YouSaid · the spoken record

Margaret Heffernan

lines on the record: 88
first: 2018-03-13
most recent: 2018-03-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“It depends on what you care about, doesn't it? Do you want to do a huge amount of stuff or do you want to do something really well?”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But preparation is everything, right? It's not necessarily that it will go the way that you think, but if you're prepared more interesting stuff will happen, I think.”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I've enjoyed it. And Adam said I would, so I appreciate you making the time for it and asking such great questions. I do often think it takes a lot more to come up with a good question than to come up with a good answer.”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know very much about me for the next nine months because I'm not doing any more speaking engagements because I can get my head down and write something different”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that must be the fun thing of what you're doing now, which is being able to have wonderful conversations with people.”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So I would say, you know, try stuff, but try stuff done as well as you can find it and contribute as much as you can. So be generous. Be curious, be reliable. I think reliability is the most undervalued characteristic. If you say you're going to do something, do it. No matter what. And be interested in other people because they are all interesting no matter who they are, they're interesting. It's up to you to find what's interesting in them, but it's in there somewhere.”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's just always more interesting. I mean, it's interesting because both my kids went to a school here in England, which is notable for being a really outstanding music school, but they didn't specialize in music. And what was interesting, and they said this to me, is the music in the school so outstanding, it just gives you a sense of what excellence is.”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, definitely absolutely no grand design. Absolutely none. I mean, I've definitely experimented with lots of things. So my advice, you know, to my kids is try stuff. Try stuff and whatever you're going to try to do, try to do it with people who do it at a really high level. So just try to work with people who you think are really serious about what they're doing. So don't mess around. If you're going to do it, do it with the very best people you can find because even if you then decide actually this is not my thing, you will have been exposed to high quality thinking or high quality doing.”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I thought it was a really good book and it was fascinating because I was at Ford last week. And so talking to people there and thinking about what's happened in between times, you know, it's really helpful. And the conversation I was having with Frank Partnoy about, you know, the business catastrophe desk calendar was very much because we both lamented the degree to which business people often have very little sense of history. and history is almost never taught in business schools. It's all the live case studies or the case studies, you know, with the ending is known. And therefore implicitly, structurally looks predetermined. And I just think that having a sense of what the longer story is is really important.”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I definitely read what I think of as car crash business books. You know, so books about businesses that go wrong. And I read some books about kind of happy ending business books. So American Icon I really enjoyed about the turnaround at Ford”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I read a lot of old books. I mean, you know, a couple months ago, I was reading Kennedy's profiles in Courage, which was not at all what I thought it was going to be. I'm very interested by how much great stuff there is that we think we know what it is, but we're wrong. The same happened when I read when prophecy fails, which is Festinger's wonderful book in which he comes up with the theory of cognitive dissonance. I mean, I think it's kind of a hilarious read because it's clearly a scholarly piece, but you know, the whole situation is so absurd that the contrast between academic writing and this insane situation is just kind of... Accidentally hilarious”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it depends if I'm reading it as I think of for work, I'll read it quite fast. I'll generally read it on my iPad and I'll annotate it quite carefully. If I'm not reading it with a specific purpose in mind, I'll read in a much more leisurely fashion and I'll quit if I don't like it. I care a lot about how things are written. I mean, a couple months ago I was reading Lionel Freiver's book, The Mandibles, and it stopped me in my tracks because it was just a wonderful sentence in it. And I thought, oh wow, wow, this is really good writing. So somehow subliminally paying attention to that kind of thing. I read quite a lot of stuff by dead writers. So I read a lot of 19th century fiction, early 20th century fiction.”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think it's always been this that way. I read a lot of biography. I'm looking across my office at a fantastic double biography of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, mother and daughter. Yeah, I mean, I I do read some business books, but I read very few.”