John Seely Brown Quotes

#1. 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

#2. Processes don't do work, people do

John Seely Brown

#3. Ok, here goes: I'm going to see how many people I can offend by suggesting that maybe many little gay boys, like many little girls, are made up of sugar and spice and everything nice.

Alice Dreger

#4. 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

#5. I shall argue that strong men, conversely, know when to compromise and that all principles can be compromised to serve a greater principle.

Andrew Carnegie

#6. 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

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

John Seely Brown

#8. 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

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

John Seely Brown

#10. Knowledge indeed is a desirable, a lovely possession.

Thomas Jefferson

#11. Practice provides the rails on which knowledge flows.

John Seely Brown

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

John Seely Brown

#13. 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

#14. 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

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

John Seely Brown

#16. If you never learned to hold onto someone, how could it possibly hurt now to let them go?

Shannon L. Alder

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

John Seely Brown

#18. Finally, I get to have houseplants and they stay alive.

Linda Vester

#19. Globalization means using slaves to manufacture products that are then sold to the unemployed!

Marine Le Pen

#20. Conversation is a catalyst for innovation

John Seely Brown

#21. My father, unusually for a PoW, talked about his experiences, but he talked about them in a very limited way.

Richard Flanagan