Quote by Douglas Engelbart, 1970
Today's environment is beginning to threaten today's organizations, finding them seriously deficient in their nervous system design.... The degree of coordination, perception, rational adaptation, etc., which will appear in the next generation of human organizations will drive our present organizational forms, with their clumsy nervous systems, into extinction.
Summary
This quote suggests that modern organizations are ill-equipped to thrive in today's rapidly changing environment. The comparison is made between the nervous system of an organization and its ability to coordinate, perceive, adapt, and think. The quote highlights the need for improved organizational designs that possess higher levels of these qualities. It suggests that the organizations of the future, with superior abilities to respond to their surroundings, will overshadow and replace the current ones, rendering them obsolete.