Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Things do go wrong. Not everyone benefits from the capitalist dream.
Most organisations do not actively seek out input from their lower echelons.
My parents were entrepreneurs. I grew up believing in the power of innovation.
Managing dissent is about recognizing the value of disagreement, discord and difference.
With consumers having ever more choice, corporations must invest more and more in courting public opinion.
Having women on boards is good for women, good for the economy and good for society. A win-win-win outcome: how rare.
Experience is not the poor relation of expertise. Valuable insights in business often come from the people on the ground.
I was - the last protest I was at was in Genoa, where I got tear gassed, and I hate tear gas, and I hate being in crowds.
Most philanthropists would still rather donate to elite schools, concert halls or religious groups than help the poor or sick.
I've become increasingly fascinated with social media to improve on traditional ways of preparing for and predicting the future.
All of us show bias when it comes to what information we take in. We typically focus on anything that agrees with the outcome we want.
I was really interested to see whether we could make predictions or forecasts by listening in on what people were saying on social media.
At the end of the day, philanthropy can only ever be an adjunct to what governments provide. And government coffers need to be replenished.
Most of us are 'ultraconformists' when it comes to who we are most likely to follow... to socialise with, or even who we are most likely to hire.
Terrorism and trade cannot be the only issues on which the world unites. We must commit ourselves to a global coalition to deal with exclusion, too.
We need to have much clearer regulations on things like corporate funding of scientific research. Things need to be made explicit which are implicit.
Consumers, unlike voters, expect an immediate response to their concerns; and companies, unlike governments, do not have the luxury of a mid-term lull.
All company bosses want a policy on corporate social responsibility. The positive effect is hard to quantify, but the negative consequences of a disaster are enormous.
Stress makes us prone to tunnel vision, less likely to take in the information we need. Anxiety makes us more risk-averse than we would be regularly and more deferential.
I'm really looking at questions of power, navigation, and spin. Then I am also looking for real-world stories that give me greater insight into smart and new ways of thinking.
When it comes to getting more women into parliament, politicians have at least started to take active measures. The British Labour Party introduced all-female shortlists in 1997.
I don't believe you can reduce the world to a mathematical formula. I start with the world, assume it's complicated, and ask where can I get help from a whole range of disciplines.
You want to challenge experts, because experts get a lot wrong. Doctors misdiagnose one time in five. In the U.S. and Canada, 50,000 people die every year who would not have had to.
In an age that is sometimes nowadays frightening or confusing, we feel reassured by the almost parental-like authority of experts who tell us so clearly what it is we can and cannot do.
I really believe in a globalist agenda, but globalization isn't just allowing companies to trade freely all over the world. It's about what types of rights and responsibilities come with that.
Get into the habit of imagining an alternate scenario. By posing such 'imagine if' questions... we can distance ourselves from the frames, cues, anchors and rhetoric that might be affecting us.
Email is having an increasingly pernicious effect. Not only is it having a perceptible effect on productivity, it's skewing what it is we focus on. The immediate increasingly crowds out the important.
We are living in a time in which movies such as 'Super Size Me' and 'An Inconvenient Truth' have made box-office history, and books such as 'No Logo' and my own, 'The Silent Takeover,' are bestsellers.
I have problems with this very extreme form of capitalism where the pendulum has swung so far in one direction, where the focus is completely on the short term, and no one is thinking about the consequences.
If somebody tweets 'I like Coca-Cola,' does that mean that they're actually going to buy Coca-Cola? One can? Two cans? Three cans? If they retweet someone else's Tweet, does that mean they're going to buy it?
Philanthropists today want input into how their monies are being deployed. The big question is, can governments use this insight to sell the rich the idea of paying more tax rather than spend more on charitable giving?
I grew up in a highly political home. My mother was the co-chair of the 300 Group, an organisation whose aim was to get more women MPs into parliament, and she herself stood in the 1987 election, the year before she died.
From solar to electric cars, from geothermal to reconfiguring the grid, the scale of investment needed in green technologies in order to meet whatever agreements on emissions reductions are finally agreed will be immense.
Child labour may be distasteful to westerners, but does boycotting goods made with child labour improve or exacerbate the lot of third world children? Trusting the market to regulate may not ultimately be in our interest.
Goodwill and reputation are intangibles, but they are the keys to business success. Since they are also inexorably linked to social values, it follows that a change in social norms will have a significant impact on profits.
So key for making smart decisions is a mindset that actively monitors and is open to shifting tides and new information, one that is acutely aware that the interplay between our environment and its outcomes is ever in flux.
Our guts can really mislead us. Sometimes, what we think of as our gut is something else, like an outside influence. If you're going to buy an apartment and it smells of freshly baked bread, you're more likely to want to buy it.
Most of us are going through life without interrogating whether our decision-making processes are fit for purpose. And that's something we need to change - especially when the stakes are high and the decisions are of real import.
Errors in decision-making lead young people to under-save for retirement, doctors to miss tumours, CEOs to make catastrophic investments, governments to engage in needless wars, and parents to irreversibly traumatize their children.
It's actually very surprising how little we think about the quality of our decision-making and how we could improve it. How absent decision-making classes are from educational curricula. How little we think about how it is we think.
The global policy shift toward neo-liberalism that took place during the 1980s and 1990s was supposed, according to its proponents, to bring a convergence of living standards of richer and poorer nations. This never actually happened.
Employees speak of being fearful opening emails and feeling increasingly helpless in the face of the deluge. Physiologically, we now know that the state of continuous disruption puts us into a constant state of hormone-induced stress.
Without industry, finance and government consciously and collaboratively ensuring that capital flows to where it is needed in order to ensure the scaling up of climate change solutions, whatever deal is agreed risks never being realised.
We need to know how we are feeling. Mindfully acknowledging our feelings serves as an 'emotional thermostat' that recalibrates our decision making. It's not that we can't be anxious, it's that we need to acknowledge to ourselves that we are.
Transparency, accountability and sustainability have become the slogans of the market leaders. Companies carry out environmental and social audits to court the consumer, and even the bluest chips woo organisations such as Greenpeace and Amnesty.
I grew up in a home where I was literally told from a young age, 'No daughter of mine will ever wash a man's socks,' and I am pleased to say I never have. It was made clear that whatever I wanted to do I should aspire to, regardless of my gender.
With clothing being designed that allows you to be hugged virtually, video conferencing becoming ever sharper, and our social and romantic lives increasingly taking place online, the gap between the physical and the virtual is getting ever smaller.
What about those who help growth indirectly, those who stay at home and look after others - mothers, carers of elderly parents or sick relatives who save the state millions of pounds annually. What is their worth? How is their value to be determined?
The challenge for corporations, if offices were to become obsolete, is twofold. How will they be able to retain their distinct cultures? And how will they be able to ensure that all employees, wherever they work from, share a united identity and vision?
We are deluged with information. We have to process now three times as much data as we would have done 50 years ago. We're bombarded with tweets, with emails - a state of continuous disruption - and that's bad for our decision making and bad for our thinking.