"An organization's reason for being, like that of any organism, is to help the parts that are in relationship to each other, to be able to deal with change in the environment"
About this Quote
Kelly smuggles a radical premise into a sentence that sounds like management common sense: the organization is not a machine built to execute a plan, but a living system built to metabolize uncertainty. By borrowing the language of biology - organism, parts, environment - he reframes corporate purpose away from slogans and toward survival dynamics. The reason for being is not profit, not even mission; it is coordination under pressure. Purpose becomes an adaptive function.
The intent is quietly anti-heroic. Leaders don’t “drive change”; they cultivate relationships robust enough to absorb it. That word “parts” matters: people, teams, tools, suppliers, customers, even norms. Kelly’s subtext is that dysfunction isn’t primarily a moral failure or a talent gap. It’s a relationship problem: information doesn’t flow, incentives collide, feedback arrives too late. In an environment that won’t sit still, brittle hierarchies snap; networked organisms reroute.
The context is classic Kevin Kelly: Wired-era systems thinking, the gospel of networks, emergence, and decentralization. He’s writing from a late-20th-century vantage point where technology accelerates cycles and makes “environment” feel less like weather and more like permanent volatility. Read now, the line feels almost diagnostic of modern work: companies obsess over identity and brand while underinvesting in the mundane infrastructure of adaptation - trust, sensing, learning, and the freedom to recombine. Kelly’s wager is that organizations endure less by being right than by being rewirable.
The intent is quietly anti-heroic. Leaders don’t “drive change”; they cultivate relationships robust enough to absorb it. That word “parts” matters: people, teams, tools, suppliers, customers, even norms. Kelly’s subtext is that dysfunction isn’t primarily a moral failure or a talent gap. It’s a relationship problem: information doesn’t flow, incentives collide, feedback arrives too late. In an environment that won’t sit still, brittle hierarchies snap; networked organisms reroute.
The context is classic Kevin Kelly: Wired-era systems thinking, the gospel of networks, emergence, and decentralization. He’s writing from a late-20th-century vantage point where technology accelerates cycles and makes “environment” feel less like weather and more like permanent volatility. Read now, the line feels almost diagnostic of modern work: companies obsess over identity and brand while underinvesting in the mundane infrastructure of adaptation - trust, sensing, learning, and the freedom to recombine. Kelly’s wager is that organizations endure less by being right than by being rewirable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Vision & Strategy |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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