Art & Creativity Quote by John W. Thompson

You can practically hear the boardroom air-conditioning in this sentence: a future dressed up as process. John W. Thompson isn’t trying to inspire; he’s trying to reassure. The intent is managerial and strategic at once: promise “state of the art” progress while framing it as a disciplined, almost inevitable evolution of existing assets. The key move is the pivot from “advance the state of the art” (a flattering, innovation-coded phrase) to “take information that we have” (a reminder that the real advantage is already owned). Innovation becomes less about invention than extraction.

The subtext is a familiar late-enterprise logic: data is the raw material, automation is the product, and “response data bases” are the quiet treasure chest. Thompson’s language turns human expertise into a pipeline: collect responses, store them, let them “drive” future behavior. The passive, technocratic phrasing softens what is actually a transfer of agency from people to systems. “Automated response” sounds efficient; it also implies fewer discretionary decisions, less interpretive work, and more pre-approved outcomes.

Context matters here: this is the rhetoric of companies selling security, software, or services at scale, where trust is currency and customers want both speed and certainty. Thompson signals modernity without making risky promises about breakthroughs. “Some of our products” is the corporate hedging clause, keeping the vision broad enough to excite investors but narrow enough to avoid accountability. The sentence is a roadmap for how institutions learn now: not by understanding, but by accumulating, codifying, and replaying.