Margaret Heffernan Quotes
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In business, staying focused requires that you turn most opportunities down.
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When you use words loosely, without care and consideration, you erode trust in yourself and in what you're saying. When you squander words, you diminish your power.
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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.
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Most people have their best ideas when they take their minds away from problems they're trying to solve.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I don't think a true company - one that builds sustainable value - can ever only exist online or remotely.
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British innovation in design, in the creative arts, in engineering and manufacturing is world class.
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Making those around you feel invisible is the opposite of leadership.
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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.
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It is nobody's right to be waited on and nobody's fate to do the waiting.
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Everyone I know feels harassed by email which has invaded their waking and sleeping hours.
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I don't mind if the couple next to me is tense or the kids are whiny. I'd even be happy to hear an honest argument, evidence of thinking. I'd like to know these teeth-perfect families don't just buy each other stuff but just occasionally can talk to one another.
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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.
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Speaking is what most people work on. They forget the thinking and the breathing and instead try to occupy space with sound.
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If the company depends entirely on you - your creativity, ingenuity, inspiration, salesmanship or charisma - nobody will want to buy it. The risk and the dependency are too great.
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Every organization has issues and concerns which are known about by many people who choose to remain silent.
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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.
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What do you want your business to do? Make money, of course. To pay for people and supplies, to be able to grow.
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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.
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A great deal of creativity is about pattern recognition, and what you need to discern patterns is tons of data. Your mind collects that data by taking note of random details and anomalies easily seen every day: quirks and changes that, eventually, add up to insights.
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The biggest catastrophes that we've witnessed rarely come from information that is secret or hidden. It comes from information that is freely available and out there, but that we are willfully blind to.
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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.