Seely Quotes & Sayings

The harder you fight to hold on to specific assumptions, the more likely there's gold in letting go of them. — John Seely Brown

Processes don't do work, people do — John Seely Brown

John Seely Brown, the former director of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, once said, The essence of being human involves asking questions, not answering them. — Eric Schmidt

Practice provides the rails on which knowledge flows. — John Seely Brown

We are working on creating self-describing, self-organizing, self-diagnosing and self-repairing networks. — John Seely Brown

Pick up a grain a day and add to your heap. You will soon learn, by happy experience, the power of littles as applied to intellectual processes and gains. — John Seely Hart

If you can design the physical space, the social space, and the information space together to enhance collaborative learning, then that whole milieu turns into a learning technology. — John Seely Brown

And now I've got to explain the smell that was in there before I went in there. Does that ever happen to you? It's not your fault. You've held your breath, you just wanna get out, and now you open the door and you have to explain, 'Oh! Listen, there's an odor in there and I didn't do it. It's bad. — Ellen DeGeneres

The locus of corporate innovations has been product development. But in times of rapid and unpredictable change, the creation of individual products becomes less important than the creation of a general organizational aptitude for innovation. — John Seely Brown

With Graham Greene life is a precious, perpetual, snot-sodden whinge. — John Crowley

This is the point where the knowing, irony-infused author laughs along with his readers about his time among the aphorisms, how he was once so gullible and needy that he drank deeply of such weak and fruity Kool-Aid. That's some other book. Slogans saved my life. All of them
the dumb ones, the preachy ones, the imperatives, the cliches, the injunctives, the gooey, Godly ones, the shameless, witless ones. — David Carr

Math can explain the reason there's one out of four chance that I'd have blue eyes. But it doesn't explain why me. — Heidi W. Durrow

It is not just the Great Works of mankind that make a culture. It is the daily things, like what people eat and how they serve it. — Laurie Colwin

For me, the concept of design is more than object-oriented; it encompasses the design of processes, systems and institutions as well. Increasingly, we need to think about designing the types of institutions we need to get things done in this rapidly accelerating world. — John Seely Brown

The most important invention that will come out of the corporate research lab in the future will be the corporation itself. — John Seely Brown

People need to know more than what a piece of information means. They also need to know how the information matters. — John Seely Brown

She wanted to remind him, whether his family was there or not. She wanted. And wanted. And endured in her wanting: the damp seat, the dry chicken, more champagne, the headache the champagne brought, the midges, the chat, his failure, no refusal, to look, look at me, I caused a thunderstorm with my passion and I sit here shaking under my skin and you don't notice because you're trying so hard not to notice, but all the people at the table there are really only you and me and you know it, the air is charged with it, it's a heat, a hot wind, and Marina and Seely are a sham next to it, Annabel ceases to exist, is simply obliterated in the gale of it, this isn't a fantasy, not my imagination, I can tell by the way you lift your fork, by the set of your jaw, by that sixth cigarette you are smoking me, or would if you could; but how long can we sustain it, how long till eruption, till the storm returns again and they can all see what it is, what it really is? — Claire Messud

We can't help who we love, Maverick," he — K.L. Kreig

It's never enough to just tell people about some new insight. Rather, you have to get them to experience it a way that evokes its power and possibility. Instead of pouring knowledge into people's heads, you need to help them grind anew set of eyeglasses so they can see the world in a new way. — John Seely Brown

The job of leadership today is not just to make money, it's to make meaning. — John Seely Brown

If you're going to love someone or something then don't be a slow leaking faucet
be a hurricane. — Shannon L. Alder

It's been said that if NASA wanted to go to the moon again, it would have to start from scratch, having lost not the data, but the human expertise that took it there the last time. — John Seely Brown

Conversation is a catalyst for innovation — John Seely Brown