“A firm is successful when the costs of directing employee effort are lower than the potential gain from directing.”

“An organization will tend to grow only when the advantages that can be gotten from directing the work of additional employees are less than the transaction costs of managing them.”

“For the last hundred years the big organizational question has been whether any given task was best taken on by the state, directing the effort in a planned way, or by businesses competing in a market.”

“The more people are involved in a given task, the more potential agreements need to be negotiated to do anything, and the greater the transaction costs.”

“[B]ecause the minimum costs of being an organization in the first place are relatively high, certain activities may have some value but not enough to make them worth pursuing in any organized way. New social tools are altering this equation by lowering the costs of coordinating group action.”

“The centrality of group effort to human life means that anything that changes the way groups function will have profound ramifications for everything from commerce and government to media and religion.”

“The low cost of aggregating information also allowed the formalization of sharing [...].”