Noreena Hertz Quotes

Any leader needs to be constantly interested in what's going on in the world, and constantly ready - even when things are going well - to change.

If you have to forecast, forecast often.

The No. 1 criticism most managers get is that they don't ever change or wait too long to make changes... It's very simple: Either things are performing or they're not. And if it's not performing, we have to make changes.

A president, like a college freshman, can't know in advance which questions he'll have to answer or what topics he'll have to master. He has to be flexible, supple, and responsive. He has to be comfortable with multiple-choice.

As a leader, you have to have the ability to assimilate new information and understand that there might be a different view.

In a start-up company, you basically throw out all assumptions every three weeks.

We need to build change in to our systems and let these systems evolve as circumstances change. Change is inevitable, but we need to do a better job of dealing with it, because when we start building huge gleaming monoliths, I think we start getting into trouble.

We cannot assume that past successes will insure future successes.

We need to be able to make decisions even though part of the information that we have is incorrect and wrong.

It is difficult to change the rules in the middle of a crisis.

As an intelligence analyst you have to tell the president what you know, what you think you know and what you don’t know.

At the end of the day, none of us are the Oracle of Delphi, so we don't get everything right. It's always good to be able to listen and to take on what seems to be the right thing to do.

Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do: when neither innateness nor learning has prepared you for the particular situation.

We tell prospective hires, 'If you want an environment that is never going to change, don't come here. This is not the place for you.'

You need a different checklist and different mental models for different companies.

The more adaptability exists for a given kind of decision, the less risky it is to make plans for the future, and therefore the more likely it is that more people will make more plans in such areas.

The pace of change is so great, there is always something else going on. What that says to me is that you have to have strategic vision and peripheral vision. Strategic vision is the ability to look ahead and peripheral vision is the ability to look around, and both are important.

You've gotta have a path [in your life]. And then, within that path, you have to be flexible. When things aren't working, you've gotta cut bait and find something else, but if you don't have a path, you're just dead.

Making good judgments when one has complete data, facts, and knowledge is not leadership - it's bookkeeping

• As society rapidly changes, individuals will have to be able to function comfortably in a world that is always in flux. Knowledge will continue to increase at a dizzying rate. This means that a content-based curriculum, with a set body of information to be imparted to students, is entirely inappropriate as a means of preparing children for their adult roles.

Never, never, never think - that's one lesson you should have in life. Never think that lack of variability is stability.

I used to think that running an organization was equivalent to conducting a symphony orchestra. But I don't think that's quite it; it's more like jazz. There is more improvisation. Someone once wrote that the sound of surprise is jazz, and if there's any one thing that we must try to get used to in this world, it's surprise and the unexpected. Truly, we are living in world where the only thing that's constant is change.

I don't think we're ever going to be in a position where we can say this is the template, this is the checklist, that must be met [for intervention].

Plan B. You've always got to have a Plan B.

The transition strategies are more important than understanding what the outcome state will be.