Heffernan Quotes & Sayings

When we are tired or preoccupied - what psychologists call 'resource-depleted' - we start to economise, to conserve those resources. Higher-order thinking is more expensive. So too is doubt, scepticism, arugment. 'Resource depletion specifically disables cognitive elaboration,' wrote Harvard psychologist Daniel Gillbert ... Because it takes less brain power to believe than to doublt, we are, when tired or distracted, gullible. Because we are all biased, and biases are quick and effortless, exhaustion tends to make us prefer the information we know and are comfortable with. We are too tired to do the heavier lifting of examining new or contradictory information, so we fall back on our biases the opinions and the people we already trust — Margaret Heffernan

When you're in L.A., and you're making movies and that kind of stuff, you don't really get a sense sometimes, I think, what the fans are like. — Kevin Heffernan

Bosses and leaders everywhere should cherish the people who bring them bad news, disappointing data or hard problems. — Margaret Heffernan

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

If it's ever fair to say that anything has "changed everything," it's fair to say so about the Internet. — Virginia Heffernan

When we care about people, we care less about money, and when we care about money, we care less about people. — Margaret Heffernan

Indeed, there seems to be some evidence not only that all love is based on illusion - but that love positively requires illusion in order to endure. — Margaret Heffernan

Business is not a science; it is not susceptible to experiments that can be controlled and replicated. Everything in business is too unpredictable for that - every business, employee, product, market is different and keeps changing. — Margaret Heffernan

As I sat alone at the computer hour after hour it seemed I was learning "computers." In fact, I was learning culture. — Virginia Heffernan

Because that's what a comic is, ultimately: a collection of pages. It's not a flatpanel or a touchscreen, even though that's where it might eventually be displayed. It's a page. — John Heffernan

A thinking partner who isn't an echo chamber ... How many of us dare to have such collaborators? — Margaret Heffernan

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. — Margaret Heffernan

I don't think you ever know anyone until you see them in action. — Margaret Heffernan

In treating people as less important than things, work becomes both demoralised and demoralising and we become blind to the moral content of our decisions ... Money and wilfful blindness make us act in ways incompatible wiht what believe our ethics to be, and often even with our own self-interest ... the problem with money isn't fundamentally about greed, although it can be comforting to think so. The problem with money is that we live in societies in which mutual support and co-operation is essential, but money erodes the relationships we need to lead productive, fulfilling and genuinely happy lives. When money becomes the dominant behavior, it doesn't cooperate with, or amplify, our relationships; it disengages us from them. — Margaret Heffernan

Openness isn't the end; it's the beginning. — Margaret Heffernan

You cannot fix a problem that you refuse to acknowledge. — Margaret Heffernan

The only consequence of their (employee) silence is that the blind (employer) lead the blind. — Margaret Heffernan

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. — Margaret Heffernan

Tweets are not diseased rings of glitchy minds. They're epigrams, aphorisms, maxims, dictums, taglines, captions, slogans, and adages. Some are art, some are commercial; these are forms with integrity. — Virginia Heffernan

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. — Margaret Heffernan

Now let's make Virginia Heffernan a man. Can you imagine the same kind of spittle-flecked rage directed at a busy working father who admits to feeding his kids Annie's Organic Mac & Cheese? — Emily Matchar

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. — Margaret Heffernan

When I come out to do my stand-up set, I pretty much get bombarded with lines from movies. You try to play off it a little bit, but that's what people want to see. Some clubs, the drunker the audience gets, the more they heckle. — Kevin Heffernan

The healthiest companies are always characterized by organic talent development. — Margaret Heffernan

If you have never failed at anything, then you haven't been trying hard enough, aren't very imaginative, or have had such extraordinarily good luck that you have come to believe you are invincible. — Margaret Heffernan

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. — Margaret Heffernan

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

The combination of power, optimism and abstract thinking makes powerful people more certain. The more cut-off they are from others, the more confident they are that they are right. — Margaret Heffernan

