Self Organization Quotes & Sayings

Heritage Action is a self-interested fundraising organization led by a former Giuliani staffer who is not taking counsel from real conservatives ... It is a worthless organization to the conservative movement. I'll be the first to say that. — Geoff Davis

The Great Society went wrong for three major reasons. First, the self-organization the Johnson administration promoted turned out to be not the pooling of family and community resources into shops and businesses, but political pressure for government handouts. Second, the Great Society failed to anticipate the perverse side-effects of handing money out to people who have done nothing to earn it. Third, while the Great Society was showering money on the poor, the Supreme Court was with childlike glee smashing to bits traditional methods of maintaining law and order. — David Frum

Bifurcation occurs when the environment of a potentially chaotic system destabilizes due to stress over time, or to some inciting disturbance, explosive or catastrophic. When perturbation occurs, an attractor draws the trajectories of the disturbance and, at the point of transition, the system bifurcates and is propelled to a new order of self-organization, or else it disintegrates. — Wally Lamb

Thr principle of organization is built into nature. Chaos itself is self-organizing. Out of primordial disorder, stars find their orbit; rivers make their way to the sea. — Steven Pressfield

Iconography becomes even more revealing when processes or concepts, rather than objects, must be depicted for the constraint of a definite "thing" cedes directly to the imagination. How can we draw "evolution" or "social organization," not to mention the more mundane "digestion" or "self-interest," without portraying more of a mental structure than a physical reality? If we wish to trace the history of ideas, iconography becomes a candid camera trained upon the scholar's mind. — Stephen Jay Gould

Life is a series of choices and all we can do is make them. — Kamal Ravikant

I have never understood why they tried to start the revolution by taking over the universities. It should have been self-evident that the net result of success would be to close the universities but leave the nation unaffected
at least, for quite a long time. Nor do I find it easy to believe that the rebels, as intelligent as most of them were, seriously expected that they could keep the universities alive as corporate bodies, once they had control of them, if they made the fundamental alterations in organization and role that they proposed to. — Muriel Beadle

Some go to sleep in an organization and never wake up, and those who do wake up put them selves to sleep again by joining another. This acquisitive movement is called expansion of thought, progress. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Peering succeeds because it leverages self-organization - a style of production that works more effectively than hierarchical management for certain tasks. — Don Tapscott

The nature of business and government has been to build a surplus and self-perpetuate, but the Internet fosters and rewards smaller, more fluid organizations. — Esther Dyson

We should be exploring consciousness at the neural level and higher, where the arrow of causal analysis points up toward such principles as emergence and self-organization. — Michael Shermer

Nature normally hates power laws. In ordinary systems all quantities follow bell curves, and correlations decay rapidly, obeying exponential laws. But all that changes if the system is forced to undergo a phase transition. Then power laws emerge-nature's unmistakable sign that chaos is departing in favor of order. The theory of phase transitions told us loud and clear that the road from disorder to order is maintained by the powerful forces of self-organization and is paved by power laws. It told us that power laws are not just another way of characterizing a system's behavior. They are the patent signatures of self-organization in complex systems. — Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

People have a hard time accepting free-market economics for the same reason they have a hard time accepting evolution: it is counterintuitive. Life looks intelligently designed, so our natural inclination is to infer that there must be an intelligent designer
a God. Similarly, the economy looks designed, so our natural inclination is to infer that we need a designer
a government. In fact, emergence and complexity theory explains how the principles of self-organization and emergence cause complex systems to arise from simple systems without a top-down designer. — Michael Shermer

The organization of self, and all self-aligning principles would be those that I promote. — Saul Williams

Constructive criticism and self-criticism are extremely important for any revolutionary organization. Without them, people tend to drown in their mistakes, not learn from them. — Assata Shakur

Reliance is the ultimate measure of a team's or organization's culture. It's not 'Would I recommend a friend to work here?' It's 'Would this group of people put their ass on the line for me?' And 'Would I do the same for them? — Bill Jensen

The organization of the government itself is something which we ought to examine in a more self-conscious way - the Federal Reserve and the Treasury and the Securities and Exchange Commission. The mission that each of them has is mainly economic but should be informed by good organizational practices. — Oliver E. Williamson

The "self-driven" talent performance management is pursuing the digital way to run a purpose-driven organization. — Pearl Zhu

Recent works on the organization of advertising agencies in Britain and the US show that advertisers' self-understanding, expertise and practices are geared to the agencies' imperative for self-promotion in competitive markets (Cronin 2004; Soar 2000). Drawing on Bourdieu's observations on 'cultural intermediaries', Matthew Soar's (2000) research also shows that the first audience which advertising 'creatives' have in mind is themselves (see also Nixon 2003). — Roberta Sassatelli

