Ever since 1911, when Frederick Winslow Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management, businesses have pursued efficiency with a focus that borders on obsession. Nearly a century later, CEOs and management authors are still writing hymns of praise to the benefits of executing operations more efficiently than the competition does. This fixation has yielded some highly precise approaches to managing modern institutions and technology. Although these practices vary in their details, they share a common foundation: pushing resources into the areas of greatest anticipated need. In today's business world, highly automated factories or service platforms, supported by rigid and standardized processes, deliver resources to the right places at predetermined times. In information technology, massive enterprise applications specify activities to be performed and resources to be deployed to meet anticipated demand. In education, standard curricula expose students to codified information through a predetermined sequence of experiences—an approach many corporations follow in their employee training.

In each of these examples—and in "push" systems generally—the core assumptions are that companies and other institutions can anticipate demand and that mobilizing scarce resources in previously specified ways is the most efficient and reliable way to meet it. But the efficiency of push systems...