Leander Kahney at The Cult of Mac has published an interview with John Sculley, the much-maligned former CEO of Apple who drove the notoriously difficult Steve Jobs out of the company in the early 1990s. Rather than dwell on how he’s been wronged by the technology press, Sculley spent the interview identifying the ideas that make Jobs such a successful product innovator. I wanted to single out one idea, as it reflects one of my own deep biases:

3. No focus groups — “Steve said: ‘How can I possibly ask somebody what a graphics-based computer ought to be when they have no idea what a graphic based computer is? No one has ever seen one before.’ He believed that showing someone a calculator, for example, would not give them any indication as to where the computer was going to go because it was just too big a leap. ”

While it’s important to understand “best practices,” best practices won’t do you much good at the edge — at the point where you’re trying to do things that are genuinely new. This is the space where forward-looking, case-by-case judgment must come to the fore, as Amar Bhidé has argued. A dynamic market economy is always changing, and assumptions based on historical experience will often prove faulty. The ability to make good educated guesses about where consumers want to go, or where they might want to go given the right product and the right brand, is incredibly rare and, as Steve Jobs has demonstrated, incredibly valuable.

There are, of course, policymaking implications. Relying on past experience convinced regulators that a national housing meltdown couldn’t happen, for example. And it has convinced many bright people that the supposed return of Clinton-era tax rates will be economically harmless, as evidenced by the experience of the 1990s. These analysts could be right! But a forward-looking analysis suggests that there are important differences between then and now. Public policy decision-making, like business decision-making, suffers from a high level of causal density, as Jim Manzi has explained — it’s very hard to tease out exactly how policy choices impact, shape, or even gently nudge various outcomes.