Kevin Kelly Organization Quotations

When a system is in turbulence, the turbulence is not just out there in the environment, but is a part of the organization or organism that you are looking at.

The way that organizations and organisms anticipate the future is by taking signals from the past, most the time.

Managers tend to treat organizations as if they are infinitely plastic. They hire and fire, merge, downsize, terminate programs, add capacities. But there are limits to the shifts that organizations can absorb.

An organization is a set of relationships that are persistent over time.

It's generally much easier to kill an organization than to change it substantially.

One of the functions of an organization, of any organism, is to anticipate the future, so that those relationships can persist over time.

An organization's reason for being, like that of any organism, is to help the parts that are in relationship to each other, to be able to deal with change in the environment.

Organizations get invested into a particular product. And sometimes the best thing is to stop making that product, even though it's profitable, because it has optimized at a local peak.

An organization's intelligence is distributed to the point of being ubiquitous.

The organization and the environment are in concert.

We tend to think of the mind of an organization residing in the CEO and the organization's top managers, perhaps with the help of outside consultants that they call in. But that is not really how an organization thinks.

Wherever the Net arises, there arises also a rebel to resist human control...A network nurtures small failures in order that large failures don't happen as often. It is...fertile ground for learning, adaptation, and evolution...The only organization capable of unprejudiced growth, or unguided learning, is a network. All other topologies limit what can happen.

The only organization capable of unprejudiced growth, or unguided learning, is a network. All othertopologies limit what can happen