TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Aaron Mahnke thinks we’re in a new age, unique from the information age:

In the Information Age, it was the knowledge workers who were the most valued. Programmers, IT people, the “computerati” as I call them. But today things have changed. Today we value the creators, the curators, the passionate. Think of the best leaders in business today. Steve Jobs and Johhny Ive come to mind as the pillars of Apple’s management. And at their core, they are artists, creators and story-tellers.

Fascinating point. You can think about this in two ways; one is in the products we use, and the second is in the businesses we start and how we run them.

In the twentieth century, for the most part, people focused on utility for the products they purchased. There were certainly exceptions, luxury cars being an obvious example, but in the mass market, people purchased things not because they had some emotional connection to them, but rather because they served some purpose. They bought more or less on functionality, and good design and construction were mostly secondary issues. This is inherently a commodity-focused world.

Increasingly, though, we demand that the products we buy have some soul to them. This means that the company did not merely make the product because consumers demanded it; rather, they make it because they believe in it—because they really believe it is better than everything else out there and that it will make our lives better in some way. We expect companies to build themselves into the product. This is an innovation-focused world.

This also affects how companies are managed. In the commodities-focused world, hard-working people who can drive costs down and improve existing features (“now with a faster processor!”) are desired; since consumers are primarily concerned with what features a product has, between two comparable products, price is the main consideration. This approach has a limited emphasis on real innovation, but substantial emphasis on increasing productivity and efficiency, and maximizing the potential of existing technology.

In the innovation-focused world, driving down costs and improving existing features is certainly important, but that’s not the main differentiator. In this world, what makes a company competitive is creating things their competitors haven’t even considered. Apple, for example, didn’t just create a phone with iPod functionality built in—a competitive advantage, but nothing truly unique. Instead, Apple created a whole new class of device and bet their future on it. No one could compete with it for a significant period of time, because no one else had anything near it.

This kind of business requires different people. Hard-working and productive, yes, but more importantly, they need to be smart people who think strategically and connect seemingly unrelated ideas. They can’t just be good workers; they need to be able to recognize that the phone market is at a historical juncture, where it will switch from feature phones to “smart,” computer-like phones, that this is an incredible growth market, and that their company is well-positioned to compete in it, because they (1) have significant experience with building small consumer electronics and computers, (2) have a genuine computer OS that can function well even on low-power devices, and (3) has a product ecosystem that no one else does. Someone at Apple realized that, and now Apple’s making more profit in the mobile phone business than Nokia.

Those are the kind of people that matter most in this new world, because seeing connections where no one else does is the way you can innovate best, and thus the way you can be successful. But just as important, it’s these kinds of people who are passionate about their ideas. They’re the kind of people that will explain to anyone who will listen why what they see (and what no one else does) is true, and they are the kind of people who will see it through from idea to shipping product. And when someone like that is directing a product, there’s soul in it. When you pick it up, you can see the thought that went into each and every part of it. You can feel their work. And that’s worth buying.