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A firm is successful when the costs of directing employee effort are lower than the potential gain from directing.

Clay Shirky

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Clay Shirky
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Academic
Scientist
Technology Evangelist
Writer
Columbia
Missouri
Potential
Gains
Cost
Directing
Effort
Employee
Successful
Costs
Lower
Firm
Gain

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If someone around you is multitasking, you pick up distraction like second-hand smoke.
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The loss of control you fear is already in the past.
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When you adopt a tool you adopt the management philosophy embedded in that tool.
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There is no larger collective-action problem than the environment. The three biggest lies of the environmental movement is that every little bit helps, you can do your part, and together we can do it.
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Upgrading one's imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.
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It used to be expensive to make things public and cheap to make them private. Now it's expensive to make things private and cheap to make them public.
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It is possible to think that the Internet will be a net positive for society while admitting that there are significant downsides - after all, it's not a revolution if nobody loses.
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Multi-taskers often think they are like gym rats, bulking up their ability to juggle tasks, when in fact they are like alcoholics, degrading their abilities through over-consumption.
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When you make the claim that something on the Internet is going to be good for democracy, you often [hear], 'Are you talking about the thing with the singing cats?'
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Egalitarianism is possible only in small social systems. Once a medium gets past a certain size fame is a forced move.
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The more ideas there are in circulation, the more ideas there are for any individual to disagree with. More media always means more arguing.
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So forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this - the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast.
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Society doesn't need newspapers. What we need is journalism... When we shift our attention from ‘save newspapers’ to ‘save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.
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Knowledge, unlike information, is a human characteristic there can be information no one knows, but there can't be knowledge no one knows.
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The change we are in the middle of isn't minor and it isn't optional.
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