Margaret Heffernan

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.

Words are how people think. When you misuse words, you diminish your ability to think clearly and truthfully.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Every organization has issues and concerns which are known about by many people who choose to remain silent.

One of the sad truths about leadership is that, the higher up the ladder you travel, the less you know.

I haven't always hated McDonald's. When my kids were little and I lived in the U.S., they were as susceptible as anyone to Happy Meals and tatty toys that subsequently littered our sitting room.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Customers who have to come back and spend, or customers who just don't want the hassle of leaving - those are the ones who are most worth attracting.

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.

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

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

The healthiest companies are always characterized by organic talent development.