Quote

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

Clay Shirky

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Clay Shirky

Image
We are in a world where most American citizens over the age of 12 share things with each other online.
Clay Shirky
Image
Publishing isn't a job anymore. It's a button.
Clay Shirky
Image
When you got a cell phone you stopped making plans. 'I'll call you when I get there.'
Clay Shirky
Image
Wikipedia [...] is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation.
Clay Shirky
Image
Upgrading one's imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.
Clay Shirky
Image
Any system described by a power law [...] has several curious effects. The first is that, by definition, most participants are below average.
Clay Shirky
Image
Curation comes up when people realize that it isn’t just about information seeking, it’s also about synchronizing a community.
Clay Shirky
Image
Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
Clay Shirky
Image
Bureaucracies temporarily suspend the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a bureaucracy, it's easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one.
Clay Shirky
Image
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.
Clay Shirky
Image
Our social life is literally primal, in the sense that chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest relatives among the primates, are also social.
Clay Shirky
Image
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.
Clay Shirky
Image
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.
Clay Shirky
Image
Tools get socially interesting after they're no longer technologically interesting.
Clay Shirky
Image
If someone around you is multitasking, you pick up distraction like second-hand smoke.
Clay Shirky
Image
We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.
Clay Shirky
Image
Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.
Clay Shirky
Image
Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.
Clay Shirky
Image
The historic role of the consumer has been nothing more than a giant maw at the end of the mass media's long conveyer belt, the all-absorbing Yin to the mass media's all-producing Yang....In the age of the internet, no one is a passive consumer anymore because everyone is a media outlet.
Clay Shirky
Image
The change we are in the middle of isn't minor and it isn't optional.
Clay Shirky