Today, the witch theory of causality has fallen into disuse, with the exception of a few isolated pockets in Papua New Guinea, India, Nepal, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Ghana, Gambia, Tanzania, Kenya, or Sierra Leone, where "witches" are still burned to death. A 2002 World Health Organization study, for example, reported that every year more than 500 elderly women in Tanzania alone are killed for being "witches." In Nigeria, children by the thousands are being rounded up and torched as "witches," and in response the Nigerian government arrested a self-styled bishop named Okon Williams, who it accused of killing 110 such children. — Michael Shermer

Basins of attraction, of self organization, show up as well in our complex social environment, in human organizations. Here again, while we cannot predict the result of any given input, we can say that it will likely fall within one of several areas. — Kevin Kelly

Successful change can only come in the context of a clear understanding of what may never change, what the organization stands for. This is what Peter Drucker calls the organization's culture. Culture, as he uses the term, is that which cannot, will not, and must not change. We talk a lot about changing corporate culture, as though it were just another parameter of the organization, like an SIC code or address. But Drucker would have us look at culture entirely differently, as the bedrock upon which any constructive change will have to rest. If nothing is declared unchangeable, then the organization will resist all change. When there is no defining vision, the only way the organization can define itself is its stasis. Like the human creature that fights wildly to resist changing whatever it considers its identity, the corporate organism without vision will hold on to stasis as its only meaningful definition of self. — Tom DeMarco

If biologists have ignored self-organization, it is not because self-ordering is not pervasive and profound. It is because we biologists have yet to understand how to think about systems governed simultaneously by two sources of order, Yet who seeing the snowflake, who seeing simple lipid molecules cast adrift in water forming themselves into cell-like hollow lipid vesicles, who seeing the potential for the crystallization of life in swarms of reacting molecules, who seeing the stunning order for free in networks linking tens upon tens of thousands of variables, can fail to entertain a central thought: if ever we are to attain a final theory in biology, we will surely, surely have to understand the commingling of self-organization and selection. We will have to see that we are the natural expressions of a deeper order. Ultimately, we will discover in our creation myth that we are expected after all. — Stuart A. Kauffman

In these times of self-directed teams, empowered employees, and "boundaryless" organizations, your worth as an individual employee will also get measured by your work group's collective results. — Price Pritchett

Until now, human organization could only be based upon something negative which could not be conquered: SCARCITY, and something false: PERSONAL ACCOUNTABILITY... No wonder instead of producing stability, it produced the exact opposite.
The current human organization based upon dealing with the consequences of scarcity and being considered responsible for our individual characteristics which we could never have chosen (our nature, our nurture, our "soul", and all the choices they engender), will always lead to an irrational, hence unstable human organization causing perpetual conflicts, which is no organization at all.

Today, we have the luxury to initiate a rational self-organization based upon two positives:
-our HUMAN CONSENSUS; our common desires shared by all, and
-the SCIENTIFIC PROJECT to achieve them. — Haroutioun Bochnakian

We need to look at learning as the product of educational self-organization. It's not about making learning happen; it's about letting it happen. — Sugata Mitra

Learn from the puppies: Don't clutter where you live. — James L. Papandrea

Justice is always naive and self-confident; believing that it will immediately win once recognized. That is the reason why the forces of Justice are so poorly organized. On the other hand, the Evil is cynic, sly and fantastically organized. It never ever has the illusion of the ability to stand on its own feet and to win in a fair competition. That is why it is ready to use any kind of means without hesitation. And of course it does - under the banners of the most noble ideas. — Vladimir Bukovsky

In 1950, the [Gallup organization] asked high school kids, are you a very important person? Then 12 percent said yes. Asked again in 2005, 80 percent said, yes, I'm a very important person. — David Brooks

RNA viruses are limited to small genomes because their mutation rates are so high, and their mutation rates are so high because they're limited to small genomes. In fact, there's a fancy name for that bind: Eigen's paradox. Manfred Eigen is a German chemist, a Nobel winner, who has studied the chemical reactions that yield self-organization of longer molecules, a process that might lead to life. His paradox describes a size limit for such self-replicating molecules, beyond which their mutation rate gives them too many errors and they cease to replicate. They die out. RNA — David Quammen

What we colloquially call 'feeling bored' is just the mind, acting out of a self-preserving reflex, ejecting information it has despaired of knowing where to place. — Alain De Botton

