John Seely Brown Quotes

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

  John Seely Brown

  Letting Go, Goodbye, Fighting

  53 Copy quote

• 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

  Education, Eyeglasses, People

  124 Copy quote

• 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

  Learning, Knowledge, Technology

  17 Copy quote

• People need to know more than what a piece of information means. They also need to know how the information matters.

  John Seely Brown

  Mean, People, Needs

  16 Copy quote

• The job of leadership today is not just to make money, it's to make meaning.

  John Seely Brown

  Jobs, Today, Making Money

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Innovation, Important, Culture

  14 Copy quote

• 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

  Thinking, Design, Needs

  15 Copy quote

• The need for innovation – the lifeblood of business – is widely recognized, and imagination and play are key ingredients for making it happen.

  John Seely Brown

  Keys, Play, Imagination

  13 Copy quote

• If I ain't learning, it ain't fun.

  John Seely Brown

  Fun, Ifs

  "How World of Warcraft Could Save Your Business and The Economy" by John Seely Brown, bigthink.com.

  9 Copy quote

• The technologies that will be most successful will resonate with human behaviour instead of working against it. In fact, to solve the problems of delivering and assimilating new technology into the workplace, we must look to the way humans act and react. In the last 20 years, US industry has invested more than $1 trillion in technology, but has realised little improvement in the efficiency of its knowledge workers ­ and virtually none in their effectiveness. If we could solve the problems of the assimilation of new technology, the potential would be enormous.

  John Seely Brown

  Successful, Technology, Effectiveness

  10 Copy quote

• Conversation is a catalyst for innovation

  John Seely Brown

  Innovation, Catalyst, Conversation

  8 Copy quote

• Practice provides the rails on which knowledge flows.

  John Seely Brown

  Practice, Flow, Rail

  Laurence Prusak, Katalina Groh, Stephen Denning, John Seely Brown (2012). “Storytelling in Organizations”, p.80, Routledge

  8 Copy quote

• The most important invention that will come out of the corporate research lab in the future will be the corporation itself.

  John Seely Brown

  Business, Important, Research

  Harvard Business Review, www.wired.com. 1991.

  9 Copy quote

• We are working on creating self-describing, self-organizing, self-diagnosing and self-repairing networks.

  John Seely Brown

  Self, Creating, Describing

  "Robots will manage your network" by Sandra Gittlen, www.cnn.com. January 28, 1999.

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Moon, Data, Scratches

  John Seely Brown, Paul Duguid (2017). “The Social Life of Information: Updated, with a New Preface”, p.115, Harvard Business Review Press

  6 Copy quote

• Processes don't do work, people do

  John Seely Brown

  People, Process

  4 Copy quote

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