Top Highlights

• “When you press the pause button on a machine, it stops. But when you press the pause button on human beings they start,” argues my friend and teacher Dov Seidman, CEO of LRN, which advises global businesses on ethics and leadership. “You start to reflect, you start to rethink your assumptions, you start to reimagine what is possible and, most impo...
• But all of this also means that with all of these energy flows in all of these directions, competition can now come from so many more directions, individuals, and companies. Historically, noted James Manyika, one of the authors of the McKinsey report, companies kept their eyes on competitors “who looked like them, were in their sector and in their ...
• Warren Bennis meant when he once famously observed that the “factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.”
• Our democracy can work only if voters know how the world works, so they are able to make intelligent policy choices and are less apt to fall prey to demagogues, ideological zealots, or conspiracy buffs who may be confusing them at best or deliberately misleading them at worst.
• On one of those occasions, I realized I didn’t care at all about my guest’s tardiness, so I said: “No, no, please—don’t apologize. In fact, you know what, thank you for being late!” Because he was late, I explained, I had minted time for myself. I had “found” a few minutes to just sit and think. I was having fun eavesdropping on the couple at the n...