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"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."
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"Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course."
Author Name
Personal Development
"My theory on housework is, if the item doesn't multiply, smell, catch fire, or block the refrigerator door, let it be. No one else cares. Why should you?"
Author Name
Personal Development
"The best training is to play by ear: trial by fire."
Author Name
Personal Development
"But, when you have to resort to turntables, trick lights, flashing lights, fire and all that, you're actually saying, I need this because what I do is not all that together."
Author Name
Personal Development
"You know me, I've got to find some way to get a fresh fire."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Deliberate violence is more to be quenched than a fire."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Fire has impacted every part of our lives - without fire, there would be no shopping, right? - that's how the Internet will intrude on our lives, particularly our kids' lives."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Man's mind is not a container to be filled but rather a fire to be kindled."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?"
Author Name
Personal Development
"I remember when I did the pilot, and I though no network is going to want to do this. How could that happen? A half Chinese guy walking the old west that doesn't fire one gun and never gets on a horse?"
Author Name
Personal Development
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"The system continually has to make this choice: it can either continue to exploit a known process and make it more productive, or it can explore a new process at the cost of being less efficient."
Being
"Complexity that works is built up out of modules that work perfectly, layered one over the other."
Work
"The organization and the environment are in concert."
Environment
"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."
Help
"It has become evident that the primary lesson of the study of evolution is that all evolution is coevolution: every organism is evolving in tandem with the organisms around it."
Science
"The current understanding was that it was impossible to predict how something would evolve because it was a very turbulent environment full of things interacting with each other."
Environment
"We are infected by our own misunderstanding of how our own minds work."
Work
"Managing bottom-up change is its own art."
Art
"A brain is a society of very small, simple modules that cannot be said to be thinking, that are not smart in themselves. But when you have a network of them together, out of that arises a kind of smartness."
Society
"This is actually a very important principle that science is learning about large systems like evolution and that futurists are learning about anticipating human society: just because a future scenario is plausible doesn't mean we can get there from here."
Science
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