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, wow, all sorts of things. I read fiction in the summer or when I'm not writing. I mean, I read fiction mostly in the summer because I think it's just good for me and good for my brain. I'm trying to think when I'm looking around my office, what am I reading? I'm reading a book called The Curse of History at the moment. Analogies at war. There's another book I'm reading. So I'm reading quite a lot of history at the moment. And I always read a lot of history, that's fair to say. There's a book across my desk on Thomas Beckett. So I read a lot of history, I read a lot of fiction, I read quite a lot of poetry, I read quite a lot of history of art. I read very, very few business books.”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I was very lucky because my chief investor once said to me, you know, Margaret, I don't mind you making mistakes. I'm just going to be seriously pissed off if you make the same mistake twice because that's going to show you weren't paying attention. And I thought that was terrific. So I said, okay, my promise to you is I will make different mistakes every time.”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And sometimes, you know, the answer is no, actually, everything went right. You just blew it. But mostly you can see, you know, that there were just, there was no margin for error. There wasn't enough margin for error. I was working too hard to please, or I didn't spot some early warning signs, or a classic mistake I made more than once was I thought I could do it for less money than I could or I could do it with fewer resources than I could. I guess, you know, I don't tend to think this is a judgment on me. This is Margaret, are you a good person or not? I tend to think What could you learn from this?”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I don't think I have a process. I think I'm very, very interested in mistakes. And I'm very ready to acknowledge them when they occur, partly because I want people who work with me to feel that it's completely safe to do so and they won't unless they see me do it too. So, I think because I felt that for quite a long time, I'm very comfortable acknowledging to myself, wow, you really screwed up there, Margaret. And I will then pretty quickly sit down and try to think about, okay, how did this happen? So let's not say it was a fluke. It might have been a fluke, but let's assume it wasn't a fluke. What were the things leading up to it that caused this to happen? And can some of those things be changed?”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I thought, well, I guess he's right. I mean, I'm not that confident. So maybe I can do it. And I mean, to cut to the chase, this is some of the worst programming ever seen on BBC television. It was a catastrophe. And I look back on that and think, He was wrong to say that and not to hear what I was saying, but I was wrong to let him do that. I should have said no, actually, I cannot do this. I just, I'm at my limit. No. And so that's, you know, I think that those are very hard calls to make. At what point is this a stretch goal? And at what point is this madness? And, you know, so I think I think that's something I've learned the hard way. I mean, we always learn things, you know, the hard way.”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Expertise, I have no experience, I don't think it plays to my strengths. I'm absolutely drowning in the 10 other programs I'm responsible for. I need help. And he put his arms around my shoulder and said, Margaret, the only problem you have is you're just not confident enough.”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think something that I have really toyed with a lot, and I think many people do, which is when do I really dig my heels in and when do I let things go? So to take that out of the abstract, there is a time I produced a monster global co-production for the BBC. And it was for all kinds of reasons, you know, logistically ridiculously complex. And among other things, it involved a number of live broadcasts from Paris. And I'd never done a live broadcast before in my life. And I'm generally really up for things that are hard and that I've never done before. But on top of all the other programs I was producing, this was just kind of way, way, too much. And I remember going to my boss at the time and saying, I have no.”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, golly, what have I learned? How have I learned anything? Sure, I have somewhere. I mean, the difficulty with learning, if it's any good, is it just becomes part of who you are and then you forgot that you didn't always have it, right? It's like it's hard for us to remember what life was like before we knew how to read. I think certainly the thing of not taking argument, opposition personally, really fundamental. I think carrying with me this sense that I could always be wrong is really fundamental. There's just this great question, you know, if I were wrong, what would I see? That really is kind of in my bloodstream now. And some of that's, you know, because there have been times when I have been wrong.”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, really, the notion that, while we didn't really get it till we had daughters, it just feels very lame to me. But clearly we are very, very, very trapped in our biases. I remember hearing Satya Nadella talking about the terrible gaffe he made at the Gracehopper Conference for Women in Computing when asked about the gender pay gap. And a year later he was still talking about what an eye-opener the blowback had been and how his mother and his wife had talked to him about had he not seen how hard it had been for them. You know, Nadella is a very thoughtful, sensitive human being, and he'd somehow missed this, which suggests that, you know, we are very, very trapped in our own biases.”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, it just beggars belief that women go into work and get underpaid and physically intimidated, you know. And people are saying, well, it really makes a difference to guys if they have daughters. Then they take this stuff seriously. And I find myself thinking, well, don't, any of them remember that they all had mothers?”