Boyan Slat Quotes

There's an urgent need to stop reacting to each immediate vexing issue in isolation. Such response often creates unanticipated second-order effects and even more problems for us.

Whether the task is fixing health care, upgrading K-12 education, bolstering national security, or a host of other missions, the U.S. is better at patching problems than fixing them.

It's very difficult to solve a lot of problems from the top down.

No given measure and no given set of measures will work a perfect cure for any serious evil.

We keep saying, 'No more 'band aid' solutions.'

You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.

However much a president wishes it, a national problem cannot be knocked out with a single punch. A president must work with the problem as much as against it, turn it into a solution if she can.

Governments do not have the answers - indeed, quite the reversal. A lot of times, they not only do not have the answers, but they themselves are the problem. If we are committed to helping our world's children, then we must begin to create solutions from the bottom up.

There is no silver bullet. I know people in Washington want grand solutions for everything.

One of the biggest challenges we have, as business owners and people, is that we think in linear terms.

People want bigger, bolder answers to the problems that exist. I felt, as leader, 'My analysis is big; are the answers big enough?'

We periodically note that there are no silver bullets, there are no magic formulas, there's no single action or component of the overall... comprehensive civil-military approach.

We have to be about finding long-term solutions to our biggest challenges.

The fundamental belief of CoreCause is to focus on a preventative rather than recovery stand point. Most of the worlds crises are the effects of a 'core cause' that if addressed would solve the problem entirely.

We have perfected the art of finding problems without fixing real-world issues. We focus too much on complexity, not harm.

Good governance is not fire-fighting or crisis-management. Instead of opting for ad-hoc solutions the need of the hour is to tackle the root cause of the problems.

I realize there are few sectors that can do what philanthropy does, which is look at big problems, take a long term view, try to develop strategies for addressing the root causes and then go about solving them.

True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity. False charity constrains the fearful and subdued, the "rejects of life," to extend their trembling hands. True generosity lies in striving so that these hands--whether of individuals or entire peoples--need be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work and, working, transform the world.

Becoming a strategic thinker is about opening your mind to possibilities. It’s about seeing the bigger picture. It’s about understanding the various parts of your business, taking them apart, and then putting them back together again in a more powerful way. It’s about insight, invention, emotion and imagination focused on reshaping some part of the world.

Change what you are doing; change your world. And if enough people do that, we can change the world.

Reversing structural problems in our economy that have been building up for two decades, that was gonna take time. It was gonna take more than a year. It was gonna take more than two years. It was gonna take more than one term. Probably takes more than one president.

Better jobs and housing are only temporary solutions. They are aspects of tokenism and don't go to the heart of the problem.

Big-picture thinkers broaden their outlook by striving to learn from every experience. They don't rest on their successes, they learn from them.

Rather, my perceptions about how we solve problems in health care or education span across a whole range of areas. And I want to try to capture that complexity.

How do we attack important problems? Pose the right question.