Quotes from Margaret Heffernan

Companies are bought for their revenue, customer base, technology, or people. A few great companies offer all of these, but any valuable business offers one.

As a mother, I work hard every day and I expect that work to be recognized and appreciated. Because I work for and with human beings, sometimes they're grateful and sometimes they aren't.

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

The healthiest companies are always characterized by organic talent development.

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

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.

What do you want your business to do? Make money, of course. To pay for people and supplies, to be able to grow.

In business, staying focused requires that you turn most opportunities down.

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.

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.

A fantastic model of collaboration: thinking partners who aren't echo chambers.

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.

For good ideas and true innovation, you need human interaction, conflict, argument, debate

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.

Reading fiction—excerpts from National Book Award finalists, winners of the Pen/O. Henry Prize for short stories, or even Amazon bestsellers—has been shown to enhance theory of mind:

Be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart," Rilke wrote, advising a young poet, "and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue.… Live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answer.… [T]his is what you must work on however you can and not waste too much time and too much energy on clarifying your attitude to other people."9