The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 21 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Heffernan: Forced ranking and hierarchies create status contests that block collaboration
“And when you add onto that systems like forced ranking and hierarchies,
You foment necessarily status contests.
And what all of that does is it implies that if I help you might do better, which by inference means I do worse.”
Heffernan: Female Entrepreneurs Are Driven to Reject Toxic Traditional Management
“And this is very characteristic of female entrepreneurs, which is a sort of sense that You know, I want to prove that it's possible to be successful and not do some of the crappy things that traditional managements do routinely.”
Heffernan: Power is disruptive and leaders should avoid using it
“Power is incredibly disruptive, and you have to be very wary of it and try super hard not ever to have to use it.”
Heffernan: Whistleblowers Are Deeply Dedicated to Protecting Their Organizations
“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.”
Heffernan: Women view power as orchestration rather than domination
“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…”
Heffernan: Business schools rely on predetermined case studies instead of teaching history
“And history is almost never taught in business schools. It's all the live case studies. Or the case studies, you know, where the ending is known, and therefore implicitly, structurally looks predetermined.”
Heffernan: Weekly personal storytelling sessions transform workplace social capital
“What it did is it stopped people looking at each other in terms of function and made them start to look at each other as human beings. And it was absolutely transformative in the way that people started to relate to each other and talk to people and, you know,…”
Heffernan: Data suggests most corporate restructurings fail
“Well, I mean, the data suggests that most of them won't work.”
Heffernan: Organizations Trap Talent and Make Good People Go Bad
“I think my experience is there's always more intelligence and talent in organizations than manages to get out and to surface and to be deployed, and I've always wondered why, and where does it go, and why does that happen, and where does it get stuck and trapp…”
Heffernan: Believing great work happens regardless of context is naive
“Because I think this notion that you can do wonderful work regardless of context is romantic and naive.”
Heffernan: Mental and economic models inherently repel disconfirming data
“And the problem with mental models, also business models, also economic models, is they attract confirming data, and they repel marginalized or trivialized disconfirming data.”
Heffernan: Research Disproves Myths That Whistleblowers Are Mostly Women or Religious
“There's a mythology that says they're mostly women, and the research doesn't bear that out. There's mythology that says they're people of faith, the research doesn't bear that out.”
Heffernan: Whistleblowers Are Detail-Oriented and Better-Than-Average Pattern Recognizers
“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…”
Heffernan: People bend their experience of life to maintain moral self-image
“It's 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.”
Heffernan: Skilling designed Enron's culture around extreme social Darwinism
“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.”
Heffernan: Entering organizations shifts moral focus from goodness to obedience
“He talked about how when we go into an organization and 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's much in our organizat…”
Heffernan: Lasting workplace reform requires redefining power, not just firings
“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?”
Heffernan: There is no evidence Charles Darwin was a social Darwinist
“There's no evidence that Darwin was a social Darwinist.”
Heffernan: BP held years of consultant reports warning of Texas City site danger
“Whereas if you take, for example, what I wrote about the deep water, not deep water, Texas City accident at 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 f…”
Heffernan: NYU research shows employees suppress concerns from fear or perceived futility
“In addition you know, there's this fabulous research on organizational silence by Morrison and Millican at NYU 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 troublemaker…”