Innovative ideas aren't generated in structured, authoritarian environments but in an adaptive culture based on the principles of self-organization and self-discipline. — Jim Highsmith

My word processor has spell-check capability, which lets me add words that didn't originally come in its comprehensive dictionary. It's interesting to see what words I had to add when writing this book: feedback, throughput, overshoot, self-organization, sustainability. — Donella H. Meadows

The lesson for progressive education is that it requires in an urgent degree, a degree more pressing than was incumbent upon former innovators, a philosophy of education based upon a philosophy of experience.
I remarked incidentally that the philosophy in question is, to paraphrase the saying of Lincoln about democracy, one of education of, by and for experience. No one of these words, of, by, or for, names anything which is self-evident. Each of them is a challenge to discover and put into operation a principle of order and organization which follows from understanding what educative experience signifies. — John Dewey

No society can last in conditions of anarchy. This is self-evident and I am in full agreement. But my aim is not the establishment of an anarchist society or the total destruction of the state. Here I differ from anarchists. I do not believe that it is possible to destroy the modern state. It is pure imagination to think that some day this power will be overthrown. From a pragmatic standpoint there is no chance of success. Furthermore, I do not believe that anarchist doctrine is the solution to the problem of organization in society and government. I do not think that if anarchism were to succeed we should have a better or more livable society. Hence I am not fighting for the triumph of this doctrine.
On the other hand, it seems to me that an anarchist attitude is the only one that is sufficiently radical in the face of a general statist system. — Jacques Ellul

If the process of life is about moving toward increased complexity and organization, a sort of sublime unfolding of greater and greater self-organizing systems, then we're actually doing pretty well. — Jason Silva

A company is a multidimensional system capable of growth, expansion, and self-regulation. It is, therefore, not a thing but a set of interacting forces. Any theory of organization must be capable of reflecting a company's many facets, its dynamism, and its basic orderliness. When company organization is reviewed, or when reorganizing a company, it must be loked upon as a whole, as a total system. — Albert Low

I wanted to create a forum, a loosely-structured cabal for the productive aliens, not misfits who need to depend on a group. After the re-organization, I was free to be more selective. I would much rather attract and lend support to those individuals who use their alienation - just as most leaders are usually different or distinctive in some way. Groups encourage dependence on beliefs and delusions to reinforce their omnipotence. Instead of fostering self-sufficiency and honest skepticism, I saw my group lapsing into blind belief and unhealthy anthropomorphism. That's not what I intended and I had to make moves to get the Church of Satan back on track. — Anton Szandor LaVey

We call ourselves a "capacity building" organization; self-motivated and self-initiated capacity building. For example, in 30 years, I don't think I have signed a check for the company. — Talal Abu-Ghazaleh

Nations are beginning to look to some vague organization, some nebulous course of humanity, to pay their bills and tell them what to do. This is not local self-government. It is not American. It is not the method which has made this country what it is. We can not maintain the western standard of civilization on that theory. If it is supported at all, it will have to be supported on the principle of individual responsibility. — Calvin Coolidge

Now shame is the only direct attack on conceit, the defensive image of oneself. Conceit is the common denominator of the Organization man, the hipster, and the juvenile delinquent-this is why I have been lumping them together. The conceited image of the self is usually not quite conscious, but it is instantly woundable; and people protect it with a conformity to their peers (oneself is superior). But the conceited groups differ in their methods of confirming and enhancing conceit: the juvenile delinquent by surly and mischievous destructiveness of the insulting privileged outgroup; the hipster by making fools of them with token performances; the Organization Man by status and salary. To his inner idol, they sacrifice the ingenuous exhibition and self-expression that could make them great, effective, or loved in the world; but that can also be shamed if it is mistaken, out of place, or disproportionate. — Paul Goodman

If you are a great news organization, you can't have the best obtainable version of the truth if your vision and your scale is reduced to a fraction of its former self. — Carl Bernstein

I have always been sure that if England were ever occupied its people would find the organization of underground cells an almost effortless means of self-expression. — Geoffrey Household

In ancient China, self-government was highly developed both in community life and in personal life. The custom of mutual protection and assistance was widespread. The organization and regulations of local self-government were clearly defined and strictly applied. Individual self-control was even more strongly emphasized. — Chiang Kai-shek

For a large corporation to be effective, it must be simple. For an organization to be simple, its people must have self-confidence and intellectual self-assurance. Insecure managers create complexity, real leaders do not clutter. — Jack Welch

