Leadership Quote by Kevin Kelly

The line punctures a comforting fiction of corporate life: that strategy is a brain you can point to, name, and pay. Kelly’s target isn’t just CEO worship; it’s the whole management-industrial habit of treating organizations like oversized individuals, with a single “mind” located at the top and occasionally upgraded by consultants. He’s arguing that the metaphor is wrong, and the consequences of that wrongness show up everywhere: in brittle reorganizations, in blame that travels upward or downward too neatly, in the belief that a memo can rewire behavior.

Kelly’s subtext is systems thinking, filtered through his long-running fascination with networks, emergence, and distributed intelligence. Organizations “think” the way ant colonies “decide” or the internet “routes”: through protocols, incentives, shared tools, tacit norms, and local decisions that aggregate into outcomes no one fully authored. The CEO is less the mind than a high-leverage node, influential but not sovereign. Consultants, in this framing, don’t inject intelligence so much as tweak the system’s rules or feedback loops (often with mixed results).

Context matters: as an editor shaped by late-20th-century tech culture, Kelly is pushing back on the heroic-leader narrative that business media loves because it’s legible and saleable. Distributed cognition is messier, harder to credit, and harder to control. That’s the point. If you want a smarter organization, you don’t just hire a “smart” person at the top; you redesign the conditions under which everyone else can think together.