Margaret Heffernan Quotes
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Making a company fit to sell may be the only way to ensure you never need a buyer.
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I'm all for ambition and stretch goals. I set them for myself. But leadership isn't the same as cheerleading. Believing in something is a necessary but absolutely insufficient condition for making it come true.
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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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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.
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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.
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One of the sad truths about leadership is that, the higher up the ladder you travel, the less you know.
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Huge open source organizations like Red Hat and Mozilla manage the collaboration of hundreds of people who don't know one another and have spent no time hanging around the water cooler.
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How can any company know if its processes, products, people are safe? Only if everyone is watching and telling the truth. The first part can be assumed; the second cannot.
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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.
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Building businesses takes tremendous stamina, and success isn't achieved without it.
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Once you have power, you are inevitably surrounded by people who have their own agendas and will tell you whatever advances them.
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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.
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The medical profession is - and knows itself to be - endemically conservative and conformist.
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The healthiest companies are always characterized by organic talent development.
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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.
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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.
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Research shows that when we read words on paper, it reduces our stress levels by nearly 70 percent. We also read more carefully than on tablets or laptops.
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If we aren't going to be afraid of conflict, we have to see it as thinking.
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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.
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Words are how people think. When you misuse words, you diminish your ability to think clearly and truthfully.
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Most executives I know are so action-oriented, or action-addicted, that time for reflection is the first casualty of their success.
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Noise is a buffer, more effective than cubicles or booth walls.
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Britain is famous for being great at inventing and poor at commercializing.
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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.