The domination of capitalism globally depends today on the existence of a Chinese Communist party that gives delocalized capitalist enterprises cheap labour to lower prices and deprive workers of the rights of self-organization. — Jacques Ranciere

Corporations, in the name of efficiency, suppress variation by "getting all the ducks in line."To optimize productivity, they evolve highly refined and internally consistent operating systems. Payoff - results - as long as the music lasts. But ... all that streamlining and re-engineering limits diversity, suppresses self-organization ... and curtails a bottom up emergent response to disruptive change. — Richard Pascale

There seems to be a sense of balance or equilibrium that nature attempts to achieve with the usage of cycles, leading us to the concept of self-organization and spontaneous order. — Kat Lahr

The self-organizing and self-correcting imprint is on all aspects of reality. So not only was your body formed by this invisible hand, not only does your body continue to work by this invisible hand, but every aspect of your life - emotionally, physiologically, and spiritually - is also programmed to thrive, is also programmed for self-organization and self-correction. — Marianne Williamson

They maintain that only a dictatorship - their dictatorship, of course - can create the will of the people, while our answer to this is: No dictatorship can have any other aim but that of self-perpetuation, and it can beget only slavery in the people tolerating it; freedom can be created only by freedom, that is, by a universal rebellion on the part of the people and free organization of the toiling masses from the bottom up. — Mikhail Bakunin

A goal of education is. to assist growth toward greater complexity and integration and to assist in the process of self-organization - to modify individuals capacity to modify themselves. — Reuven Feuerstein

Nature is pretty good at networks, self-organizing systems. By contrast, social systems are top-down and hierarchical, from which we draw the basic assumption that organization and order can only come from centralism. — Nicholas Negroponte

The agile movement supports individuals and teams through dedication to the concepts of self-organization, self-discipline, egalitarianism, respect for individuals, and competency. "Agile" is a socio-technical movement driven by both the desire to create a particular work environment and the belief that an adaptive environment is critical to the goal of delivering innovative products to customers. — Jim Highsmith

When the ego dominates in organizations, even spiritual organizations, there is usually a big drama or upheaval of some kind, and self-destruction begins. — Eckhart Tolle

Only under conditions of revolutionary crises do you have the highest level of self-organization; this is the Soviet type of organization, which is to say, workers' councils, people's councils, call them what you want, popular committees. — Ernest Mandel

Not one example of significant self-generation or self-organization can be found in the entire realm of nature ... Without causation, nothing happens and without organization by an intelligent being, systems tend to lower and lower levels of complexity. — Hugh Ross

A self that is very robust, that has many, many levels of organization, from simple to complex, and that functions as a sort of witness to what is going on in our organisms. — Antonio Damasio

Fresh proof of the risks you run in writing about players, and of the advisability of not standing to leeward of their self-esteem when one has had the misfortune to wound it in the slightest degree. When you criticize a singer, you do not have his colleagues up in arms against you. Indeed, they generally feel that you have not been severe enough. But the virtuoso instrumentalist who belongs to a well-known musical organization always claims that in criticizing him you are 'insulting' the whole institution, and though the contention is absurd he sometimes succeeds in making the other players believe it. — Hector Berlioz

Trust emerges when we have a sense that another person or organization is driven by things other than their own self-gain. — Simon Sinek

Like resilience, self-organization is often sacrificed for purposes of short-term productivity and stability. Productivity and stability are the usual excuses for turning creative human beings into mechanical adjuncts to production processes. Or for narrowing the genetic variability of crop plants. Or for establishing bureaucracies and theories of knowledge that treat people as if they were only numbers. Self-organization — Donella H. Meadows

Perhaps it is the case that no organization or hierarchy can withstand the closest of scrutiny. Not even a smugly self-touted meritocracy. The success and persistence of utter fools everywhere is sad testament to that. — Ian C. Esslemont

Christianity has held back any further advances in human consciousness for the past thousand years. And for the past century it's been in direct conflict with its illegitimate offspring, Communism (again with a capital C). Both ask the individual to sacrifice his self-interest to the higher goals of the organization. (Which is okay by me as long as it's voluntary; but as soon as either becomes too big-and takes on that damned capital C-they stop asking for cooperation and start demanding it.) Any higher states of human enlightenment have been sacrificed between these two monoliths. — David Gerrold

This unique and deep meaning of power laws perhaps explains our excitement when we first spotted them on the Web. It wasn't only that they were unprecedented and unexpected in the context of networks. It was that they lifted complex networks out of the jungle of randomness where Erdos and Renyi had placed them forty years earlier and dropped them into the center of the colorful and conceptually rich arena of self-organization. Gazing at the power laws that our little search engine carried home from its journey, we caught a glimpse of a new and unsuspected order within networks, one that displayed an uncommon beauty and coherence. — Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

