Quotes from Ori Brafman

In its simplest terms, clicking can be defined as an immediate, deep, and meaningful connection with another person or with the world around us. Typically

Representing the first of two types of hybrid organizations, eBay is a centralized company that decentralizes the customer experience.

A hybrid approach led to eBay's success, but it also created tensions. People are willing to trust one another when it comes to user ratings, but in other situations they want the safeguards that are possible only with a command-and-control structure.

What happens in that moment when we first sense our interest in another person? Why do we click with some people and not with others? Why do those moments make us feel more fully connected not just to that individual but to everything around us? Is there a way to foster or proactively create that kind of instant intimacy?

about itself: "There are times

Information doesn't change behavior," quips Lisa. "If it did, none of us would smoke and we'd all floss.

Lisa's philosophy is that instead of trying to enact change from the top down (i.e., print a lot of posters telling people what to do, or attempt to enforce rigid guidelines), we're actually much better off creating little pockets of chaos. The idea is that in this chaos, solutions can emerge.

Planning serendipity is about engaging as many parts of your organization as possible. It's about listening to people when they tell you that there's a problem and then empowering them to discover the solution. After all, the solution may very well be sitting in the room.

These three elements of contained chaos—white space, unusual suspects, and planned serendipity—can help both large businesses and small start-ups to introduce more innovation, drive growth, and propel excellence.

But in the information age, the paradigm for managers has shifted from managing bodies to managing minds. It is true that a body at rest is a body that is not producing. But a mind at rest could be a manager's, and a company's, greatest asset. Employees who are working ceaselessly on a problem may not be giving their brains the space they need to synthesize information and come up with insightful solutions. Think

Having a long-term plan--and not casting it aside--is the key to dealing with our fear of loss (loss aversion).

when attacked, centralized organizations tend to become even more centralized.

We tend to match the emotions of those around us. For example, we're more prone to become stressed when we're around someone who is high-strung. And we're more likely to be in a good mood when others around us are laughing.

Ideology is the glue that holds decentralized organizations together.

In open organizations, a catalyst is the person who initiates a circle and then fades away into the background.

Nevins explained that the traits of a decentralized society-flexibility, shared power, ambiguity-made the Apaches immune to attacks that would have destroyed a centralized society.

Not only did the Apaches survive the Spanish attacks, but amazingly, the attacks served to make them even stronger. When the Spanish attacked them, the Apaches became even more decentralized and even more difficult to conquer. When the Spanish destroyed their villages, the Apaches might have surrendered if the villages had been crucial to their society. But they weren't. Instead, the Apaches abandoned their old houses and became nomads. (Try to catch us now.)

The moment you introduce property rights into the equation, everything changes: the starfish organization turns into a spider. If you really want to centralize an organization, hand property rights to the catalyst and tell him to distribute resources as he sees fit. With power over property rights, the catalyst turns into a CEO and circles become competitive.

The forces that motivate jpgm to write reviews are the same ones that inspire people to edit Wikipedia articles: everyone wants to contribute, and everyone has something to contribute somewhere.

We need to find a common language, understand each other's quirks, and establish an emotional bond. But sometimes this process is greatly accelerated, and the connection seems to form almost magically and instantaneously.

If they had been, explained Falk, they would have had to come up with a falsifiable hypothesis. For instance, if the hypothesis is that all tomatoes are red, you can disprove the hypothesis by finding a yellow tomato. "What I said in my paper," Falk told us, "that [the Hobbit] is not a microcephalic, can be falsified with one specimen from a proven microcephalic whose virtual endocast looks identical. And that is scientific.

At the core of what happened with the Apaches and with AA was the concentration of power. Once people gain a right to property, be it cows or book royalties, they quickly seek out a centralized system to protect their interests. It's why we want our banks to be centralized. We want control, we want structure, we want reporting when it comes to our money.

Our theory," explained Fried, "is that we'll see better results when people have a long stretch of uninterrupted time.

They were more a new set of ways of looking at the universe, supported by the math, than a set of complex mathematical formulas.