Kevin Kelly Quotes

I think there's always an adjustment when somebody new is runnings things, from the top down.

Companies have got to learn to eat change for breakfast.

Change is the norm; unless an organization sees that its task is to lead change, that organization will not survive.

I have been interested in phenomena involving complexity, diversity and evolution since I was a young boy.

Man and animals are in reality vehicles and conduits of food, tombs of animals, hostels of Death, coverings that consume, deriving life by the death of others.

Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.

A declining institution often experiences survival of the unfittest.

All is connected... no one thing can change by itself.

The scientific perspective of the world, especially the living world, inexorably impresses on us a dynamic picture of the world of entities and structures involved in continuous and incessant change and in process without ceasing.

In most organizations, change comes in only two flavors: trivial and traumatic. Review the history of the average organization and you'll discover long periods of incremental fiddling punctuated by occasional bouts of frantic, crisis-driven change.

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.

Managing bottom-up change is its own art.

Nature is an incredible cooperative. When things operate outside of that cooperative, they die off. It's a very simple rule that nature operates under.

We are embedded in a biological world and related to the organisms around us.

The best way to make change is to know how something works. If you're going to go build something or change whatever it is, if you don't know how it works and you're trying to go make a change in it, the first thing you're doing is you're spending time figuring out how it works. The same thing happens in organizations.

The way to understand how different species evolved is to think about the niches that they fill in an ecosystem - basically, how they make a living.

Once an organization has a strong sense of mission, leaders can focus on trying new things.

A long time ago, I became aware that many of us have a tendency to lump nature into simplistic categories, such as what we consider beautiful or ugly, important or unimportant. As human a thing as that is to do, I think it often leads us to misunderstand the respective roles of life forms and their interconnectedness.

We do as much harm holding onto programs and people past their natural life span as we do when we employ massive organizational air strikes. However, destroying comes at the end of life's cycle, not as a first response.

We've navigated a lot of change at Campbell's. The best thing for me to be able to do is to discuss that change with people.

You always have years when you go through transition and the side needs to be rebuilt. Or you have changes in terms of managers.

You have to seed internal disruptors. You need sources of internal disruption. They don't guarantee your survival, but you have got to try.

The world always changes, and teams go through evolutions.

As people in business know, if you just sit on your hands and don't progress with the changing environment, you won't reform and improve the existing relationships you have.

Change has to be fundamental to a company's culture, or there is no way it can survive.