Margaret Heffernan

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

“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.”

“The cell phone has become the adult's transitional object, replacing the toddler's teddy bear for comfort and a sense of belonging.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“You cannot fix a problem that you refuse to acknowledge.”

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

“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.”

“The healthiest companies are always characterized by organic talent development.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Money is just one of the forces that blind us to information and issues which we could pay attention to - but don't. 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 don't see. We wouldn't be so blind if our blindness didn't deliver rewards; the benefit of comfort and ease.”

“British innovation in design, in the creative arts, in engineering and manufacturing is world class.”

“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.”