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.
Most people have their best ideas when they take their minds away from problems they’re trying to solve.
When we care about people, we care less about money, and when we care about money, we care less about people.
Any fool can buy talent; only real leaders develop it.
In our house, Mother’s Day is every day. Father’s Day, too. In our house, parents count. They do important work and that work matters. One day just doesn’t cut for us.
One of the sad truths about leadership is that, the higher up the ladder you travel, the less you know.
We treasure what we can measure.
Silence is the language of inertia.
You cannot fix a problem that you refuse to acknowledge.
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.
Being a critical thinker starts with resisting the urge to be a pleaser.
On a voyage of exploration, how can you price what you’ll find before you even set sail?
Indeed, there seems to be some evidence not only that all love is based on illusion – but that love positively requires illusion in order to endure.
Those who consistently attempt multitasking find it harder to ignore irrelevant information and take longer moving between tasks – in other words, for all their frantic activity, they’re actually wasting time. And.
Questions are the heart and soul of constructive conflict. They open up the exploration, bring in new information, and reframe debate. When.
It’s when we stop and think that we rediscover the courage, wit, compassion, imagination, delight, frustration, discovery, and devotion that work can provoke – in short, all the things at work that do count, beyond measure.
Over 100 years of research into productivity has shown that, after about forty hours a week, when we work longer, we make more mistakes – and the extra time goes to cleaning them up, the mess we made. ‘We see it here in England and in the.
In business,” Siilasmaa said, “we forget that we are human. Many strong leaders think they should not be friends with their colleagues. I disagree. Business is emotional. I like to be friends with my colleagues. You get through a crisis because you care so much.
When we trade the effort of doubt and debate for the ease of blind faith, we become gullible and exposed, passive and irresponsible observers of our own lives. Worse still, we leave ourselves wide open to those who profit by influencing our behavior, our thinking, and our choices. At that moment, our agency in our own lives is in jeopardy.
Because it takes less brain power to believe than to doubt, we are, when tired or distracted, gullible.25 Because we are all biased, and biases are quick and effortless, exhaustion makes us favor the information we know and are comfortable with. We’re too tired to do the heavier lifting of examining new or contradictory information, so we fall back on our biases, the opinions and the people we already trust.
Knowing the hard limits to our cognitive capacity and the huge cost of working long hours should not be an intractable problem to address. We have a century of data and a roll call of the disastrous consequences that follow those who insist that heroic hours are a proof of commitment to an employer. Companies that measure work by hours could make themselves smarter by the simple act of measuring contribution by output and rewarding those who go home.