine is the perfect case. It was loud. It was crude. It burned through coal like a furnace with the flu. By modern standards, it was embarrassingly inefficient.

But it did one thing that mattered: it pumped water out of a flooded mine, on its own, without stopping.

It was useful. And in the real world, useful beats perfect every time.

Once that engine was out in the field, something interesting happened. Operators noticed where it stuck. Repairmen saw where it leaked. Foremen tracked where it broke down. Their fixes became the next design revision. Each version was a little less terrible than the last.

Watt didn't invent the steam engine. He improved it. And he was building on Newcomen. And Newcomen was building on Thomas Savery. And Savery was influenced by Denis Papin's experiments with steam pressure across the English Channel.

No single person built this thing. The engine was a relay race, not a solo act.

Here's the other thing Rosen drives home: look at who actually did the improving.

It wasn't the professors.

The breakthroughs came from skilled mechanics, instrument makers, and shop-floor problem solvers — people who could turn ideas into working metal. The feedback loop ran through the factory, not the lecture hall.

John Wilkinson was a cannon borer. He figured out how to bore cylinders accurately enough for Watt's engine to actually function. Henry Maudslay was a toolmaker who came from the shop floor — no money, no prestige — and pioneered precision machining. His leadscrew let you cut metal with accuracy that hadn't existed before. Matthew Murray's D-valve. Richard Trevithick's fusible plug. Names and parts that most people have never heard of.

But without them, there's no locomotive. There's no factory. There's no Industrial Revolution.

And it wasn't just steam. The same pattern played out in textiles. Richard Arkwright and Edmund Cartwright followed the exact same playbook — taking spinning and weaving machines that sort of worked and making them work better through relentless, hands-on refinement. In transport, incremental improvements to power transmission and rail eventually produced the Rocket, the locomotive that proved steam could move people and freight, not just pump water.

The common thread across all of it: the people closest to the work — the ones who felt the machines vibrate, who heard the valves stick, who watched the seals fail — were the ones who knew what to fix next.

Feedback from the shop floor drove the entire cycle.

It's tempting to hear the word "tinkering" and picture someone blindly messing around in a garage. That's not what the book describes.

The tinkering that drove the Industrial Revolution was built on better tools, tighter tolerances, and repeatable parts. It was learning by making — but making with measurement.

Precision in metalworking and machine tools let people make tighter fits and reproducible components. That meant you could test a change, measure the result, and keep what worked — rather than relying on one-off hacks that couldn't be replicated.

Watt's separate condenser was a beautiful idea on paper. But it would have stayed on paper forever if Wilkinson hadn't figured out how to bore a cylinder to within a fraction of an inch. The idea needed the tooling to become real.

And then it fed itself. Better tools enabled better tinkering. Better tinkering demanded better tools. The cycle compounded.

Skills didn't stay locked in one workshop. They spread through apprenticeships, informal circles, and what amounted to an 18th-century open-source network.

A technique developed in one trade would migrate to another. A fix discovered in a mine in Cornwall would show up in a textile mill in Manchester. Practical knowledge traveled fast once people could see and copy what worked.

Watt himself is the best example of this cross-pollination. He wasn't an engine builder. He was an instrument maker — a guy who made scientific tools. But that sideways glance from one craft into another produced the single biggest leap in steam technology of the century.

The breakthroughs in iron smelting came from Shropshire metalworkers, not academics. A cannon borer made the precision engine possible. A toolmaker from the shop floor made mass production repeatable.

This is convergence before anyone had a word for it. Ideas migrating from one lane to another, carried by people who didn't know they were supposed to stay in their own.

So if the steam engine wasn't the product of a single genius, why did it happen in 18th-century Britain and not somewhere else?

China had known about steam for centuries. The Romans used water power. France had brilliant scientists.

Why England? Why then?

Rosen's answer is deceptively simple: because England let people own their ideas.

The patent system — shaped by legal thinkers like Edward Coke and philosophers like John Locke — didn't just protect inventions. It created a market for improvements. It attracted investment. And it pushed people to design around each other's claims, which often produced even more tinkering in the process.

Before the patent system, invention was a hobby of the idle rich. After it, invention became an opportunity for anyone with a good idea and the willingness to get their hands dirty. A craftsman, a blacksmith's apprentice, a guy who sold tools — any of them could build something, protect it, and profit from it.

Cheap coal and abundant iron didn't automatically create progress. But they made certain kinds of tinkering pay off — so more people did it. The infrastructure lowered the cost of experimentation. The patent system raised the reward. Between the two, you got a flywheel: useful tweaks got copied, funded, and improved again. One improvement attracted investors, whose capital funded the next round of tinkering, which produced the next improvement.

That's the "most powerful idea" in Rosen's title. Not the engine. The legal and cultural framework that made the engine possible. The idea that your idea belongs to you.

Here's the concept I keep coming back to.

If you plot human advancement on a graph, the line is basically flat for ten thousand years — and then, in the 18th century, it shoots straight up. What changed wasn't one invention. It was the fact that small improvements started to compound.

