The McKinsey team would stay with a company for five or six months or more, studying a very complicated set of arrangements, until somehow certain patterns became clear. We’d all sit around on the edge of our desks and someone would say, ’This must be happening because of that,’ and someone else would say, ‘Then that must be so.’ Then we’d go out a

system that is complex, in the sense that a great many independent agents are interacting with each other in a great many ways.

complex, self-organizing systems are adaptive,

Because a lot of older high-tech companies were already there. Them that has gets.

complex, self-organizing, adaptive systems possesses a kind of dynamism that makes them qualitatively different from static objects

Any given organism’s ability to survive and reproduce depends on what niche it is filling, what other organisms are around, what resources it can gather, even what its past history has been.

an autocatalytic set was an economy—a submicroscopic economy that extracted raw materials (the primordial “food” molecules) and converted them into useful products (more molecules in the set).

he envisions a new second law that explains how emergent entities will do the most interesting things when they’re at the edge of chaos, and how adaptation will inexorably build these entities up into higher and higher levels of complexity.

There is no general-purpose procedure that can scan the code and the input and give you the answer any faster than that.