Kevin Kelly quotes:

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.

In 2007, Stanford Business School Advisory committee asserted that self awareness was the most important attribute a leader should develop. The challenge for the modern entrepreneur is to take that path.

Each system is trying to anticipate change in the environment.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

The great advance of personal computers was not the computing power per se but the fact that it brought it right to your face, that you had control over it, that were confronted with it and could steer it.

Much of outcomes research is a systematic attempt to exploit what is known and make it better.

But in a turbulent environment the change is so widespread that it just routes around any kind of central authority. So it is best to manage the bottom-up change rather than try to institute it from the top down.

Changing things from the top down works when things are stable.

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

The most interesting thing about change in the environment is that for the most part the environment isn't changing.

We are infected by our own misunderstanding of how our own minds work.

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.

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.

A single thread of self generation ties the cosmos, the bios, and the technos together into one creation. Humans are not the culmination of this trajectory but an intermediary, smack in the middle between the born and the made... The arc of complexity and open-ended creation in the last four billion years is nothing compared to what lies ahead.

It's more along the lines of raising a child: we train the system to a certain range of behaviors that we find most useful. But then we let it go, because we don't want to have to be babysitting it the whole time.

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.

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

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

Life is the ultimate technology. Machine technology is a temporary surrogate for life technology. As we improve our machines they will become more organic, more biological, more like life, because life is the best technology for living.

The organization and the environment are in concert.

The daily grinding of evolution, as accelerated by technology, churns out more and more complex organisms, with higher rates of energy use, and with increasing specialization. Minds are the ideal way to express complexity, energy density, increasing specialization, expanding diversity -- all in one system. Mindedness is what evolution produces. Mindedness is what technology wants, too.

How do entrepreneurs survive their early failures? They don't view their failures as failures - they view these experiences as feedback, and a prelude to future success.

Humans are the reproductive organs of technology. We multiply manufactured artifacts and spread ideas and memes.

Extrapolated, technology wants what life wants:Increasing efficiencyIncreasing opportunityIncreasing emergenceIncreasing complexityIncreasing diversityIncreasing specializationIncreasing ubiquityIncreasing freedomIncreasing mutualismIncreasing beautyIncreasing sentienceIncreasing structureIncreasing evolvability

Our mission as humans is not only to discover our fullest selves in the technium, and to find full contentment, but to expand the possibilities for others. Greater technology will selfishly unleash our talents, but it will also unselfishly unleash others: our children, and all children to come.

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.

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.

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.

Willingness to learn is important, but willingness to act on what you learn is critical.

Organisms by their design are not made to adapt too far.

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.

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.

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.

Managing bottom-up change is its own art.

All imaginable futures are not equally possible.

In a broad systems sense, an organism's environment is indistinguishable from the organism itself.

Complexity that works is built up out of modules that work perfectly, layered one over the other.

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.

The way to build a complex system that works is to build it from very simple systems that work.

Species go extinct because there are historical contraints built into a given body or a given design.

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.

Basins of attraction, of self organization, show up as well in our complex social environment, in human organizations. Here again, while we cannot predict the result of any given input, we can say that it will likely fall within one of several areas.

The most certain thing you can say about the environment tomorrow is that it probably is going to be just like today, for the most part.

A complaint is a unique opportunity to strengthen the relationship with the client.

All these computers, all these handhelds, all these cell phones, all these laptops, all these servers - what we're getting out of all these connections is we're getting one machine. ... We're constructing a single, global machine.

Any believable prediction will be wrong. Any correct prediction will be unbelievable.

Attention deficit is no longer the supposed domain of Generation Y's who were brought up on a diet of social media and new technology. A recent study revealed 65 percent of 55-64 year olds surf, text and watch television simultaneously.

Clearly, we are self-made. We are the first technology. We are part inventor and part the invented

Each organism's environment, for the most part, consists of other organisms.

Everything that we are making, we are making more and more complex.

Evolution doesn't care about what makes sense; it cares about what works

Find the minimum amount of technology that will maximize your options.

I work in a "you scratch my back, and I'll stab yours" kind of a place.

In the context of your dreams,knowledge will always gives you enough reasons not to act. Act regardless and execute xceptionally

It is easy to make a dollar but it is hard to make a difference.

My major goal in business was to learn. I had legislated in my mind for failure the worse possible scenario was I would learn a lot regardless of the outcome. This goal was the foundation for success of the business. Peldi, Balsamiq

Nobody is as smart as everybody.

Our society lacks a feedback loop for controlling technology: a way to gauge intended effects from actual effects later on

Preserve the core, and let the rest flux. In their wonderful bestseller Built to Last, authors James Collins and Jerry Porras make a convincing argument that long-lived companies are able to thrive 50 years or more by retaining a very small heart of unchanging values, and then stimulating progress in everything else. At times "everything" includes changing the business the company operates in, migrating, say, from mining to insurance. Outside the core of values, nothing should be exempt from flux. Nothing.

Since a relationship involves two members investing in it, its value increases twice as fast as one's investment.

Singularity is the point at which "all the change in the last million years will be superseded by the change in the next five minutes."

Softball isn't just a game it's away of life.

Technological advances could allow us to see more clearly into our own lives.

Technology is all the accumulated usefulness that our minds invent.

Technology is anything that doesn't work yet.

Technology is anything that was invented after you were born.

The only factor becoming scarce in a world of abundance is human attention.

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

The smallest thought could not exist unless the entire universe and the laws of physics were in some way encouraging it.

The very long tail of the future is already here.

The young are always coming up with the good ideas; it's because they waste time. They follow their passion and do something, not looking for a payoff, just doing what's interesting.

There is nothing to be found in a beehive that is not submerged in a bee. And yet you can search a bee forever with cyclotron and fluoroscope, and you will never find the hive.

This is the culmination of a lot of people's vision. I think this is just another step towards making Central Michigan football among the elite programs in the Mid-American Conference.

We have to get better at believing the impossible.

We're just at the beginning of the beginning of all these kind of changes. There's a sense that all the big things have happened, but relatively speaking, nothing big has happened yet. In 20 years from now we'll look back and say, 'Well, nothing really happened in the last 20 years.'

What technology is really about is better ways to evolve. That is what we call an 'infinite game.' ... A finite game is played to win, and an infinite game is played to keep playing.

Why fear feedback? Why stigmatize failure in the workplace when it's bringing you closer to achieving your organizational goals.

Your greatest job is shedding what you don't have to do.

Humans are the reproductive organs of technology.

We are reaching deep within ourselves to adjust the master knob.

Well, here's what you can do, and that's about it.