"If you go back to the first single-cell form of life, it clearly possessed the capacity to receive, to utilize, to store, to transform, and to transmit information"
About this Quote
Start with a single cell and you get a quietly radical demotion of the corporate ego. Dee Hock, best known for founding Visa and preaching “chaordic” organization, frames information not as a modern invention or a tech-sector asset class but as biology’s original business model. The rhetorical move is simple: if the first life-form already had an information system, then your company’s databases, org charts, and dashboards aren’t signs of sophistication; they’re late-stage variations on something primordial.
The intent is managerial, but the subtext is philosophical. Hock is arguing against the lingering industrial fantasy that organizations are machines you can optimize by tightening bolts. He wants you to see them as living systems: sensing environments, converting signals into action, retaining memory, and passing learnings forward. That verb chain - receive, utilize, store, transform, transmit - reads like a process map, but it’s also a rebuke. If information is life’s baseline capability, then hoarding it, bottling it inside silos, or mistaking it for control is organizational self-harm.
Context matters: Hock came of age in an era when “information” became business scripture, from cybernetics to systems theory to the early internet. His line borrows the authority of science to smuggle in a governance argument: the healthiest institutions won’t be the most hierarchical; they’ll be the most adaptive. In other words, the future belongs to companies that behave less like factories and more like cells.
The intent is managerial, but the subtext is philosophical. Hock is arguing against the lingering industrial fantasy that organizations are machines you can optimize by tightening bolts. He wants you to see them as living systems: sensing environments, converting signals into action, retaining memory, and passing learnings forward. That verb chain - receive, utilize, store, transform, transmit - reads like a process map, but it’s also a rebuke. If information is life’s baseline capability, then hoarding it, bottling it inside silos, or mistaking it for control is organizational self-harm.
Context matters: Hock came of age in an era when “information” became business scripture, from cybernetics to systems theory to the early internet. His line borrows the authority of science to smuggle in a governance argument: the healthiest institutions won’t be the most hierarchical; they’ll be the most adaptive. In other words, the future belongs to companies that behave less like factories and more like cells.
Quote Details
| Topic | Science |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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