Quotes from Dee Hock

Every mind is a room packed with archaic furniture.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Substance is enduring, form is ephemeral.

Make a careful list of all things done to you that you abhorred. Don't do them to others, ever. Make another list of things done for you that you loved. Do them for others, always.

We never fully understand what we have been told until we experience it. Learning not embedded in experience is forever crippled. Unfortunately, our present society is schooled, not educated.

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.

Education that gives priority to measurement rather than values, to efficiency rather than conscience, to information rather than ethics, provides no barrier to barbarity and violence. The Holocaust was perpetrated by a society of the most disciplined, highly educated people on earth.

One of the more curious facts about human beings is that they can spend a day of introspection without discovering what is obvious to anyone who has spent a half hour in their company.

Much of that which passes for conversation these days is the lobbing of small bombs of dogma and little clots of banality at one another.

The ultimate insanity is to so organize society that power, wealth, and information are concentrated in the hands of so few people that they have the power, for whatever reason, to put to death our species and the living earth as well. But so we have.

If we examine with clear eyes what we have done to the majority of people on earth, to the earth itself, and to all other forms of life thereon, we can only hope that there are no gods, or if there are, that they are not just.

One of the more fascinating things about human behavior is the degree to which we conceive of countless boundaries that constrain and inhibit us in extraordinary ways, even though they are nothing but mental constructs that, in reality, do not exist.

Children are easily taught, for they readily accept and believe lies told by their elders.

The most common lesson of history is that the butchery of one mass of people by another is, in the minds of the butchers, sanctioned by their god.

Just as bad money drives out good, the broad, deep, inclusive renaissance mind is being driven out by the narrow, specialized, technical mind.

Nothing can be more violent and merciless than a group of true believers, no matter what they choose to believe.