A 1% improvement repeated thousands of times is what changes the world.

Rosen treats tinkering as a compounding process, not a single moment. Newcomen's engine was crude. Watt's was efficient. Boulton scaled and commercialized it. Trevithick made it mobile. Each generation inherited the last one's work and pushed it a little further.

Tinker, measure, rebuild, repeat.

The increments were usually very small. But they stacked.

That's the thing about compounding: it's invisible until it's not. For decades, the improvements were marginal — a better seal, a more precise bore, a valve that stuck slightly less. Nobody was writing headlines about it.

And then one day the world had railroads and factories and the entire structure of civilization had changed.

Everything above is a nice history lesson if it stays in the 1700s. It's not supposed to stay there. The patterns Rosen identifies — rewarding small improvements, listening to the people closest to the work, cross-pollinating between disciplines, funding cheap experiments, and letting gains compound — are operating principles. They work in a team of five and they work in a company of five thousand.

The patent system worked because it rewarded small improvements, not just big inventions. Most organizations do the opposite. Promotions, bonuses, all-hands shoutouts, OKRs — they're almost always structured around launches, new products, big wins. Nobody gets promoted for reducing onboarding time by 8%. Nobody gets a bonus for cutting support tickets by 12% through a process tweak nobody noticed.

If that's your system, you've accidentally built an organization that punishes tinkering. You're 18th-century France: plenty of smart people, no reason for them to bother improving things.

If you lead a team: Audit how your people get recognized. Then add a mechanism — a standup category, a Slack channel, a monthly callout — that specifically celebrates incremental improvements. Make "I made this existing thing 5% better" carry the same weight as "I shipped something new." The moment people see that small fixes get noticed, you'll be shocked how many start appearing.

If you're on the team: Don't wait for the system to change. Start keeping a running log of every improvement you make, no matter how small. When review season comes, don't just list your projects — list the things you made better that nobody asked you to fix. That log is your proof that you think like a builder, not just an executor. It's the single most underused move in career development.

The steam engine improved because the mechanic's fix became the next design revision. The person who felt the valve stick was the person whose feedback mattered most.

In most organizations, that loop is broken. The customer support rep who hears the same complaint 40 times a week doesn't have a direct line to the product team. The field sales rep who knows exactly why deals die in stage three never talks to the people designing the sales process. The junior associate who processes the actual paperwork sees the bottleneck that the partners don't.

If you lead a team: Identify the three people in your organization who are closest to where things actually break — your support lead, your ops manager, your most experienced frontline IC. Set up a recurring 30-minute meeting with each of them. One agenda item: "What's broken that nobody's fixing?" Then give them a small budget or clear authority to run fixes without an approval chain. That's the Newcomen-to-Watt pipeline. That's where your next leap is hiding.

If you're on the team: You probably already know what's broken. You see it every day. The problem is that nobody's asked, and there's no obvious place to say it. So create one. Write it up. A short email, a one-page doc, a message to your manager: "Here's what I keep running into, here's what I think would fix it, and here's what I'd need to test it." Most people sit on this knowledge for years. The ones who surface it — clearly, constructively, with a proposed fix — are the ones who get pulled into rooms they weren't in before.

Watt was an instrument maker, not an engine builder. A cannon borer made the precision engine possible. A Shropshire metalworker's iron technique ended up powering factories. None of these collisions were planned — they happened because 18th-century Britain had enough informal networks for knowledge to wander between trades.

You can't rely on that happening by accident.

If you lead a team: Once a quarter, put someone from one department into a problem session for a completely different department. Have your marketing person sit in on an engineering retro. Have your finance person shadow a customer call. Have your ops lead spend a day with sales. You're not looking for them to solve the problem. You're looking for the sideways question that nobody inside the silo would think to ask. That's the Watt move — the outsider's glance that sees what the specialist can't.

If you're on the team: Volunteer for the cross-functional project that nobody else wants. Sit in the meeting that isn't technically your department. Read the industry newsletter from an adjacent field, not just your own. The most valuable professionals aren't the deepest specialists — they're the people who can connect dots across two or three domains. Every time you step outside your lane, you're adding a tool to your kit that your peers don't have. That's asymmetric knowledge, and it compounds.

Newcomen's engine was embarrassing. It wasted most of its energy. It was loud and crude and inefficient. And it created the entire foundation for the Industrial Revolution — because it was in the field, doing useful work, generating real feedback.

Most teams over-engineer V1 because they're afraid of looking bad. They spend six months polishing something that could have been learning in the real world after six weeks.

If you lead a team: For your next product, feature, or initiative, define the "Newcomen version" — the crudest thing that solves the core problem and nothing else. Ship it. Then watch what breaks. That's your real roadmap. Not the one you planned in a conference room — the one your users write for you by showing you where it actually fails. Set the standard that V1 is supposed to be ugly. If it's not a little embarrassing, you probably waited too long.

If you're on the team: Apply this to your own work. The proposal doesn't need to be perfect before you share it. The side project doesn't need to be polished before you show someone. The idea doesn't need to be airtight before you test it. Get a crude version in front of real feedback as fast as possible. Every week you spend perfecting something in private is a week you could have been learning what actually needs to change. "Useful now" beats "perfect later" — that's not just a slogan, it's the operating principle behind the most consequential machine ever built.

