I'm all for ambition and stretch goals. I set them for myself. But leadership isn't the same as cheerleading. Believing in something is a necessary but absolutely insufficient condition for making it come true.
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.
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.
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.
Very few entrepreneurs start their business on the back of market research. Instead, they have tremendous zeitgeist, honed by paying attention to where they are.
Every organization has issues and concerns which are known about by many people who choose to remain silent.
I don't mind if the couple next to me is tense or the kids are whiny. I'd even be happy to hear an honest argument, evidence of thinking. I'd like to know these teeth-perfect families don't just buy each other stuff but just occasionally can talk to one another.
In business, staying focused requires that you turn most opportunities down.
Most people have their best ideas when they take their minds away from problems they're trying to solve.
The medical profession is - and knows itself to be - endemically conservative and conformist.
The healthiest companies are always characterized by organic talent development.
The single hardest part of leading any organization is knowing what is going on. There's too much noise in the system, too much complexity: you absolutely depend on people speaking up and raising concerns.
It is nobody's right to be waited on and nobody's fate to do the waiting.
If we aren't going to be afraid of conflict, we have to see it as thinking.
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.
Noise is a buffer, more effective than cubicles or booth walls.
British innovation in design, in the creative arts, in engineering and manufacturing is world class.
Britain is famous for being great at inventing and poor at commercializing.
The vast literature concerning whistleblowers shows that, far from weird extremists, they are really quite ordinary people: male and female, young and old, junior and senior, no more nerdy or obsessive than most hard workers.
Once you have power, you are inevitably surrounded by people who have their own agendas and will tell you whatever advances them.
