An illustration I use to get people to understand it is this: I'll ask major corporate audiences: Why don't you just take all your traditional beliefs about organizations, and apply them to the neurons in your brain?
Dee Hock

An organization, no matter how well designed, is only as good as the people who live and work in it.
Dee Hock

As I like to say, the entire collective memory of the species - that means all known and recorded information - is going to be just a few keystrokes away in a matter of years.
Dee Hock

Clean out a corner of your mind and creativity will instantly fill it.
Dee Hock

Every mind is a room packed with archaic furniture.
Dee Hock

Experience is easy to provide and quickly put to good use by people with all the other qualities.
Dee Hock

If you don't understand that you work for your mislabeled 'subordinates,' then you know nothing of leadership. You know only tyranny.
Dee Hock

If you go back to the first single-cell form of life, it clearly possessed the capacity to receive, to utilize, to store, to transform, and to transmit information.
Dee Hock

If you look to lead, invest at least 40% of your time managing yourself - your ethics, character, principles, purpose, motivation, and conduct. Invest at least 30% managing those with authority over you, and 15% managing your peers.
Dee Hock

If you're in such a position of power and your ego is such that this is not possible, then its essential to have a small cadre of very bright, committed people who are questioning, exploring and understanding these emerging concepts.
Dee Hock


It is essential to employ, trust, and reward those whose perspective, ability, and judgment are radically different from yours. It is also rare, for it requires uncommon humility, tolerance, and wisdom.
Dee Hock

It won't do away with hierarchy totally, but the principal leader will be the person who most exemplifies the kind of organization and behavior required who is best able to create the conditions such organizations require.
Dee Hock

Language was a huge expansion of that capacity to deal with information.
Dee Hock

Lead yourself, lead your superiors, lead your peers, and free your people to do the same. All else is trivia.
Dee Hock

Make a careful list of all things done to you that you abhorred. Don't do them to others, ever.
Dee Hock

Make an empty space in any corner of your mind, and creativity will instantly fill it.
Dee Hock

Make another list of things done for you that you loved. Do them for others, always.
Dee Hock

Money motivates neither the best people, nor the best in people. It can move the body and influence the mind, but it cannot touch the heart or move the spirit; that is reserved for belief, principle, and morality.
Dee Hock

Preserve substance; modify form; know the difference.
Dee Hock

Substance is enduring, form is ephemeral.
Dee Hock