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sea change. And I would really love to think that it is, but I think for it to have lasting impact requires more than heads rolling. It requires a, you know, as well as the kind of negative, let's get rid of this, it requires a positive, which is what is the concept of power that replaces it? And whether that will take root, I don't know. And how far this is actually displacement activity. Because some people in power can't be removed? I don't know. I really hope it marks the beginning of something quite different, but it's way too early to tell.”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know. I think, I guess I have two questions. One is, will it all blow over? And everybody think, oh, thank God that's over. We can go back to business as normal, whatever that is. And I have a second question, which is, will it trickle down, which is, I remember interviewing a young woman who worked in a car showroom talking about sexual harassment. not a famous young woman working in not a famous place for not a famous boss and my question is will her life her working life get better because if it doesn't then this isn't good enough right um and i really don't know i mean it certainly feels I know everybody's saying it feels like a real”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think there are certainly many organizations, many corporate cultures where power is about domination and in those environments, the kind of harassment and intimidation that we've seen is possible. And harassment is an abuse of power. It happens because people have power over others.”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I wrote my first book about women's corporate careers, I thought a lot about power. And the reason I thought about it was because so many women said to me they didn't really like the idea of power. And I always thought, really, how are we going to get anything done without it? And I think what I concluded was that it isn't that women don't like power at all, but that we think of it differently. So many of the very, very successful women I interviewed for that book and for my second book, which is about the rise of female entrepreneurship, women on top, thought of power as orchestration. Power to bring people together to do collectively what they couldn't do alone. I think there is another concept of power, which is about domination. And I think that's specifically the kind of power which women were saying they rejected.”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had neither, and it made me feel a little more comfortable, although, you know, there's nothing about this that should really make anybody terribly happy, except that maybe now it'll stop or at least reduce. The first chapter in Willful Blindness is about bias. And of course, we inhabit a business environment that was built by men for men in their own image and not surprisingly favors men. And I think that concentration of power is always dangerous. And I think everybody's biased. The biology suggests that everybody's biased. And so when you have one group that basically holds power with bias in all of them, you are going to get an economist called perverse outcomes. Now, you can look at it a different way too.”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's interesting. Absolutely. It's an epic example of willful blindness. And in fact, off the back of that, my publishers have just commissioned an updated edition of the book. And not only because of that, because obviously there So why? Also, I became very uncomfortable at one point a couple weeks ago where, you know, people were just quitting left, right and center. I felt like it was watching a production of The Crucible. And I talked to a friend of mine who's a lawyer and just said, you know, what's going on here? It makes me uncomfortable that this is getting such a head of steam. And she said, well, Margaret, these individuals are being fired now because the companies have been keeping dossiers. They all knew. But as long as they could get away with it, these high-profile people are delivering real business value.”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we were joking. He said, you know what we need is we need a desk calendar of business catastrophes. Otherwise, everybody forgets. We just repeat the stuff.”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's really funny because I remember talking to Frank Partnoy and he said, you know, it was when he was teaching corporate finance at University of San Diego and he said, you know, most of his students have never even heard of it.”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Alert to how we change in different environments and pay attention to what we leave behind and what gets amplified. And I think it's a very hard problem. I work on a thing here in England called the Responsible Leadership Program where we work very hard with senior executives to try to alert them to the dangers that exist in organizational life, not because the organizations are bad, but just because there are organizations, right? And obviously, some are more dangerous places to work than others, but the assumption that you're just, you know, the assumption that Kenmade, if you like, I'm a good person and therefore nothing I do can be bad, that's just not safe”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's a great question. I think we have to be very humble about how fragile our sense of Good and bad is. And, you know, Stanley Milgram wrote about this brilliantly. He talked about how when we go into an organization, our moral focus shifts essentially from wanting to be a good person to wanting to do a good job. And we implicitly assume that doing a good job is doing