Quotes by Margaret Heffernan

“The weight of the evidence makes it clear that the only people who would believe that AOLs real concern is the privacy and security if its members are the kind of people who believed that East Germany built the Berlin Wall to protect its citizens.”

“I think its more complicated than that. Balance certainly is not half and half ...”

“Who defines us: Our employers or ourselves?”

When we care about people, we care less about money, and when we care about money, we care less about people.

Money is just one of the forces that blind us to information and issues which we could pay attention to - but dont. It exacerbates and often rewards all the other drivers of willful blindness; our preference for the familiar, our love for individuals and for big ideas, a love of busyness and our dislike of conflict and change, the human instinct to obey and conform and our skill at displacing and diffusing responsibility. All of these operate and collaborate with varying intensities at different moments in our lives. The common denominator is that they all make us protect our sense of self-worth, reducing dissonance and conferring a sense of security, however illusory. In some ways, they all act like money; making us feel good at first, with consequences we dont see. We wouldnt be so blind if our blindness didnt deliver rewards; the benefit of comfort and ease.

In treating people as less important than things, work becomes both demoralised and demoralising and we become blind to the moral content of our decisions...Money and wilfful blindness make us act in ways incompatible wiht what believe our ethics to be, and often even with our own self-interest...the problem with money isnt fundamentally about greed, although it can be comforting to think so. The problem with money is that we live in societies in which mutual support and co-operation is essential, but money erodes the relationships we need to lead productive, fulfilling and genuinely happy lives. When money becomes the dominant behavior, it doesnt cooperate with, or amplify, our relationships; it disengages us from them.

You cannot fix a problem that you refuse to acknowledge.

according to the psychologist irving Janis, is that our sense of belonging (which makes us feel safe) blinds us to dangers and encourages greater risk-taking.

The combination of power, optimism and abstract thinking makes powerful people more certain. The more cut-off they are from others, the more confident they are that they are right.

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.

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.

In our house, Mothers Day is every day. Fathers Day, too. In our house, parents count. They do important work and that work matters. One day just doesnt cut for us.

Speaking is what most people work on. They forget the thinking and the breathing and instead try to occupy space with sound.

Everywhere I look, there are ads marking Mothers Day. Mostly they conform to stereotype: flowers, jewelry, perfume. Not a lot of books. Not many computers. Few tools. Little thats useful.

Britain is famous for being great at inventing and poor at commercializing.

For good ideas and true innovation, you need human interaction, conflict, argument, debate.

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

Making those around you feel invisible is the opposite of leadership.

Im all for ambition and stretch goals. I set them for myself. But leadership isnt the same as cheerleading. Believing in something is a necessary but absolutely insufficient condition for making it come true.

The medical profession is - and knows itself to be - endemically conservative and conformist.