We may say, for instance, that nearly two-thirds of them cannot read or write. This but partially expresses the fact. They are ignorant of the world about them, of modern economic organization, of the function of government, of individual worth and possibilities, - of nearly all those things which slavery in self-defence had to keep them from learning. — W.E.B. Du Bois

In a tribal organization, even in time of peace, service to tribe or state predominates over all self seeking; in war, service for the tribe or state becomes supreme, and personal liberty is suspended. — Arthur Keith

Until we are willing to oppose all abortion
ALL ABORTION
then the Christian community will lack the true ethical high ground to oppose ANY ABORTIONS.
The minute we concede that there is any ground
even in the so-called case of rape, incest or the health of the mother
to make a decision to self-consciously and deliberately kill a child based on our puny, finite understanding of the facts, and a a cost-benefit analysis based on our pragmatic post-modern vision of utlilitarian ethics, we have conceded everything. We have abandoned biblical law and granted to Planned Parenthood the legitimacy of the core argument they have advanced since Margaret Sanger founded the organization
namely, that some circumstances of pregnancy are sufficiently uncomfortable or troubling that man has the right to play God and declare his own authority to take the life of an innocent, unborn baby. — Douglas W. Phillips

Nature is capable of building complex structures by processes of self-organization; simplicity begets complexity. — Victor J. Stenger

Glenn Hammond Curtiss was a bicycle enthusiast before he started building motorcycles. Although he only attended grammar school to the 8th grade, his interests motivated him to move on to greater things. In 1904, as a self-taught engineer, he began to manufacture engines for airships. During this time, Curtiss became known for having won a number of international air races and for making the first long-distance flight in the United States. On September 30, 1907, Curtiss was invited to join a non-profit pioneering research program named the "Aerial Experimental Association," founded under the leadership of Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, to develop flying machines. The organization was established having a fixed time period, which ended in March of 1909. During this time, the members produced several different aircraft in a cooperative, rather than a competitive, spirit. — Hank Bracker

Education is a work of self-organization by which man adapts himself to the conditions of life. — Maria Montessori

The social order will be all the more stable, the more it takes this fact into account and does not place in opposition personal interest and the interests of society as a whole, but rather seeks ways to bring them into fruitful harmony. In fact, where self-interest is violently suppressed, it is replaced by a burdensome system of bureaucratic control which dries up the wellsprings of initiative and creativity. When people think they possess the secret of a perfect social organization which makes evil impossible, they also think that they can use any means, including violence and deceit, in order to bring that organization into being. Politics then becomes a "secular religion" which operates under the illusion of creating paradise in this world. — Pope John Paul II

Self-organization is often sacrificed for purposes of short-term productivity and stability. Productivity and stability are the usual excuses for turning creative human beings into mechanical adjuncts to production processes. Or for narrowing the genetic variability of crop plants. Or for establishing bureaucracies and theories of knowledge that treat people as if they were only numbers. — Donella H. Meadows

I learned in my Ph.D. the discipline I needed to be successful. Most boxers are not that disciplined. They have talent, but the self-organization - the ability to schedule yourself and your priorities - is lacking. My studies were about the control of training on both the psychological and the physical side. — Wladimir Klitschko

Hell yeah! Twitter was proof that leaderless self-organizing systems could be true agents of change. — Biz Stone

Culture is the deeper level of basic assumptions and beliefs that are shared by members of an organization, that operate unconsciously and define in a basic 'taken for granted' fashion an organization's view of its self and its environment. — Edgar Schein

The primary value in value-based leadership is other-centredness - to be more concerned about other people and the organization than oneself. So in other words, the leader's job is to fulfil the agenda, the role, and the vision of the organization, not his personal agenda. All the great leaders in the world are other-centred. The self-centred leader will derail in due course But still, to be other centred is not enough. — John Ng

I emphasize self-esteem, self-confidence, and dignity, not as an ideal, but as a real test of community organization. Without leadership development, community organizations do not have staying power. — Paul Wellstone

Moved by insane delusion and reckless self-regard, the German people overturned the foundations on which we all lived and built. But the spokesmen of the French and British peoples have run the risk of completing the ruin, which Germany began, by a Peace which, if it is carried into effect, must impair yet further, when it might have restored, the delicate, complicated organization, already shaken and broken by war, through which alone the European peoples can employ themselves and live. — John Maynard Keynes