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. — Margaret Heffernan

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

It's a truism that love is blind; what's less obvious is just how much evidence it can ignore. — Margaret Heffernan

Silence is the language of inertia. — Margaret Heffernan

Digital forms are best illuminated by cultural criticism, which uses the tools of art and literary theory to make sense of the Internet's glorious illusion: that the Internet is life. Because — Virginia Heffernan

Those who consistently attempt multitasking find it harder to ignore irrelevant information and take longer moving between tasks - in other words, for all their frantic activity, they're actually wasting time. And — Margaret Heffernan

thinking: a rather prosaic, low-tech concept, easily forgotten and routinely underrated. But — Margaret Heffernan

Unless you are rich, and can con vales center in a sanatorium estate (where visitors came down a tiered, oceanside lawn to found you ato your easel) you have to keep going when you're depressed. That means phone calls, appointments errands, holidays, family, friends, and colleagues. — Virginia Heffernan

We have to see conflict as thinking and then get really good at it. — Margaret Heffernan

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

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. — Margaret Heffernan

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. — 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. — Margaret Heffernan

Most people have their best ideas when they take their minds away from problems they're trying to solve. — Margaret Heffernan

Over the past two decades screens have proliferated, filling our purses, pockets, and bedside tables. The living room is no longer configured around a single blazing digital fireplace, the television; instead it flashes with decentralized brushfires: ereaders, tablets, laptops, desktops, smartphones, televisions, refrigerator screens. As for the radios and bookshelves that were supposed to vanish with the digitalization of the American home, they've stubbornly remained. — Virginia Heffernan

As long as it (an issue) remains invisible, it is guaranteed to remain insoluble. — Margaret Heffernan

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. — Margaret Heffernan

But even if, as Johnson argues, power and dominance serve no meaningful purpose, they always incur costs. In biology, the cost can be painfully visible. During courtship, the argus cock pheasant spreads his large secondary wing feathers, which are decorated with beautiful eye spots; the bigger they are, the more they stimulate the female. And the longer the feathers, the more progeny the cock will produce. So the more beautiful cocks produce more descendants. That should be a competitive advantage. But the evolution of the argus pheasant has run itself into a blind alley because the most gorgeous cock has feathers so huge and unwieldy that they may cause him to be eaten by a predator, because he can't fly away fast enough. Oskar Heinroth, the teacher of Konrad Lorenz, commented: 'Next to the wings of the argus pheasant, the hectic life of western civilized man is the most stupid product of intra-specific selection! — Margaret Heffernan

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. — Margaret Heffernan

The truth won't set us free - until we develop the skills and the habit and the talent and the moral courage to use it. — Margaret Heffernan

It's when we stop and think that we rediscover the courage, wit, compassion, imagination, delight, frustration, discovery, and devotion that work can provoke - in short, all the things at work that do count, beyond measure. — Margaret Heffernan

According to the psychologist irving Janis, is that our sense of belonging (which makes us feel safe) blinds us to dangers and encourages greater risk-taking. — Margaret Heffernan

Speaking is what most people work on. They forget the thinking and the breathing and instead try to occupy space with sound. — Margaret Heffernan

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: — Margaret Heffernan

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

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

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. — Margaret Heffernan

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. — Margaret Heffernan

Questions are the heart and soul of constructive conflict. They open up the exploration, bring in new information, and reframe debate. When — Margaret Heffernan

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. — Margaret Heffernan

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. — Margaret Heffernan

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. — Margaret Heffernan

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

A great deal of creativity is about pattern recognition, and what you need to discern patterns is tons of data. Your mind collects that data by taking note of random details and anomalies easily seen every day: quirks and changes that, eventually, add up to insights. — Margaret Heffernan

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. — Margaret Heffernan

Even more important, I needed to follow the advice of the emperor Hadrian, as imagined by Marguerite Yourcenar: "Our great mistake is to try to exact from each person virtues which he does not possess, and to neglect the cultivation of those he has." I needed to learn how to see that though the cashier is sullen, she makes perfect change and that is enough — Deborah Daw Heffernan