what we're told. And there is much in our organizational life. That creates, if you like, a sort of special identity for us. The person you are at work is not identical to the person that you are at home, which also is probably not entirely consonant with the person you are on the golf course or, you know, in the baseball pitch. Identities are not as absolute and fixed as we once to imagine. And so we have to be very”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I think there's evidence that lots and lots and lots of people knew that it was going badly wrong. Now, I think, you know, skilling was a very intimidating character, extraordinarily aggressive. So if people are afraid, which in a competitive environment like that they will be, and they have huge incentives to just shut up and deliver, they will. We know this”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That this is all fake. So there's a kind of collective awareness there. And she also said something really interesting. She said she noticed a lot of people around her getting very overweight. She wondered what was the emptiness they were trying to fill in other words they kind of felt something was wrong and they were overly driven to comfort themselves And she talked also about private conversation that she had with people while working there, about is this what happened in Germany? And so I think, I mean, Sharon's, of course, notable for having actually had the nerve to try to do something about it.”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that, I think, explains why he didn't see it. It doesn't explain why it went wrong. Why did it go wrong? I tend to believe that that's more to do with skilling than with lay, though I may really be letting him off the hook here, you know. Skilling clearly did believe in social Darwinism to an extreme degree and absolutely played on the competitive instincts of people in the company. And everything in the company culture was designed around this. Now, I think it's also true that Enron was packed full of people who were very uncomfortable with what was going on. And I remember talking to Sharon Watkins about this and her saying, you know, I think it was with skilling that they decided to do a kind of Christmas show of the Wizard of Oz, you know, which is almost as big a clue as you could ask for, right?”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I had a long conversation with Albert Bandura about this because, of course, Bandura's whole kind of life's work is about the degree to which we have to think about ourselves, think of ourselves as good people. And we will bend our experience of life to keep that sense of good self intact. And so I think that's what was going on with Leigh. And of course, it's also important to remember when everybody Says you're the greatest thing ever, and they surround you with praise and wealth and accolades. That's very seductive, right?”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's, I mean, I could talk about this for hours. I think Leigh is a very, very interesting character, partly because he's a preacher's son. He comes from a very, very poor background. He is, I think, seriously quite a religious person. And I think he had a very strong sense of himself as morally a very fine person. Now, I know that could sound absurd, but I think, I mean, I have interviewed so many people who knew him who aren't necessarily defending Enlon at all. But who will talk to this, including his pastor in Houston, who was rhapsodic about the effort Ley went to to get public transportation in Houston so that poor people could get to jobs? So I That his sense of himself as a good person was so profoundly defended that he could not conceive that his company could do bad things.”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think that's true, but it's really interesting. I was talking to the head of the British Army last week, and he said, you know, we now see that these people are helpful because they may see things before we do, and we need that. And I heard exactly the same thing from the chief executive of a big supermarket chain here in the UK that had some significant accounting issues leading to restatements of earnings and so on and also some issues around food quality. So I think part of what has happened is that as we've come to understand that in the cases of willful blindness, there almost always are people who see it early, that actually if we would not rush to get them fired or silenced, but instead have the kind of poise encourage to listen to them, they might represent a really outstanding early warning system.”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they're very good at doing, you know, this is how Hannah Arendt defined thinking. They're very good at having a conversation with themselves along the lines of, hmm, what does that mean? Does it matter? If it mattered, what else might I see? Oh, I've just seen that too. Ooh, that's tricky. And they're doing that all the time. It's not generally speaking switched on by a problem. It's the way they experience life. So I think there's that. I think in general, and of course there are always exceptions to this, but in general, such people are deeply dedicated to the organization that they serve. So they want to protect it. They do instinctively. Hold it to a very high standard. And so when they see lapses, they're quite concerned.”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's really interesting and it's a very, very hard question to answer because there's a lot of mythology around such people who are customarily described as whistleblowers, although that's quite a complicated term. So there's a mythology that says they're mostly women and the research doesn't bear that out. It says they're people of faith, the research doesn't bear that out. The only thing I could find, and I've interviewed hundreds of such people, they tend to be a little nerdy. And I emphasize a little because, you know, not spectacularly, but they are definitely people who like detail. And as a consequence of liking detail, they may be slightly better than average pattern recognizers. So they'll start to see things that will prompt questions.”