The essay says "1% repeated a thousand times changes the world." That's not a metaphor. It's math.

A 1% weekly improvement to a conversion rate compounds to a 67% improvement over a year. A 1% weekly improvement to production efficiency, customer retention, content output, personal skill — same math. These aren't abstract inspiration. They're projections you can put in a spreadsheet and hold yourself accountable to.

If you lead a team: Pick one metric that matters to your business. Set a target of 1% improvement per week. Track it visibly. Don't chase a 50% jump next quarter — chase fifty 1% improvements between now and December. When the team can see the number moving, week after week, something shifts. They stop looking for the silver bullet and start looking for the next small fix. That's the culture change. That's the flywheel.

If you're on the team: Pick one skill, one output, one metric in your own work. Measure it. Improve it by 1% this week. Then again next week. You won't feel the difference for a month. You'll start to see it at three months. By six months, you'll be operating at a level that would have seemed unrealistic when you started. This is how people build careers that accelerate instead of plateau — not through one big break, but through relentless, quiet compounding that nobody notices until it's undeniable.

The essay explains how cheap coal and the patent system lowered the cost of experimentation. That's not just an economic history point. It's a resource allocation strategy.

Most organizations concentrate their resources into one or two big bets. The steam engine says: spread it out. Run twenty small experiments. Kill the ones that don't work. Double down on the ones that do.

If you lead a team: Take 10–15% of whatever you're currently spending on "innovation" or "new initiatives" and redistribute it as a rapid-experimentation fund. Small budgets. Short timelines. Clear kill criteria. The goal isn't to find a breakthrough — it's to create the conditions where breakthroughs find you. Lower the cost of trying. Raise the speed of learning. That's the environment that produced the steam engine, and it's the environment that produces the next version of whatever your team builds.

If you're on the team: You have more resources than you think. A lunch break. An evening. A weekend. A free tool. An email you could send. A conversation you could start. You don't need a budget to run a small experiment — you need a question and the willingness to test it. The people who changed the world with steam didn't wait for a grant. They had a problem in front of them and they started trying things. The cost of most career experiments is a few hours and a little ego. The cost of never running them is years you don't get back.

The steam engine didn't come from one mind. It came from a culture that rewarded curiosity, protected small ideas, and gave ordinary people a reason to solve hard problems. It took ironmongers and instrument makers and cannon borers and textile improvers — people who worked with their hands and noticed what the theorists missed. It took better tools, which enabled better tinkering, which demanded better tools. It took a system that turned problem-solving from a pastime into a profession.

And above all, it took compounding. Thousands of incremental improvements, stacking on top of each other, until the world looked completely different from the one those first tinkerers started in.

The history is interesting. The principle is useful. But the only part that matters is what you do with it.

Reward the small fix. Listen to the person closest to the problem. Cross-pollinate on purpose. Ship ugly. Compound relentlessly. Run cheap experiments.

That's the playbook. It worked in 1765. It works now.

What are you tinkering with this week?

You don't need to do all six. Pick the one that fits where you are right now and do it before Friday.

Nothing's out the door yet? Stop polishing. Figure out the roughest version of your thing that still does the job, and get it in front of someone this week. Not next quarter. This week. Newcomen's engine was a mess. It also started the Industrial Revolution.

Stuck and not sure why? Go talk to the person closest to where things actually break. Not your boss. Not the strategist. The person who does the work every day and sees what's failing. Ask them one question: "What's broken that nobody's fixing?" Then go fix one of those things.

Improving but it feels painfully slow? Pick one number that matters — close rate, output, response time, whatever. Measure it. Try to move it 1% this week. Then 1% next week. Don't look up for 90 days. Compounding doesn't feel like anything until it does.

Good people on your team but nothing's really changing? Look at what got celebrated last month. If it was all big launches and splashy wins, your people have no reason to make small things better. Start recognizing the person who quietly made an existing process faster, cheaper, or less annoying. That signal changes behavior faster than any strategy deck.

Everyone's solving the same problems in their own silo? Take one person from one department and put them in a room with a completely different department's problem. You're not looking for them to have the answer. You're looking for the question nobody inside that room would think to ask. That's the move that made the steam engine — an outsider's glance that sees what the specialist can't.

Ideas but no room to try them? You don't need a budget. You don't need permission. You need one small experiment you can run this week with what you already have. One email. One conversation. One rough prototype built on a Saturday morning. Make the cost of trying so low that there's no excuse not to.

Michael Wildes is the founder and CEO of Drive Phase Holding Company, a permanent-capital firm focused on building category-defining companies across business, media, aviation, and impact. After leaving a career as a professional pilot, he spent a year as Business Editor at FLYING Magazine writing 330+ articles on aviation's transformation. Now he builds permanent-capital companies focused on long-term trends that compound over decades. Based in Arlington, Virginia.

Connect: mikewildes.com | [email protected]