Leadership

I am still a physiologist. I am not absorbed by the pharmaceutical industry. I have stuck to my laboratory, to the science.

People often say to me, 'You must be so pleased with the effects your work has had.' But the daily feeling is frustration. There's much more to do. For kidney transplantation, I could tell you about victory after victory in a war we're losing -- because the shortage of transplants is growing rather than shrinking, as diabetes and hypertension become an epidemic. There's so much to do, so little time, and it's so hard to be persuasive.

We allow firefighters to risk their lives to save others, and we honour them for it. We didn't allow people to test vaccines that way.

The Red Crescent sheik said: 'That would just be giving his life back. We could do that.' A WHO official, told that the same Filipino patient would have died without our exchange, exclaimed, 'He should be dead!'

There's an Overton window of policies you can make, but it's a wider window than the policies you can run your political campaign on. It's more a matter of legislators than politicians -- even though they're the same people.

There are plenty of reasonable, moderate, reformist, liberal leaders who just don’t quite know what to do. Our book ideally will help them make that choice. That is my hope.

We have the technological means to deal with climate change. We have the technological means to deal with pandemics. This is not a technical problem. It is mostly a political problem. If we get our politics under control, the rest is fun and games.

It is the job of the prime minister or the president to persuade people that we are all in it together, and that if you fall behind, we will lend you a hand.

They tend to have quite a power of persuasion and dominance in person. That gets diminished when they are reduced to words on a page.

One interesting way to break the sunk cost is to think about the cost of staying to other people. You might be willing to absorb the abuse yourself — but are you willing to put your family through the effects of your staying?

That stress doesn’t just stay in the office. We get in our car, we get on the subway, we bring it home with us. If you have a high-psychopathy boss, research shows you actually have more conflict at home too.

The phrase 'seeing is believing' has it exactly backwards. The research shows that believing is seeing.

Strategy is, in large part, institutionalised belief. The question is whether your organisation has any mechanism for examining those beliefs — or whether they're just the water everyone swims in, invisible and unquestioned.

We don't fail because we make mistakes; mistakes can be fixed. We fail because we quit. And we quit because belief collapsed, not because the strategy was wrong.

The test for any belief isn't whether it makes you feel good. It's whether it makes you better at engaging with reality. That's not self-help. That's applied science.

If the sixty hours of capacity was always there in those rats — what are we writing off as fixed limits in human beings that are actually just locked potential waiting for the right belief?