Everybody has the same size box

--- Michael Hsu, quoted in Business Travel Won’t Be Taking Off Soon Amid Coronavirus, Wall Street Journal, 15 June 2020

From the article

Michael Hsu, chief executive of Kimberly-Clark Corp., the maker of Cottonelle toilet paper, said he has found Zoom calls more effective than some in-person meetings with his executive team. In face-to-face executive roundtables, people fidget and look at their phones, he said, but on Zoom people are forced to be attentive. Mr. Hsu said he also finds such meetings to be more “egalitarian” because no one is at the head of the table, so executives speak up more often and more candidly.

“Everybody has the same size box,” he said.

what forms of psychological manipulation will we consider to be acceptable business models?

--- James Williams, author of Stand out of our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy (CUP 2018), speaking on the Talking Politics podcast 25 April, 2018, at timecode 24:39

The fundamental question for society to answer is, what forms of psychological manipulation will we consider to be acceptable business models.

Trust is the bridge between the known and the unknown

--- Rachel Botsman, Said Business School, University of Oxford, author of "Who can you trust," in "In what? we trust" by Douglas Heaven, New Scientist, issue 3149, 28 October 2017

Quote in context

Trust is a human instinct that is essential to our survival. It first evolved when we lived in small tribal groups, and probably provided benefits in times of conflict. Groups that were better at working together – more trusting – were more likely to survive than less cooperative rivals.

“All societies are based on trust because you can’t do everything yourself,” says Luciano Floridi, who studies online trust at the Oxford Internet Institute in the UK. “At some point you have to trust someone to keep the fire going.”

The trouble is, trusting groups can always be exploited by untrustworthy individuals. Putting your trust in someone puts you at risk, it makes you vulnerable. “Trust is the bridge between the known and the unknown,” says Rachel Botsman at the University of Oxford’s Said Business School.

"behind every great fortune there is a psychological aberration"

--- The Economist's Schumpeter columnist, in Great bad men as bosses, 23 July 2011.

Quote in context:

Balzac supposedly wrote that “behind every great fortune lies a great crime”. It would be truer to say that behind every great fortune there is a psychological aberration. Henry Ford hated Jews. George Eastman sanctioned industrial espionage. Thomas Watson turned IBM into a personality cult, complete with company songs about “our friend and guiding hand”, a man whose “courage none can stem”. Michael Milken, the inventor of junk bonds, was jailed. Richard Tedlow of Harvard Business School argues that many “giants of enterprise” suffer from what Norwegians call stormannsgalskap, the madness of great men.

Stormannsgalskap is particularly common among media barons, not least because they frequently blur the line between reporting reality and shaping it. William Randolph Hearst is widely suspected of stirring up the Spanish-American war to give his papers something to report. Lord Beaverbrook regarded himself as a kingmaker, literally so in the case of George VI. These men’s megalomania was captured in two masterworks: Orson Welles’s film “Citizen Kane” and Evelyn Waugh’s novel “Scoop”.

The ugly side of these entrepreneurs is often just as important to their success as their admirable side. You cannot reshape an industry without extraordinary confidence in your own rightness. And it is hard to build a great company from scratch without what Mr Tedlow dubs “the imperialism of the soul”. But these negative qualities often end up undermining the empires that they helped to create.

"Innovation is unnatural"

--- The Economist's Schumpeter columnist, in  review (Aug 30, 2010) of “The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge” by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble ("G&T")

From the piece:

G&T say that you need to start by recognising that innovation is unnatural. Established businesses are built for efficiency, which depends on predictability and repeatability—on breaking tasks down into their component parts and holding employees accountable for hitting their targets. But innovation is by definition unpredictable and uncertain. Bosses may sing a pretty song about innovation being the future. But in practice the heads of operational units will favour the known over the unknown.

...

G&T argue that companies need to build dedicated innovation machines. These machines need to be free to recruit people from outside (since big companies tend to attract company men rather than rule-breakers). They also need to be free from some of the measures that prevail in the rest of the company. But they must avoid becoming skunk works. They need to be integrated with the rest of the company—they must share some staff, for example, and they must tap into the wider company’s resources as they turn ideas into products. And they must be tightly managed according to customised rather than generic rules. For example, they should be held accountable for their ability to learn from mistakes rather than for their ability to hit their budgets.

Sounds good, but it's easy to give recipes. Still, it's a good quote