Margaret Heffernan Quotes

When we confront facts and fears, we achieve real power and unleash our capacity for change.

When we care about people, we care less about money, and when we care about money, we care less about people.

The best remote companies I've seen do almost everything online, via email and telephone. But they also get together face to face on a regular basis.

Building businesses takes tremendous stamina, and success isn't achieved without it.

Silence is the language of inertia.

Seventy percent of US companies now use open-plan offices and hot desking in the hope that these free-form physical structures will provoke free-form thinking. This architectural determinism isn't entirely convincing - there's plenty of evidence that people find open workspaces noisy, distracting, and impersonal. Walking through several such workspaces recently, I couldn't help but notice how hard everyone was working to simulate privacy. Plugged into headphones, surrounded by stacks of books and temporary dividers, defensiveness was more evident than openness. Architecture alone won't change mindsets and tearing down physical walls won't demolish the mental silos that trap thinking.

Questions are the heart and soul of constructive conflict. They open up the exploration, bring in new information, and reframe debate. When

The sooner we associate long hours and multitasking with incompetence and carelessness the better. The next time you hear boasts of executives pulling an all-nighter or holding conference calls in their cars, be sure to offer your condolences; it's grim being stuck in sweatshops run by managers too ignorant to understand productivity and risk. Working people like this is as smart as running your factory without maintenance. In manufacturing and engineering businesses, everyone learns that the top priority is asset integrity: protecting the machinery on which the business depends. In knowledge-based economies, that machinery is the mind.

Reading fiction - excerpts from National Book Award finalists, winners of the Pen/O. Henry Prize for short stories, or even Amazon bestsellers - has been shown to enhance theory of mind:

If you have never failed at anything, then you haven't been trying hard enough, aren't very imaginative, or have had such extraordinarily good luck that you have come to believe you are invincible.

Britain is famous for being great at inventing and poor at commercializing.

Very few entrepreneurs start their business on the back of market research. Instead, they have tremendous zeitgeist, honed by paying attention to where they are.

Money appears to motivate only our interest in ourselves, making us selfish and self-centered ... Money makes people feel self-sufficient, which also means they don't need or care about others; it's each man for himself

Speaking is what most people work on. They forget the thinking and the breathing and instead try to occupy space with sound.

Every organization has issues and concerns which are known about by many people who choose to remain silent.

Business is not a science; it is not susceptible to experiments that can be controlled and replicated. Everything in business is too unpredictable for that - every business, employee, product, market is different and keeps changing.

The combination of power, optimism and abstract thinking makes powerful people more certain. The more cut-off they are from others, the more confident they are that they are right.

The only consequence of their (employee) silence is that the blind (employer) lead the blind.

Instead, we have found ourselves gasping for air in a sea of corruption, dysfunction, environmental degradation, waste, disenchantment and inequality - and the harder we compete, the more unequal we become.

The single hardest part of leading any organization is knowing what is going on. There's too much noise in the system, too much complexity: you absolutely depend on people speaking up and raising concerns.

Big data will never give you big ideas ... Big data doesn't facilitate big leaps of the imagination. It will never conjure up a PC revolution or any kind of paradigm shift. And while it might tell you what to aim for, it can't tell you how to get there

Most executives I know are so action-oriented, or action-addicted, that time for reflection is the first casualty of their success.

Those in powerless positions aren't about to complain about bullying bosses, abusive supervisors or corrupt co-workers. There is no safe way to do so and no process that promises redress.

A great advantage of a large corporation is supposed to be the large pool of talent in which its leaders can find and groom high achievers and successors.

Dominant people, it appears, use snap judgements and conform to received wisdom more than do the less dominant. Those who need power, and those who have it, think differently.

Everywhere I look, there are ads marking Mother's Day. Mostly they conform to stereotype: flowers, jewelry, perfume. Not a lot of books. Not many computers. Few tools. Little that's useful.

In our house, Mother's Day is every day. Father's Day, too. In our house, parents count. They do important work and that work matters. One day just doesn't cut for us.

We have to see conflict as thinking and then get really good at it.

When we are tired or preoccupied - what psychologists call 'resource-depleted' - we start to economise, to conserve those resources. Higher-order thinking is more expensive. So too is doubt, scepticism, arugment. 'Resource depletion specifically disables cognitive elaboration,' wrote Harvard psychologist Daniel Gillbert ... Because it takes less brain power to believe than to doublt, we are, when tired or distracted, gullible. Because we are all biased, and biases are quick and effortless, exhaustion tends to make us prefer the information we know and are comfortable with. We are too tired to do the heavier lifting of examining new or contradictory information, so we fall back on our biases the opinions and the people we already trust

For good ideas and true innovation, you need human interaction, conflict, argument, debate.

We treasure what we can measure.

The healthiest companies are always characterized by organic talent development.

One of the sad truths about leadership is that, the higher up the ladder you travel, the less you know.

Companies are bought for their revenue, customer base, technology, or people. A few great companies offer all of these, but any valuable business offers one.

The vast literature concerning whistleblowers shows that, far from weird extremists, they are really quite ordinary people: male and female, young and old, junior and senior, no more nerdy or obsessive than most hard workers.

