Top 60 Margaret Heffernan Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “For good ideas and true innovation, you need human interaction, conflict, argument, debate.”

— Margaret Heffernan

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

— Margaret Heffernan

Featured in: Focus Quotes

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

— Margaret Heffernan

4. “You cannot fix a problem that you refuse to acknowledge.”

— Margaret Heffernan

5. “Companies don’t have ideas. Only people do. And what motivates people are the bonds of loyalty and trust they develop around each other.”

— Margaret Heffernan

6. “We treasure what we can measure.”

— Margaret Heffernan

7. “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

8. “Openness isn’t the end; it’s the beginning.”

— Margaret Heffernan

9. “The cell phone has become the adult’s transitional object, replacing the toddler’s teddy bear for comfort and a sense of belonging.”

— Margaret Heffernan

10. “Companies don’t have ideas. Only people do.”

— Margaret Heffernan

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

— Margaret Heffernan

12. “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

13. “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.”

— Margaret Heffernan

14. “A fantastic model of collaboration: thinking partners who aren’t echo chambers.”

— Margaret Heffernan

15. “The healthiest companies are always characterized by organic talent development.”

— Margaret Heffernan

16. “When we care about people, we care less about money, and when we care about money, we care less about people.”

— Margaret Heffernan

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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

20. “We have to see conflict as thinking and then get really good at it.”

— Margaret Heffernan

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

— Margaret Heffernan

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

— Margaret Heffernan

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

— Margaret Heffernan

24. “Silence is the language of inertia.”

— Margaret Heffernan

25. “Instead, we have found ourselves gasping for air in a sea of corruption, dysfunction, environmental degradation, waste, disenchantment and inequality – and the harder we compete, the more unequal we become.”

— Margaret Heffernan

26. “We know – intellectually – that confronting an issue is the only way to resolve it. But any resolution will disrupt the status quo. Given the choice between conflict and change on the one hand, and inertia on the other, the ostrich position can seem very attractive.”

— Margaret Heffernan

27. “Building businesses takes tremendous stamina, and success isn’t achieved without it.”

— Margaret Heffernan

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

— Margaret Heffernan

29. “There is no more powerful weapon for change than honesty.”

— Margaret Heffernan

30. “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

31. “Any fool can buy talent; only real leaders develop it.”

— Margaret Heffernan

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

— Margaret Heffernan

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

— Margaret Heffernan

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

— Margaret Heffernan

35. “Certainty is no guarantor of correctness.”

— Margaret Heffernan

36. “Most people have their best ideas when they take their minds away from problems they’re trying to solve.”

— Margaret Heffernan

37. “Being a critical thinker starts with resisting the urge to be a pleaser.”

— Margaret Heffernan

38. “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

39. “Questions are the heart and soul of constructive conflict. They open up the exploration, bring in new information, and reframe debate. When.”

— Margaret Heffernan

40. “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

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

— Margaret Heffernan

42. “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

43. “On overnight flights, I have trained myself to get to sleep almost instantly after takeoff. I always listen to the same audiobook on my iPod so my brain knows, regardless of time zone, that that voice means it’s time for bed.”

— Margaret Heffernan

44. “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

45. “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

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

— Margaret Heffernan

47. “If we aren’t going to be afraid of conflict, we have to see it as thinking.”

— Margaret Heffernan

48. “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

49. “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

50. “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