top of page
.png){kind=small}
"Complexity that works is built up out of modules that work perfectly, layered one over the other."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Work quotes
"The job description, like most, used complicated words that made job-hopefuls hesitant to apply because it may be out of their range of capability."
"We are so used to working that not working is the new hard work."
"And yet, troublingly, there is one difference between 'labour' and other elements [raw materials, machinery] which conventional economics does not have a means to represent, or give weight to, but which is nevertheless unavoidably present in the world: the fact that labour feels pain."
"A salary is a tax employers pay, every four weeks, for putting an employee's dream on hold."
"Read the Bible. Work hard and honestly. And don't complain."
"Work is a vehicle with which man chases some fleeting destination called a full tummy."
"To some women, a job plays the role of a man. To most women, a man plays the role of a job."
"A specialist's mind is a slave to his specialization."
"When I worked at the W. M. Keck Observatory on the 13,796 feet very high altitude summit of Mauna Kea, we would routinely be engulfed in cold clouds of helium and nitrogen gas as we discharged it into the video camera systems daily. The management team never warned us that we were in a hazardous oxygen deprived environment during this activity that was known for its ability to adversely affect physical and mental health, and possibly bring on death by asphyxiation."
Explore more quotes by Kevin Kelly
"But in fact, when you try to model that on a computer you find that because of the very structure of matter and of the chemical bonds that are the basis of every organism, evolution is not random at all. It will tend to follow certain paths."
"In a broad systems sense, an organism's environment is indistinguishable from the organism itself."
"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."
"And they discovered something very interesting: when it comes to walking, most of the ant's thinking and decision-making is not in its brain at all. It's distributed. It's in its legs."
"But when you are embodied in a location, in a physical plant, in a set of people, and in a common history, that constrains your evolution and your ability to evolve in certain directions."
"The way that organizations and organisms anticipate the future is by taking signals from the past, most the 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."
"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."
"The nature of an innovation is that it will arise at a fringe where it can afford to become prevalent enough to establish its usefulness without being overwhelmed by the inertia of the orthodox system."
bottom of page