Margaret Heffernan Quotes - Page 2

Making a company fit to sell may be the only way to ensure you never need a buyer.

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.

Instead, we have found ourselves gasping for air in a sea of corruption, dysfunction, environmental degradation, waste, disenchantment and inequality—and the harder we compete, the more unequal we become.

I don't think you ever know anyone until you see them in action.

A thinking partner who isn't an echo chamber... How many of us dare to have such collaborators?

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.

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.

One of the sad truths about leadership is that, the higher up the ladder you travel, the less you know.

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.

It is nobody's right to be waited on and nobody's fate to do the waiting.

Silence is the language of inertia.

When we confront facts and fears, we achieve real power and unleash our capacity for change.

We treasure what we can measure.

If we aren't going to be afraid of conflict, we have to see it as thinking.

Most executives I know are so action-oriented, or action-addicted, that time for reflection is the first casualty of their success.

Every organization has issues and concerns which are known about by many people who choose to remain silent.

Once you have power, you are inevitably surrounded by people who have their own agendas and will tell you whatever advances them.

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.

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.

Everyone I know feels harassed by email which has invaded their waking and sleeping hours.

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.

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.

Big data will never give you big ideas... Big data doesn't facilitate big leaps of the imagination. It will never conjure up a PC revolution or any kind of paradigm shift. And while it might tell you what to aim for, it can't tell you how to get there

Noise is a buffer, more effective than cubicles or booth walls.