[For constructive conflict,] we have to resist the neurobiological drive which means that we really prefer people mostly like ourselves.

All businesses and jobs depend on a vast number of people, often unnoticed and unthanked, without which nothing really gets done. They are all human and deserve respect and gratitude.

Noise is a buffer, more effective than cubicles or booth walls.

There is no more powerful weapon for change than honesty.

But even if, as Johnson argues, power and dominance serve no meaningful purpose, they always incur costs. In biology, the cost can be painfully visible. During courtship, the argus cock pheasant spreads his large secondary wing feathers, which are decorated with beautiful eye spots; the bigger they are, the more they stimulate the female. And the longer the feathers, the more progeny the cock will produce. So the more beautiful cocks produce more descendants. That should be a competitive advantage. But the evolution of the argus pheasant has run itself into a blind alley because the most gorgeous cock has feathers so huge and unwieldy that they may cause him to be eaten by a predator, because he can't fly away fast enough. Oskar Heinroth, the teacher of Konrad Lorenz, commented: 'Next to the wings of the argus pheasant, the hectic life of western civilized man is the most stupid product of intra-specific selection!

Clearing your head of distractions in order to notice and understand the people you are with can feel inefficient - there are so many other people and issues to think about. But being present makes you effective.

Phones and soundtracks and Muzak and fountains replace genuine and unpredictable human contact with a seamless soundtrack from a bad movie and a cliche that makes us believe we must all be happy.

On overnight flights, I have trained myself to get to sleep almost instantly after takeoff. I always listen to the same audiobook on my iPod so my brain knows, regardless of time zone, that that voice means it's time for bed.

Everyone I know feels harassed by email which has invaded their waking and sleeping hours.

Customers who have to come back and spend, or customers who just don't want the hassle of leaving - those are the ones who are most worth attracting.

The truth won't set us free - until we develop the skills and the habit and the talent and the moral courage to use it.

I haven't always hated McDonald's. When my kids were little and I lived in the U.S., they were as susceptible as anyone to Happy Meals and tatty toys that subsequently littered our sitting room.

It's a truism that love is blind; what's less obvious is just how much evidence it can ignore.

A fantastic model of collaboration: thinking partners who aren't echo chambers.

A thinking partner who isn't an echo chamber ... How many of us dare to have such collaborators?

thinking: a rather prosaic, low-tech concept, easily forgotten and routinely underrated. But

Money is just one of the forces that blind us to information and issues which we could pay attention to - but don't. It exacerbates and often rewards all the other drivers of willful blindness; our preference for the familiar, our love for individuals and for big ideas, a love of busyness and our dislike of conflict and change, the human instinct to obey and conform and our skill at displacing and diffusing responsibility. All of these operate and collaborate with varying intensities at different moments in our lives. The common denominator is that they all make us protect our sense of self-worth, reducing dissonance and conferring a sense of security, however illusory. In some ways, they all act like money; making us feel good at first, with consequences we don't see. We wouldn't be so blind if our blindness didn't deliver rewards; the benefit of comfort and ease.

Was I wilfully blind when I married Michael? Of course I was. I knew about his heart condition - everyone did. But I fell in love with him and decided it didn't matter. We were going to live for ever, somehow. Now I know that the fact that we had the same initials, were both expatriates, had gone to the same university, and were of medium build made the relationship highly determined. But I might have done the research and discovered his short life expectancy or talked to psychologists about the pain of grieving or read books about the sadness of widowhood. But I didn't do any of those things. I looked away from those sad certainties and pretended that they weren't there.
Love is blind, not, as in mythology, because Cupid's arrows are random but because, once struck by them, we are left blind. When we love someone, we see them as smarter, wittier, prettier, stronger than anyone else sees them.

It's when we stop and think that we rediscover the courage, wit, compassion, imagination, delight, frustration, discovery, and devotion that work can provoke - in short, all the things at work that do count, beyond measure.

Most people have their best ideas when they take their minds away from problems they're trying to solve.

Many CEOs and leaders think that silence is indeed golden, that consensus is bliss. It is - sometimes. But more often what it signifies is that there are no respected processes for surfacing concerns and dissent.

Bosses and leaders everywhere should cherish the people who bring them bad news, disappointing data or hard problems.

Being a critical thinker starts with resisting the urge to be a pleaser.

Making a company fit to sell may be the only way to ensure you never need a buyer.

Any fool can buy talent; only real leaders develop it.

British innovation in design, in the creative arts, in engineering and manufacturing is world class.

I hate people walking down the street listening to the soundtrack of their lives which responds to them but not their setting. I hate the overspill of sound which metro and subway riders are oblivious to because they notice no one and nothing around them.

I regularly take my entrepreneurship students out walking because I want to get them in the habit of noticing and thinking about what they notice. They have to leave their phones behind to learn the basic lesson: Be where you are.

If I have to spend a lot of time on planes, I try to think of this as time off. In certain ways, it's more restful than home: no Internet, no phones, no interruptions.

Overall, people are about twice as likely to seek information that supports their own point of view as they are to consider an opposing idea.19

As a mother, I work hard every day and I expect that work to be recognized and appreciated. Because I work for and with human beings, sometimes they're grateful and sometimes they aren't.