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Say if the house is on fire, call the fire department. So when the house is on fire, I don't call the fire department because I'm way too focused on my KPIs and I can only think about one thing at a time and I'm already overwhelmed and I'm probably also quite tired. So you put all those things together and you can get Wells Fargo and Volkswagen and General Motors and the economic crash and so on and so forth.”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And in addition to all that, of course, as human beings were very obedient, we're very conformist, we want to belong. And if we see something going wrong and nobody else is making a fuss about it, we will take cues from them and think, well, maybe it's okay. Maybe everybody else knows something I don't and it's all fine. And I think that there are characteristics of hierarchy that exacerbate this. So I look up and see that my boss looks pretty happy. So I'm not going to rock the boat because my job description for myself is keep the boss happy. So I think hierarchy exacerbates it. I think bureaucracy exacerbates it. So I have a job description and I have 25 KPIs and 37 targets and none of those.”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That shows that people have issues and concerns at work, but they don't voice them either because they're afraid that they'll be labeled troublemakers. It just nobody will pay attention, so why bother? It's just more trouble than it's worth”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what Alan Greenspan calls our ideology will be very useful in bringing to us information and prioritizing information that our model suggests is important, but it will fail to highlight the stuff that the mental model says doesn't matter. We would like to think that it being the nature of organizational life that we're surrounded by people who are different from us and will therefore might come with us to come to us with a disconfirming piece of evidence. But of course we are individually highly attracted to people just like ourselves. So we're most likely to choose to be surrounded by people who roughly speaking share the same Mental models, and therefore we'll see the same things that we see and not see the things that we don't see. So they may be sort of amplify our blindness In addition, there's this fabulous.”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there are lots of different things. I mean, I think, so there are a whole, yeah, so there are a whole bunch of things. One is, you know, we all have mental models of how the world works. We have to because we couldn't make sense of the world otherwise if every day we started afresh. And the problemal models, also business models, also economic models, is they attract confirming data and they repel marginalized or trivialize disconfirming data.”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Determined that actually it wasn't knowable, that this is what was going on. And there was no evidence that anybody knew what was going on, in which case it was not willful blindness. It was just ignorance, right? So the ignorance wasn't a choice. There was just nothing to go on. Whereas if you take, for example, what I wrote about the deep water, not deep water, Texas City accident, the BP plant, There are years of consultant reports talking about how dangerous the site is. So, you know, that were commissioned by BP and sitting in filing cabinets in BP. So that was the really crucial defining characteristic of every case I looked at, which was, was it possible to know this? Because if it wasn't possible, it's not well. Blindness”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so when I was writing that book, the critical determinant for the cases that I chose was there had to be ample evidence that the information that was ignored was easily and freely available. So, for example, at one point I thought of looking at the case, and I'm going to forget his name, there was a horrible case of a man in Austria who had kept his daughter locked up in a basement for years and raped her repeatedly and had a child by her and so on. And I thought, and meanwhile, his wife and the rest of his family was living upstairs. And I thought, is this a case of willful blindness? And as unpleasant as the case was, I read through everything I could find about it.”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so willful blindness is a legal term. And I first encountered it when I was writing two plays for the BBC about the collapse of Enron. And in the trial of Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay, the judge Simeon Lake referred to his summing up to the jury. And he described it as if there are things that you could have known and should have known and somehow managed not to know the law deems that your ignorance has been a choice and you're responsible for the choice that you made.”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and everybody wanted what was best for the business. Well, that was the working assumption. And I think generally speaking, it was true. But it's not about me. And it's not about sucking up to me. And I think that, you know, this is another very kind of recurrent theme in my work, which is power is incredibly disruptive. And you have to be very wary of it and try super hard not ever to have to use it.”
2018-03-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #30 Margaret Heffernan: Collaboration and Competition · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT