The Very Long Tail Of

A Brain Is A Society Of Very Small, Simple Modules That Cannot Be Said To Be Thinking, That Are Not Smart In Themselves. But When You Have A Network Of Them Together, Out Of That Arises A Kind Of Smartness.

And They Discovered Something Very Interesting: When It Comes To Walking, Most Of The Ant's Thinking And Decision-making Is Not In Its Brain At All. It's Distributed. It's In Its Legs.

In A Broad Systems Sense, An Organism's Environment Is Indistinguishable From The Organism Itself.

Preserve The Core, And Let The Rest Flux. In Their Wonderful Bestseller Built To Last, Authors James Collins And Jerry Porras Make A Convincing Argument That Long-lived Companies Are Able To Thrive 50 Years Or More By Retaining A Very Small Heart Of Unchanging Values, And Then Stimulating Progress In Everything Else. At Times "everything" Includes Changing The Business The Company Operates In, Migrating, Say, From Mining To Insurance. Outside The Core Of Values, Nothing Should Be Exempt From Flux. Nothing.

One Of The Functions Of An Organization, Of Any Organism, Is To Anticipate The Future, So That Those Relationships Can Persist Over Time.