Quotes from Margaret Heffernan

It is nobody's right to be waited on and nobody's fate to do the waiting.

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

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.

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.

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

Making a company fit to sell may be the only way to ensure you never need a buyer.

Openness isn't the end. It's the beginning.

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

If I have to spend a lot of time on planes, I try to think of this as time off. In certain ways, it's more restful than home: no Internet, no phones, no interruptions.

If we aren't going to be afraid of conflict, we have to see it as thinking.

I don't think a true company - one that builds sustainable value - can ever only exist online or remotely.

Once you have power, you are inevitably surrounded by people who have their own agendas and will tell you whatever advances them.

When we confront facts and fears, we achieve real power and unleash our capacity for change.

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.

A great advantage of a large corporation is supposed to be the large pool of talent in which its leaders can find and groom high achievers and successors.

Research shows that when we read words on paper, it reduces our stress levels by nearly 70 percent. We also read more carefully than on tablets or laptops.

Certainty is no guarantor of correctness.

As long as they are well-intentioned, mistakes are not a matter for shame but for learning

Clearing your head of distractions in order to notice and understand the people you are with can feel inefficient - there are so many other people and issues to think about. But being present makes you effective.

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

How can any company know if its processes, products, people are safe? Only if everyone is watching and telling the truth. The first part can be assumed; the second cannot.

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

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

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.