Dee Hock Quotes

“Accomplishment is one part commitment, one part ability, one part persistence, and one part circumstance. Circumstance we cannot control. The rest we might.”

“Adam was the first man, Eve the first woman, Satan the first consultant, and God the first entrepreneur.”

“All organizations are merely conceptual embodiments of a very old, very basic idea – the idea of community. They can be no more or less than the sum of the beliefs of the people drawn to them; of their character, judgements, acts and efforts.”

“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?”

“An organization's success has more to do with clarity of shared purpose, common principles and strength of belief in them than to assets, expertise, operating ability or management competence, important as they may be.”

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

“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.”

“Certainty is the place where questions go to die.”

“Children are easily taught, for they readily accept and believe lies told by their elders.”

“Clean out a corner of your mind and creativity will instantly fill it.”

“Community is composed of that which we don't attempt to measure, for which we keep no record and ask no recompense. Most are things we cannot measure no matter how hard we try.”

“Do not get angry, stubborn, and imperious. Get curious.”

“Don’t preach. Don’t teach. Don’t judge. Take a loved child by the hand and explore something fascinating together.”

“Education that gives priority to measurement rather than values, to efficiency rather than conscience, to information rather than ethics, provides no barrier to barbarity and violence. The Holocaust was perpetrated by a society of the most disciplined, highly educated people on earth.”

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

“Failure is not to be feared. It is from failure that most growth comes.”

“Far better than a precise plan is a clear sense of direction and compelling beliefs. And that lies within you. The question is, how do you evoke it?”

“For every difficult destination, there are thousands who stand aside and point the way for each one with courage and capacity to go before and show the way. The former are managers; the latter are leaders.”

“Given the right circumstances, from no more than dreams, determination, and the liberty to try, quite ordinary people consistently do extraordinary things”

“Gratitude is an emotion linked to the past. Love and contentment are linked to the moment. Avarice, ambition, and fear are linked to the future.”

“Great achievements would be few and far between without gross overestimation of the advantages and pleasures to be expected from them.”

“Great thought, great achievement, and great love have this in common: all involve great risk.”

“Heaven is purpose, principle, and people. Purgatory is paper and procedure. Hell is rules and regulations.”

“Hire and promote first on the basis of integrity; second, motivation; third, capacity; fourth, understanding; fifth, knowledge; and last and least, experience.”

“Hire and promote first on the basis of integrity; second, motivation; third, capacity; fourth, understanding; fifth, knowledge; and last and least, experience. Without integrity, motivation is dangerous; without motivation, capacity is impotent; without capacity, understanding is limited; without understanding, knowledge is meaningless; without knowledge, experience is blind. Experience is easy to provide and quickly put to good use by people with all the other qualities.”

“Ideas are so transcendent and alive compared to language that thousands of variations of each may be written without fully capturing any.”

“If a plethora of learning with a paucity of teaching is an approach to heaven and a plethora of teaching with a paucity of learning an approach to hell, the devil is hard at work in our educational systems.”

“If Satan were twins, one the Republican nominee for president, the other the nominee of the Democrats, and God ran as an independent, can there be any doubt who would come in last?”

“If we examine with clear eyes what we have done to the majority of people on earth, to the earth itself, and to all other forms of life thereon, we can only hope that there are no gods, or if there are, that they are not just.”

“If we pay great attention to the meaning of each moment of our unique life, the meaning of life in general will attend to itself.”