Margaret Heffernan Quotes
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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.
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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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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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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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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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Building businesses takes tremendous stamina, and success isn't achieved without it.
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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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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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The healthiest companies are always characterized by organic talent development.
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The medical profession is - and knows itself to be - endemically conservative and conformist.
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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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If we aren't going to be afraid of conflict, we have to see it as thinking.
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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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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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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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Words are how people think. When you misuse words, you diminish your ability to think clearly and truthfully.
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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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Britain is famous for being great at inventing and poor at commercializing.
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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.
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Noise is a buffer, more effective than cubicles or booth walls.
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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.