Top 70 Dee Hock Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple stupid behavior.”

— Dee Hock

2. “Making good judgments when one has complete data, facts, and knowledge is not leadership – it’s bookkeeping.”

— Dee Hock

3. “An organization, no matter how well designed, is only as good as the people who live and work in it.”

— Dee Hock

4. “The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out. Every mind is a building filled with archaic furniture. Clean out a corner of your mind and creativity will instantly fill it.”

— Dee Hock

5. “Hire and promote first on the basis of integrity; second, motivation; third, capacity; fourth, understanding; fifth, knowledge; and last and least, experience.”

— Dee Hock

6. “You learn nothing form your successes except to think too much of yourself. It is from failure that all growth comes, provided you can recognize it, admit it, learn from it, rise above it, and then try again.”

— Dee Hock

7. “Given the right circumstances, from no more than dreams, determination, and the liberty to try, quite ordinary people consistently do extraordinary things.”

— Dee Hock

8. “An organization’s success has more to do with clarity of shared purpose, common principles and strength of belief in them than to assets, expertise, operating ability or management competence, important as they may be.”

— Dee Hock

9. “If you look to lead, invest at least 40% of your time managing yourself – your ethics, character, principles, purpose, motivation, and conduct. Invest at least 30% managing those with authority over you, and 15% managing your peers.”

— Dee Hock

10. “Failure is not to be feared. It is from failure that most growth comes.”

— Dee Hock

11. “Clean out a corner of your mind and creativity will instantly fill it.”

— Dee Hock

12. “It is far too late and things are far too bad for pessimism.”

— Dee Hock

13. “The essence of community, its heart and soul, is the non-monetary exchange of value; things we do and share because we care for others, and for the good of the place.”

— Dee Hock

14. “Money motivates neither the best people, nor the best in people. It can move the body and influence the mind, but it cannot touch the heart or move the spirit; that is reserved for belief, principle, and morality.”

— Dee Hock

15. “Only fools worship their tools.”

— Dee Hock

16. “Substance is enduring, form is ephemeral.”

— Dee Hock

17. “Heaven is purpose, principle, and people. Purgatory is paper and procedure. Hell is rules and regulations.”

— Dee Hock

18. “If you don’t understand that you work for your mislabeled ‘subordinates,’ then you know nothing of leadership. You know only tyranny.”

— Dee Hock

19. “With the advent of genetic engineering the time required for the evolution of new species may literally collapse.”

— Dee Hock

20. “All organizations are merely conceptual embodiments of a very old, very basic idea – the idea of community. They can be no more or less than the sum of the beliefs of the people drawn to them; of their character, judgements, acts and efforts.”

— Dee Hock

21. “Success follows those adept at preserving the substance of the past by clothing it in the forms of the future.”

— Dee Hock

22. “Lead yourself, lead your superiors, lead your peers, and free your people to do the same. All else is trivia.”

— Dee Hock

23. “Education that gives priority to measurement rather than values, to efficiency rather than conscience, to information rather than ethics, provides no barrier to barbarity and violence. The Holocaust was perpetrated by a society of the most disciplined, highly educated people on earth.”

— Dee Hock

24. “Make a careful list of all things done to you that you abhorred. Don’t do them to others, ever.”

— Dee Hock

25. “The most abundant, least used, and most abused resource in the world is human spirit and ingenuity.”

— Dee Hock

26. “Far better than a precise plan is a clear sense of direction and compelling beliefs. And that lies within you. The question is, how do you evoke it?”

— Dee Hock

27. “We are now at a point in time when the ability to receive, utilize, store, transform and transmit data – the lowest cognitive form – has expanded literally beyond comprehension. Understanding and wisdom are largely forgotten as we struggle under an avalanche of data and information.”

— Dee Hock

28. “If you think you can’t, why think.”

— Dee Hock

29. “Knowledge is never in doubt. Wisdom is never certain.”

— Dee Hock

30. “There is nothing that dictates behavior more than what we want others to think of us. When that happens, we become a reflection in our own mind of what we believe is reflected in the mind of another, neither of which has the slightest chance of being correct. Talk about dogs chasing tails.”

— Dee Hock

31. “Particularity and separability are infirmities of the mind, not characteristics of the universe.”

— Dee Hock

32. “We never fully understand what we have been told until we experience it. Learning not embedded in experience is forever crippled. Unfortunately, our present society is schooled, not educated.”

— Dee Hock

33. “Certainty is the place where questions go to die.”

— Dee Hock

34. “One of the more fascinating things about human behavior is the degree to which we conceive of countless boundaries that constrain and inhibit us in extraordinary ways, even though they are nothing but mental constructs that, in reality, do not exist.”

— Dee Hock

35. “If we pay great attention to the meaning of each moment of our unique life, the meaning of life in general will attend to itself.”

— Dee Hock

36. “Every mind is a room packed with archaic furniture.”

— Dee Hock

37. “We are at that very point in time when a 400-year old age is rattling in its death bed and another is struggling to be born.”

— Dee Hock

38. “Do not get angry, stubborn, and imperious. Get curious.”

— Dee Hock

39. “Life will never surrender its secrets to a yardstick.”

— Dee Hock

40. “The closest thing to a law of nature in business is that form has an affinity for expense, while substance has an affinity for income.”

— Dee Hock

41. “If you’re in such a position of power and your ego is such that this is not possible, then its essential to have a small cadre of very bright, committed people who are questioning, exploring and understanding these emerging concepts.”

— Dee Hock

42. “Community is composed of that which we don’t attempt to measure, for which we keep no record and ask no recompense. Most are things we cannot measure no matter how hard we try.”

— Dee Hock

43. “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.”

— Dee Hock

44. “It won’t do away with hierarchy totally, but the principal leader will be the person who most exemplifies the kind of organization and behavior required who is best able to create the conditions such organizations require.”

— Dee Hock

45. “The prudent course is to make an investment in learning, testing and understanding, determine how the new concepts compare to how you now operate and thoughtfully determine how they apply to what you want to achieve in the future.”

— Dee Hock

46. “It is not making better people of others that management is about. It’s about making a better person of self. Income, power, and titles have nothing to do with that.”

— Dee Hock

47. “Experience is easy to provide and quickly put to good use by people with all the other qualities.”

— Dee Hock

48. “What will become compellingly important is absolute clarity of shared purpose and set of principles of conduct sort of institutional genetic code that every member of the organization understands in a common way, and with deep conviction.”

— Dee Hock

49. “Hire and promote first on the basis of integrity; second, motivation; third, capacity; fourth, understanding; fifth, knowledge; and last and least, experience. Without integrity, motivation is dangerous; without motivation, capacity is impotent; without capacity, understanding is limited; without understanding, knowledge is meaningless; without knowledge, experience is blind. Experience is easy to provide and quickly put to good use by people with all the other qualities.”

— Dee Hock

50. “As I like to say, the entire collective memory of the species – that means all known and recorded information – is going to be just a few keystrokes away in a matter of years.”

— Dee Hock