Wisdom in fragments

In large organizations, a small group of leaders can hold the organization's capacity to change hostage to their own personal willingness to adapt and change – they are the gatekeepers – and even if they have the best will in the world, there simply will not be enough of them to deal with the complexity that we have in the environment around us.

Management theorist & author who revolutionized strategic thinking

There simply isn't enough creativity and bandwidth at the top to deal with the level of complexity and change in today's world. A century ago, information was expensive to acquire and move- bureaucracy was a logical way of bringing information together. The world simply doesn't work like that anymore.

Management theorist & author who revolutionized strategic thinking

We've had hierarchical and bureaucratic structures as far back as we can go in human history. The Chinese civil service goes back to at least 2000BC and militaries have always been structured as hierarchical. Modern bureaucracy is a mash-up of two ideas. Firstly, the command and control structures which have been core to organized human activity for millennia and secondly, the principles of industrial economics.

Management theorist & author who revolutionized strategic thinking

Human progress often comes at great cost to people who are willing to sacrifice for the sake of principles or in defense of the rights of others. It took hundreds of millions of people to die before we created a global security and human rights order and all of these are under stress. One would hate to think it would be another similar amount of deaths before we made more progress.

UN Human Rights Chief & International Justice Advocate

Today's Coronavirus crisis is not a force-majeure, it is a biological phenomenon, the spread of which is an indictment, and commentary on the mediocrity global leadership. It should never have escaped Wuhan, and the fact it has shows a failure of leadership and now the very same people who are responsible for neglecting these issues are being invited to comment on it, and lead our way out.

UN Human Rights Chief & International Justice Advocate

You cannot say you support a values based human rights agenda and have your defense industry dictate the terms of your relationships between states to the extent that you won't criticize states who you sell weapons to. People see this for what it is, they recognise the internal and external inconsistencies and are tired of it.

UN Human Rights Chief & International Justice Advocate

Only a handful of diplomats and governments are prepared to put the global good before the national interest. Seldom is it the case for any diplomat that they put the global good high up on the agenda; in my career I've seen it very rarely. Only 30 of the 193 or so ambassadors at the UN in NY will be devoted to a multilateral context. Most are pursuing bilateral interests in a multilateral context.

UN Human Rights Chief & International Justice Advocate

In my experience, unless you are directly affected by a human rights abuse, you are unlikely to give it a second thought. How many times do you draw breath a day? It's about 22,000 times – you don't think about it until you can't. That's exactly how most people view human rights- they are generally apathetic and may express some concern or sympathy when they hear about something on the news, but they don't mobilise unless it affects them directly.

UN Human Rights Chief & International Justice Advocate

World poverty has been reduced significantly- and whilst everyone seems to think the world is getting more impoverished, this simply is not the case. Scientific cooperation has improved too, and this has allowed significant advances in global health.

Harvard Professor & Creator of "Soft Power" Concept

In the short-run, my fear would be that we've mismanaged the relationship with China through miscalculation to produce a 1914-like situation. I think it's a low-probability outcome, but it could of course be mismanaged. There's obviously the danger of nuclear weapons and a miscalculation leading to their use, and inevitably therefore, catastrophic outcomes.

Harvard Professor & Creator of "Soft Power" Concept

What is worrying is not the rise of multinational corporations, but the rise of social media. Facebook has 2.5 billion participants and whilst some may argue they are an instrument of the American state, it's worth noticing that Russia was able to use Facebook as a device to penetrate and disrupt the American electoral process in 2016.

Harvard Professor & Creator of "Soft Power" Concept

People are now talking of a new 'Cold War' with China. This is a very misleading use of history. If you look at the relationship between China and the US today, there is half a trillion dollars of trade, and some 350,000 Chinese students and 3 million Chinese tourists are in the US. It's more complex than the type of relationship we had during the Cold War.

Harvard Professor & Creator of "Soft Power" Concept

Power is the ability to affect others and get the outcomes you want – and that's true whether on the individual, national or international level. You can exert power in three ways. You can do it with coercion (sticks), you can do it with payments (carrots) and you can do it with soft power – through attraction.

Harvard Professor & Creator of "Soft Power" Concept

I'll hope I have helped be more generative and less extractive, through my own actions, and through my support of others. We live in a world where we're constantly battling these forces and we need to ensure we're more generative than extractive — of each other, of our planet — I believe we can do it.

Founder of Kickstarter, crowdfunding platform pioneer

Navigating complexity and uncertainty requires long-term thinking, not long-term planning. Long-term thinking requires accepting, even enjoying, the challenges of unpredictability, builds the flexibility required to navigate it, and rejects simplified narratives that lose the nuance of this reality.

Founder of Kickstarter, crowdfunding platform pioneer

I believe businesses need to move away from having profit as their primary reason for existing, that's why we built Kickstarter as a public benefit corporation and encoded our mission into our fiduciary responsibility. Profit primacy can be replaced by mission primacy.

Founder of Kickstarter, crowdfunding platform pioneer