>"A fish on land still waves its fins, but the results are qualitatively different when the fish is put in its most suitable watery environment."
>"Because of the normal distribution of talents and drive in the world, a depressingly large percentage of organizational processes have been designed to deal with people of moderate ability, motivation, and trust. We can easily see this in most walks of life today, but also astoundingly in corporate, university, and government research. ARPA/PARC had two main thresholds: self-motivation and ability. They cultivated people who "had to do, paid or not" and "whose doings were likely to be highly interesting and important".
>"Out of control" because artists have to do what they have to do. "Extremely productive" because a great vision acts like a magnetic field from the future that aligns all the little iron particle artists to point to “North” without having to see it. They then make their own paths to the future."
>"Unless I'm badly mistaken, in most processes today—and sadly in most important areas of technology research—the administrators seem to prefer to be completely in control of mediocre processes to being "out of control" with superproductive processes. They are trying to "avoid failure" rather than trying to "capture the heavens".