Rem Koolhaas Quotes

It was immediately clear to me that security was a cross-cutting issue, so rather than dividing the space up in parallel with each of the other areas, I wanted security cut across the areas in addition to having its own content.

As a company gets big, the information that informs decision-making gets massive. Depending upon the prism through which you view the business, your perspective will vary. If two people are in charge, this variance will cause conflict and delay.

Management does not know what a system is.

When a culture is broken, the cracks show - morale is weakened, but so is profit and performance. That's why culture has to be at the core of any business transformation.

I have a lot of supporters but they are not well organized. They send me donations but for the most part, their commitment is not really serious.

A structured design approach can heighten the hit rate in the fuzzy front end of innovation processes in public and private sectors.

As a company grows, things get stuck at the top. It can be a bottleneck.

Can a label group by itself scale to make a sensible business? I don't think so.

Don't hurry your code. Make sure it works well and is well designed. Don't worry about timing.

The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots. If you're not an idiot, but find yourself in the Navy, you can only operate well by pretending to be one.

Every great man exhibits the talent of organization or construction, whether it be in a poem, a philosophical system, a policy, or a strategy. And without method there is no organization nor construction.

The study of economic organization commonly proceeds as though market and administrative modes of organization were disjunct. Market organi­zation is the province of economists. Inter­nal organization is the concern of organization theory specialist. And never the twain shall meet.

I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.

Object-oriented programming as it emerged in Simula 67 allows software structure to be based on real-world structures, and gives programmers a powerful way to simplify the design and construction of complex programs.

With respect to Committees as you would perceive I am very jealous of their formation. I mean working committees. I think business is always better done by few than by many.

The combination of threads, remote-procedure-call interfaces, and heavyweight object-oriented design is especially dangerous... if you are ever invited onto a project that is supposed to feature all three, fleeing in terror might well be an appropriate reaction.

The reason why it is so difficult for existing firms to capitalize on disruptive innovations is that their processes and their business model that make them good at the existing business actually make them bad at competing for the disruption. Companies in fact are specifically organized to under-invest in disruptive innovations! This is one reason why we often suggest that companies set up separate teams or groups to commercialize disruptive innovations. When disruptive innovations have to fight with other innovations for resources, they tend to lose out.

I have met bright students in computer science who have never seen the source code of a large program. They may be good at writing small programs, but they can't begin to learn the different skills of writing large ones if they can't see how others have done it.

Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.

We defend ourselves by descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.

Every kind of science, if it has only reached a certain degree of maturity, automatically becomes a part of mathematics.

My feeling is that anarchists have to think in terms of a specific. I think the dispersal of anarchists all over the place, particularly very gifted ones who can turn out periodicals and do very effective public work, and their tendency to just pick up and take off is a liability.

There's nothing wrong with being organized.Things that change history tend to be organized.

Being a president is being a CEO, essentially.

A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.