Dee Hock famous quotes

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

#Creativity #Mind

The essence of community, its heart and soul, is the non-monetary exchange of value; things we do and share because we care for others, and for the good of the place.
-- Dee Hock

#Heart #Essence #Community

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

#Moving #Heart #People

We are now at a point in time when the ability to receive, utilize, store, transform and transmit data - the lowest cognitive form - has expanded literally beyond comprehension. Understanding and wisdom are largely forgotten as we struggle under an avalanche of data and information.
-- Dee Hock

#Struggle #Data #Understanding

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?
-- Dee Hock

#Lying #Belief #Evoke

Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple stupid behavior.
-- Dee Hock

#Educational #Stupid #Intelligent

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

#Mind #Rooms #Furniture

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

#Dream #Determination #People

Never hire or promote in your own image. It is foolish to replicate your strength and idiotic to replicate your weakness. 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

#Business #Humility #Perspective

The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out. Every mind is a building filled with archaic furniture. Clean out a corner of your mind and creativity will instantly fill it.
-- Dee Hock

#Creativity #Meditation #Mind

The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out.
-- Dee Hock

#Business #Work #Learning

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

#Organization #People #Matter

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

#Motivation #Integrity #Understanding

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

#Motivation #Character #Over You

Substance is enduring, form is ephemeral.
-- Dee Hock

#Substance #Ephemeral #Form

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.
-- Dee Hock

#Motivation #Integrity #People

Throughout history, it took centuries for the habits of one culture to materially affect another. Now, that which becomes popular in one country can sweep through others within months.
-- Dee Hock

#Country #Culture #Months

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.
-- Dee Hock

#Community #Trying #Records

People are not "things" to be manipulated, labeled, boxed, bought, and sold. Above all else, they are not "human resources." They are entire human beings, containing the whole of the evolving universe, limitless until we start limiting them. We must examine the concept of leading and following with new eyes. We must examine the concept of superior and subordinate with increasing skepticism. We must examine the concept of management and labor with new beliefs. And we must examine the nature of organizations that demand such distinctions with an entirely different consciousness.
-- Dee Hock

#Eye #Organization #People

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

#Done #Lists #Careful

The prudent course is to make an investment in learning, testing and understanding, determine how the new concepts compare to how you now operate and thoughtfully determine how they apply to what you want to achieve in the future.
-- Dee Hock

#Understanding #Want #Prudent

You learn nothing form your successes except to think too much of yourself. It is from failure that all growth comes, provided you can recognize it, admit it, learn from it, rise above it, and then try again.
-- Dee Hock

#Success #Thinking #Growth

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

#People #Risk #Peers

It is far too late and things are far too bad for pessimism.
-- Dee Hock

#Success #Too Late #Pessimism

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.
-- Dee Hock

#Organization #Important #Principles

Failure is not to be feared. It is from failure that most growth comes.
-- Dee Hock

#Growth

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

#People #Ego #Understanding

We don't have to remain in this radically destructive mind-set and institutional-set. We can change, and the natural order of things could emerge in all of our societal organizations-government, commerce, religion-it's right there, waiting to happen. I often tell people that every mind is like a room in an old house, stuffed with very old furniture. Take any space in your mind and empty it of your old conceptions and new ones will rush in, good or bad. So change is more a getting rid of rather than an adding to or an acquiring.
-- Dee Hock

#Change #Government #Order

We are at the very point in time when a 400-year old age is dying and another is struggling to be born - a shifting of culture, science, society, and institutions enormously greater than the world has ever experienced. Ahead, the possibility of the regeneration of individuality, liberty, community and ethics such as the world has never know, and a harmony with nature, with one another, and with the divine intelligence such as the world has never dreamed.
-- Dee Hock

#Struggle #Years #Community

What will become compellingly important is absolute clarity of shared purpose and set of principles of conduct sort of institutional genetic code that every member of the organization understands in a common way, and with deep conviction.
-- Dee Hock

#Organization #Important #Way

With the advent of genetic engineering the time required for the evolution of new species may literally collapse.
-- Dee Hock

#Engineering #May #Evolution

The closest thing to a law of nature in business is that form has an affinity for expense, while substance has an affinity for income.
-- Dee Hock

#Law #Income #Substance

It is not making better people of others that management is about. It's about making a better person of self. Income, power, and titles have nothing to do with that.
-- Dee Hock

#Self #People #Titles

Leadership: Here is the heart and soul of the matter. If you look to lead, invest at least 30% managing those with authority over you, and 15% managing your peers. Use the remainder to induce those you 'work for' to understand and practice...lead yourself, lead your supervisors, lead your peers, and free your people to do the same. All else is trivia.
-- Dee Hock

#Heart #Practice #People

Making good judgments when one has complete data, facts, and knowledge is not leadership - it's bookkeeping
-- Dee Hock

#Data #Facts #Judgment

Control is not leadership; management is not leadership; leadership is leadership is leadership. If you seek to lead, invest at least 50% of your time leading yourself-your own purpose, ethics, principles, motivation, conduct. Invest at least 20% leading those with authority over you and 15% leading your peers. If you don't understand that you work for your mislabeled 'subordinates,' then you know nothing of leadership. You know only tyranny.
-- Dee Hock

#Motivation #Discipline #Over You

The most abundant, least used, and most abused resource in the world is human spirit and ingenuity.
-- Dee Hock

#Inspiration #World #Spirit

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

#Memories #Mean #Years

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

#People #Quality #Use

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

#Cells #Information #Firsts

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

#Organization #Leader #Hierarchy

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

#Expansion #Information #Language

Success follows those adept at preserving the substance of the past by clothing it in the forms of the future.
-- Dee Hock

#Past #Substance #Form

Life will never surrender its secrets to a yardstick.
-- Dee Hock

#Secret #Yardsticks #Surrender

Particularity and separability are infirmities of the mind, not characteristics of the universe.
-- Dee Hock

#Mind #Characteristics #Infirmity

Only fools worship their tools
-- Dee Hock

#Tools #Fool #Worship

If you think you can't, why think
-- Dee Hock

#Thinking

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

#Leadership #Tyranny