Words matter. These are the best Noreena Hertz Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Stress makes us prone to tunnel vision, less likely to take in the information we need. Anxiety makes us more risk-averse than we would be regularly and more deferential.
My parents were entrepreneurs. I grew up believing in the power of innovation.
We are all socialists now, it seems. John McCain, David Cameron and Gordon Brown attack bankers’ irresponsible behaviour and salaries, and call for state intervention in the financial markets. But these calls will not get them elected or re-elected if they are addressed only to the banking sector.
What my research has shown me is that experts tend on the whole to form very rigid camps; that within these camps, a dominant perspective emerges that often silences opposition; that experts move with the prevailing winds, often hero-worshipping their own gurus.
Child labour may be distasteful to westerners, but does boycotting goods made with child labour improve or exacerbate the lot of third world children? Trusting the market to regulate may not ultimately be in our interest.
Transparency, accountability and sustainability have become the slogans of the market leaders. Companies carry out environmental and social audits to court the consumer, and even the bluest chips woo organisations such as Greenpeace and Amnesty.
The problem lies with us: we’ve become addicted to experts. We’ve become addicted to their certainty, their assuredness, their definitiveness, and in the process, we have ceded our responsibility, substituting our intellect and our intelligence for their supposed words of wisdom.
Employees speak of being fearful opening emails and feeling increasingly helpless in the face of the deluge. Physiologically, we now know that the state of continuous disruption puts us into a constant state of hormone-induced stress.
All company bosses want a policy on corporate social responsibility. The positive effect is hard to quantify, but the negative consequences of a disaster are enormous.
When it comes to getting more women into parliament, politicians have at least started to take active measures. The British Labour Party introduced all-female shortlists in 1997.
Experience is not the poor relation of expertise. Valuable insights in business often come from the people on the ground.
I’ve become increasingly fascinated with social media to improve on traditional ways of preparing for and predicting the future.
I have problems with this very extreme form of capitalism where the pendulum has swung so far in one direction, where the focus is completely on the short term, and no one is thinking about the consequences.
Goodwill and reputation are intangibles, but they are the keys to business success. Since they are also inexorably linked to social values, it follows that a change in social norms will have a significant impact on profits.
Forcing companies to recruit away from the golf course might lead to the appointment of more women from NGOs and academia and medicine, all of whom are likely to understand such concepts as stewardship and sustainability much better than men picked from the usual hunting grounds.
Most philanthropists would still rather donate to elite schools, concert halls or religious groups than help the poor or sick.
Most of us are ‘ultraconformists’ when it comes to who we are most likely to follow… to socialise with, or even who we are most likely to hire.
The World Trade Organization is an organization that defends trade interests. I think the problem is less that they exist. The problem is that internationally we’ve only got an organization that protects trade interests. Surely we need some kind of counterweight to protect human rights and the environment, too.
I don’t believe you can reduce the world to a mathematical formula. I start with the world, assume it’s complicated, and ask where can I get help from a whole range of disciplines.
Having women on boards is good for women, good for the economy and good for society. A win-win-win outcome: how rare.
Our guts can really mislead us. Sometimes, what we think of as our gut is something else, like an outside influence. If you’re going to buy an apartment and it smells of freshly baked bread, you’re more likely to want to buy it.
Email is having an increasingly pernicious effect. Not only is it having a perceptible effect on productivity, it’s skewing what it is we focus on. The immediate increasingly crowds out the important.
I really believe in a globalist agenda, but globalization isn’t just allowing companies to trade freely all over the world. It’s about what types of rights and responsibilities come with that.
In an age that is sometimes nowadays frightening or confusing, we feel reassured by the almost parental-like authority of experts who tell us so clearly what it is we can and cannot do.
I grew up in a highly political home. My mother was the co-chair of the 300 Group, an organisation whose aim was to get more women MPs into parliament, and she herself stood in the 1987 election, the year before she died.
When Apple introduced its game-changing iPhone in 2007, Nokia was caught sleeping on the job. Although it had actually developed an iPhone-style device – complete with a color touchscreen, maps, online shopping, the lot – some seven years earlier. Astonishingly, it never released the product.
At the end of the day, philanthropy can only ever be an adjunct to what governments provide. And government coffers need to be replenished.
With consumers having ever more choice, corporations must invest more and more in courting public opinion.
If somebody tweets ‘I like Coca-Cola,’ does that mean that they’re actually going to buy Coca-Cola? One can? Two cans? Three cans? If they retweet someone else’s Tweet, does that mean they’re going to buy it?
It is a world of extremes, which can be characterised most clearly in terms of exclusion. That means political exclusion, whereby the rights of citizens are marginalised by the interests of big business: George W Bush’s environmental policy, for example, is clearly formulated in the interests of U.S. energy companies.
The challenge for corporations, if offices were to become obsolete, is twofold. How will they be able to retain their distinct cultures? And how will they be able to ensure that all employees, wherever they work from, share a united identity and vision?
The global policy shift toward neo-liberalism that took place during the 1980s and 1990s was supposed, according to its proponents, to bring a convergence of living standards of richer and poorer nations. This never actually happened.
Errors in decision-making lead young people to under-save for retirement, doctors to miss tumours, CEOs to make catastrophic investments, governments to engage in needless wars, and parents to irreversibly traumatize their children.
Things do go wrong. Not everyone benefits from the capitalist dream.
Most of us are going through life without interrogating whether our decision-making processes are fit for purpose. And that’s something we need to change – especially when the stakes are high and the decisions are of real import.
Terrorism and trade cannot be the only issues on which the world unites. We must commit ourselves to a global coalition to deal with exclusion, too.
Most organisations do not actively seek out input from their lower echelons.
Surely in a world of email, video conferencing and virtual assistants, isn’t being expected to show up at the office extremely anachronistic? Yet to date it seems that where one works does matter. That creativity and innovation do feed off physical interactions between people.
Without industry, finance and government consciously and collaboratively ensuring that capital flows to where it is needed in order to ensure the scaling up of climate change solutions, whatever deal is agreed risks never being realised.
All of us show bias when it comes to what information we take in. We typically focus on anything that agrees with the outcome we want.
So key for making smart decisions is a mindset that actively monitors and is open to shifting tides and new information, one that is acutely aware that the interplay between our environment and its outcomes is ever in flux.
I try to take a weekly digital Sabbath, batch my emails so I deal with them a few times a day rather than constantly, and increasingly give myself permission to ignore unsolicited communiques. I try, too, to give others more slack. The respond-now culture is a two-way street. I’m trying to be more mindful of that.
I was really interested to see whether we could make predictions or forecasts by listening in on what people were saying on social media.
What about those who help growth indirectly, those who stay at home and look after others – mothers, carers of elderly parents or sick relatives who save the state millions of pounds annually. What is their worth? How is their value to be determined?
