Wisdom in fragments

If you go into a new situation where you don't know anybody and you want to be more influential, don't look around the room and say hmmm… who can most help me here?… instead, look around and say hmmm…. Who can I most help here? You will put that person in a position where they will be standing on the balls of their feet to help you!

Influence & Persuasion Expert; Author of "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

We all inhabit distinctive inner universes. We all see and experience the world in a slightly different way. Understanding perception has a lot of consequences for understanding who we are.

Neuroscientist & leading researcher on consciousness and perception

Sensory data by itself is not red, it's not anything. It's just energy. Sensory signals don't come with labels attached. Redness is coming from within my brain, as a way of predicting how certain patterns of light appear.

Neuroscientist & leading researcher on consciousness and perception

The way I prefer to think of perception is as a processor of active construction, a controlled hallucination. Everything we perceive is a kind of inference, a burst guess about what's out there.

Neuroscientist & leading researcher on consciousness and perception

Consciousness is any kind of subjective experience whatsoever. It's what goes away when you fall into a dreamless sleep or go into general anesthesia, and what comes back when you wake-up or come around.

Neuroscientist & leading researcher on consciousness and perception

It's not enough to sit in our ivory towers or offices and think we have to go out and talk to people who are affected by a problem to understand what's going on, on the ground.

Chief Innovation Officer of the White House & Open Government Advocate

Distrust in government is very dangerous – what follows is the ability for authoritarian and totalitarian forms of government to take control, and that doesn't do anybody, any good.

Chief Innovation Officer of the White House & Open Government Advocate

We need to shift our thinking about what government does, and what civil servants do, away from this relentless focus on policy and ideology and onto project management and problem solving.

Chief Innovation Officer of the White House & Open Government Advocate

The danger is that when we jump too quickly to the solution, not only is the floor littered with the inventions that never worked, but we risk designing solutions that never fit the problem.

Chief Innovation Officer of the White House & Open Government Advocate

The process of problem definition is a discipline that we rarely teach or learn. It is one of the most important things that we can invest our time in. What are the true underlying causes of a problem? How are people really affected?

Chief Innovation Officer of the White House & Open Government Advocate

If your strategy is to do everything, you have no strategy at all.

NPR Host and Senior News Correspondent for Over Three Decades

Incumbents are not doomed, and disruptors are not ordained.

NPR Host and Senior News Correspondent for Over Three Decades

You can't stay in your lane anymore – you need to be good at multiple things, and understand interactions.

NPR Host and Senior News Correspondent for Over Three Decades

In a world where everything is connected, there's bits and bytes moving, and leaders need to understand what happens when functions inside a company interact. What happens when your company is interacting with others inside of its ecosystem? There's a flow to business and leaders need to be able to see that flow.

NPR Host and Senior News Correspondent for Over Three Decades

The physical world isn't going away. We are a physical species. While digitisation is enabling incredible things – the best companies seem to be combining the physical and digital; they seem to understand what it means when products and services are connected.

NPR Host and Senior News Correspondent for Over Three Decades

Fundamentally, we must slow-down the process of change. We should recognise that most change is not progress- and therefore, it is in our interests to slow down without interfering too much with actual solution making.

Evolutionary biologist and podcaster known for critical COVID-19 vaccine commentary