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" It's actually very surprising how little we think about the quality of our decision-making and how we could improve it. How absent decision-making classes are from educational curricula. How little we think about how it is we think. "

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" From solar to electric cars, from geothermal to reconfiguring the grid, the scale of investment needed in green technologies in order to meet whatever agreements on emissions reductions are finally agreed will be immense. "

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" Rather than empowering all, consumer and shareholder activism gives greatest voice to those with the most money in their pockets, those who can switch from seller to seller with relative ease. Consumer and shareholder activism is a form of protest that favours the middle classes, an outpouring of the dissatisfaction of the bourgeoisie. "

" Most organisations do not actively seek out input from their lower echelons. "

" Managing dissent is about recognizing the value of disagreement, discord and difference. "

" Governments have been ceding power to big multinational corporations in the market. We see the manifest in a variety of ways. Where governments are giving up power to big international institutions like the World Trade Organization or NAFTA, which are disabling governments' ability to protect the rights of their own people. "

" My parents decided - because they were not going to teach us anything Jewish at home - to send both me and my sister to a Jewish primary school. So I went to Kerem Primary School in Hampstead Garden Suburb. But, for me, that school really didn't work that well. "

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Sister

" Email is having an increasingly pernicious effect. Not only is it having a perceptible effect on productivity, it's skewing what it is we focus on. The immediate increasingly crowds out the important. "

Noreena Hertz

Focus

Important

" I'm really looking at questions of power, navigation, and spin. Then I am also looking for real-world stories that give me greater insight into smart and new ways of thinking. "

" Goodwill and reputation are intangibles, but they are the keys to business success. Since they are also inexorably linked to social values, it follows that a change in social norms will have a significant impact on profits. "

" Get into the habit of imagining an alternate scenario. By posing such 'imagine if' questions... we can distance ourselves from the frames, cues, anchors and rhetoric that might be affecting us. "

" Terrorism and trade cannot be the only issues on which the world unites. We must commit ourselves to a global coalition to deal with exclusion, too. "

" At the end of the day, philanthropy can only ever be an adjunct to what governments provide. And government coffers need to be replenished. "

" Most of us are 'ultraconformists' when it comes to who we are most likely to follow... to socialise with, or even who we are most likely to hire. "

Noreena Hertz

Most

Who

" You want to challenge experts, because experts get a lot wrong. Doctors misdiagnose one time in five. In the U.S. and Canada, 50,000 people die every year who would not have had to. "

" It's not that I am against the rich giving money to charities. I'm all for it, and we should think of ways of encouraging more of it. But I also believe that states, rather than individuals, are ultimately a better bet for delivering a fair and just world and reconciling differing interests. "

" Experience is not the poor relation of expertise. Valuable insights in business often come from the people on the ground. "

" Consumers, unlike voters, expect an immediate response to their concerns; and companies, unlike governments, do not have the luxury of a mid-term lull. "

" The term 'glass ceiling' was coined in 1984. More than 20 years later, the ceiling has barely cracked. There isn't a single country in the world that has as many female as male politicians. In business, the situation is even worse. Its highest echelon - the board - remains a chauvinist's dream. "

" People are looking for certainty. The more complex the world becomes, the more people look for people to give them certainty and tell them what to do. During the past few years of actively thinking about this, there is one thing that I have accepted: certainty is not out there. There is not one strategy to follow, and that's OK. "

" With consumers having ever more choice, corporations must invest more and more in courting public opinion. "

" Stress makes us prone to tunnel vision, less likely to take in the information we need. Anxiety makes us more risk-averse than we would be regularly and more deferential. "

Noreena Hertz

Information

Stress

" Debt vultures are really the scum at the bottom of the pond. These are guys who buy up the debts of the world's poorest countries on the secondary market. You can go buy debts of a country like Peru, for example, at a real discount. Why? Because people think that the debts won't be repaid. "

" Back in the 1970s, Kodak tried to give $25m to a black civil rights organisation in Rochester, New York. The company's shareholders rose up in arms: making this politically charged offering wasn't the reason they had entrusted Kodak with their money. The donation was withdrawn. "

" What my research has shown me is that experts tend on the whole to form very rigid camps; that within these camps, a dominant perspective emerges that often silences opposition; that experts move with the prevailing winds, often hero-worshipping their own gurus. "

" My mother was really involved with the Refusenik campaign with Soviet Union Jews. They would come and stay at our house, some of them, after they managed to get out of the Soviet Union at the time. There were things that were Jewish-related happening in my house quite consistently, but it was much more from a kind of activist standpoint. "

" The World Trade Organization is an organization that defends trade interests. I think the problem is less that they exist. The problem is that internationally we've only got an organization that protects trade interests. Surely we need some kind of counterweight to protect human rights and the environment, too. "

" All company bosses want a policy on corporate social responsibility. The positive effect is hard to quantify, but the negative consequences of a disaster are enormous. "

" When it comes to getting more women into parliament, politicians have at least started to take active measures. The British Labour Party introduced all-female shortlists in 1997. "

Noreena Hertz

Active

Women

" Countries that need monies so that they can provide health care and education and shelter to their people shouldn't have to repay debts that we knowingly lent to bad regimes long since gone; and all illegitimate debts - debts lent to these terrible dictators like Saddam Hussein, like Suharto, like Marcos - must also be canceled. "

" I try to take a weekly digital Sabbath, batch my emails so I deal with them a few times a day rather than constantly, and increasingly give myself permission to ignore unsolicited communiques. I try, too, to give others more slack. The respond-now culture is a two-way street. I'm trying to be more mindful of that. "