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

[For constructive conflict,] we have to resist the neurobiological drive which means that we really prefer people mostly like ourselves. — Margaret Heffernan

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

For good ideas and true innovation, you need human interaction, conflict, argument, debate. — Margaret Heffernan

I began to think that melancholy was a dialect that only some people knew-or could even hear-and in my conversations, I sought these people out. — Virginia Heffernan

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

Overall, people are about twice as likely to seek information that supports their own point of view as they are to consider an opposing idea.19 — Margaret Heffernan

The turn away from the BlackBerry and toward the iPhone is a reckoning with our essential nature and how we currently process, deploy, and enjoy symbolic communication. — Virginia Heffernan

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

I remember I was supposed to take the bar exam that summer just when we got the chance to make our first feature. I told my parents I wasn't going to take the bar exam, and they were pretty upset about it. — Kevin Heffernan

There is no more powerful weapon for change than honesty. — Margaret Heffernan

As any American with children knows, our children have at least one bright, clear reason for being: to furnish subjects for digital photographs that can be corrected, cropped, captioned, organized, categorized, albumized, broadcast, turned into screen savers, and brandished on online social networks. — Virginia Heffernan

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

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. — Margaret Heffernan

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

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. — Margaret Heffernan

I went to law school after college. — Kevin Heffernan

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

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

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. — Margaret Heffernan

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

Everywhere I look, there are ads marking Mother's Day. Mostly they conform to stereotype: flowers, jewelry, perfume. Not a lot of books. Not many computers. Few tools. Little that's useful. — Margaret Heffernan

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

It's just so hard to get movies made, especially comedies. — Kevin Heffernan

Money is just one of the forces that blind us to information and issues which we could pay attention to - but don't. It exacerbates and often rewards all the other drivers of willful blindness; our preference for the familiar, our love for individuals and for big ideas, a love of busyness and our dislike of conflict and change, the human instinct to obey and conform and our skill at displacing and diffusing responsibility. All of these operate and collaborate with varying intensities at different moments in our lives. The common denominator is that they all make us protect our sense of self-worth, reducing dissonance and conferring a sense of security, however illusory. In some ways, they all act like money; making us feel good at first, with consequences we don't see. We wouldn't be so blind if our blindness didn't deliver rewards; the benefit of comfort and ease. — Margaret Heffernan

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

Any fool can buy talent; only real leaders develop it. — Margaret Heffernan

When you're acting and directing, you're standing there acting with another actor, and you're trying to do your performance, and at the same time you're watching their performance, and making sure the lights are in the right place, and if the person is wearing the right wardrobe. All these things are going on in your head. — Kevin Heffernan

We shouldn't confuse grief over the passing of our favorite technology with resentment because some digital alchemy failed to preserve analog experiences. Whether or not we admit it, the internet and its artifacts are not just like their cultural precedents. They're not even a rough translation -- or a strong misreading -- of those precedents. — Virginia Heffernan

Certainty is no guarantor of correctness. — Margaret Heffernan

Those in powerless positions aren't about to complain about bullying bosses, abusive supervisors or corrupt co-workers. There is no safe way to do so and no process that promises redress. — Margaret Heffernan

Money appears to motivate only our interest in ourselves, making us selfish and self-centered ... Money makes people feel self-sufficient, which also means they don't need or care about others; it's each man for himself — Margaret Heffernan

Cruise through the gargantuan sites - YouTube, Amazon, Yahoo! - and it's as though modernism never existed. Twentieth-century print design never existed. European and Japanese design never existed. The Web's aesthetic might be called late-stage Atlantic City or early-stage Mall of America. — Virginia Heffernan

Dominant people, it appears, use snap judgements and conform to received wisdom more than do the less dominant. Those who need power, and those who have it, think differently. — Margaret Heffernan

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

I wondered if all of us churchgoers were just exhausted by grief. For the dying priest and us, I thought, "God" always refused to become glorious, instead stubbornly remaining plain, a headache, a sorrowful knot of language. — Virginia Heffernan