116 Quotes by Margaret Heffernan

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.

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.

The truth won’t set us free – until we develop the skills and the habit and the talent and the moral courage to use it.

Building businesses takes tremendous stamina, and success isn’t achieved without it.

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.

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.

The biggest catastrophes that we’ve witnessed rarely come from information that is secret or hidden. It comes from information that is freely available and out there, but that we are willfully blind to.

We know – intellectually – that confronting an issue is the only way to resolve it. But any resolution will disrupt the status quo. Given the choice between conflict and change on the one hand, and inertia on the other, the ostrich position can seem very attractive.

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.