James Surowiecki Quotes - Page 2

One of the problems that exacerbates procrastination is the feeling that you have lots of different things to do and no clear sense of which matter more, when they should be done, etc.

If you thought the advent of the Internet, the spread of cheap and efficient information technology, and the growing fragmentation of the consumer market were all going to help smaller companies thrive at the expense of the slow-moving giants of the Fortune 500, apparently you were wrong.

The smartest groups, then, are made up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent of each other. Independence doesn't imply rationality or impartiality, though. You can be biased and irrational, but as long as you're independent, you won't make the group any dumber.

The value of a currency is, ultimately, what someone will give you for it - whether in food, fuel, assets, or labor. And that's always and everywhere a subjective decision.

You can't fuel real economic growth with indiscriminate credit. You can only fuel it with well-allocated, long-term investment.

It's a familiar truism that at any one moment, financial markets are dominated by either fear or greed. But the healthiest markets are those that are animated by both fear and greed at the same time.

We assume that good-looking people are smarter and more effective than they really are, and that homely people are the reverse.

Framing effects can be very influential, and to the degree that you can think of a task as close rather than distant, you're more likely to actually get it done.

Nike used to be known as Blue Ribbon Sports. What's now Sara Lee used to be Consolidated Foods. And Exxon was once Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. These were name changes that worked. But for all the ones that do, there are 10 or 20 that don't.

Now, modern economies have a very effective mechanism for deciding if salaries are really too high: it's called the free market. That's how most people's salaries are set, after all, including those of major-league baseball players and European soccer players.

Solyndra's failure isn't a reason for the government to give up on alternative energy, any more than the failure of Pets.com during the Internet bubble means that venture capital should steer clear of tech projects.

Being unemployed is even more disastrous for individuals than you'd expect. Aside from the obvious harm - poverty, difficulty paying off debts - it seems to directly affect people's health, particularly that of older workers.

To be sure, if you watch CNBC all day long you'll pick up some interesting news about particular companies and the economy as a whole. Unfortunately, to get to the useful information, you have to wade through reams of useless stuff, with little guidance on how to distinguish between the two.

The truth is that the United States doesn't need, and shouldn't have, a debt ceiling. Every other democratic country, with the exception of Denmark, does fine without one.

Developing countries often have hypertrophied bureaucracies, requiring businesses to deal with enormous amounts of red tape.

The history of the Internet is, in part, a series of opportunities missed: the major record labels let Apple take over the digital-music business; Blockbuster refused to buy Netflix for a mere fifty million dollars; Excite turned down the chance to acquire Google for less than a million dollars.

Downsizing itself is an inevitable part of any creatively destructive economy.

It may be that the very qualities that help people get ahead are the ones that make them ill-suited for managing crises. It's hard to prepare for the worst when you think you're the best.

Steve Jobs was rare: a C.E.O. who actually had a huge impact on his company's fortunes. Contrary to corporate mythology, most C.E.O.s could be easily replaced, if not by your average Joe, then by your average executive vice-president. But Jobs genuinely earned the label of superstar.

The financial crisis of 2008 was not caused by investment banks betting against the housing market in 2007. It was caused by the fact that too few investors - including all of the big investment banks - bet too heavily on the housing market in the years before 2007.

I think there is clearly a connection between free time and procrastination. The more you have of the former, all things being equal, the more likely you are to procrastinate.

Patrimonial capitalism's legacy is that many people see reform as a euphemism for corruption and self-dealing.

From a social point of view, it's beneficial that homeownership encourages commitment to a given town or city. But, from an economic point of view, it's good for people to be able to leave places where there's less work and move to places where there's more.

Life insurance became popular only when insurance companies stopped emphasizing it as a good investment and sold it instead as a symbolic commitment by fathers to the future well-being of their families.

In the days when corporate downsizing was all the rage, Wall Street took a lot of flak for judging companies too harshly and setting the bar for corporate performance so high that executives felt their only option was to slash payrolls.