The innovator's proviso

Reinventing the wheel sure seems fun, but really it’s best only used if your redesign is astonishingly(!) better.

Example: If you’re going to reinvent how we get from point A to point B, there’s not a high enough ROI to justify repaving our roads with a more viscous asphalt.

But creating the infrastructure for nation-wide, eco-friendly, pressurized-capsule-freight-transportation (that goes over six times the speed of the next best alternative)…that’s next-gen stuff, and probably worth more than the cost of transformation.

The moral: If you can improve on what is with a radically better alternative, by all means change it for the better. Just don’t waste time and money solving problems that don’t need fixing.