Words matter. These are the best Margaret Heffernan Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
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.
Noise is a buffer, more effective than cubicles or booth walls.
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.
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.
For good ideas and true innovation, you need human interaction, conflict, argument, debate.
Most people have their best ideas when they take their minds away from problems they’re trying to solve.
Words are how people think. When you misuse words, you diminish your ability to think clearly and truthfully.
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.
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.
British innovation in design, in the creative arts, in engineering and manufacturing is world class.
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.
I don’t think a true company – one that builds sustainable value – can ever only exist online or remotely.
Speaking is what most people work on. They forget the thinking and the breathing and instead try to occupy space with sound.
Making those around you feel invisible is the opposite of leadership.
The medical profession is – and knows itself to be – endemically conservative and conformist.
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.
Britain is famous for being great at inventing and poor at commercializing.
The healthiest companies are always characterized by organic talent development.
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 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.
The cell phone has become the adult’s transitional object, replacing the toddler’s teddy bear for comfort and a sense of belonging.
One of the sad truths about leadership is that, the higher up the ladder you travel, the less you know.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
