James Surowiecki Quotes:- James Surowiecki (born April 30, 1967) is an American journalist. He was a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he wrote a regular column on business and finance called “The Financial Page”
Inspirational James Surowiecki Quotes
“The desire for reinvention seems to arise most often when companies hear the siren call of synergy and start to expand beyond their core businesses.”-James Surowiecki
“Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably smart – smarter even sometimes than the smartest people in them.”-James Surowiecki
“Sometimes even a smart crowd will make a mistake.”-James Surowiecki
“The challenge for capitalism is that the things that breed trust also breed the environment for fraud.”-James Surowiecki
“Nike used to be known as Blue Ribbon Sports. What’s now Sara Lee used to be Consolidated Foods. And Exxon was once the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. These were name changes that worked. But for all the ones that do, there are 10 or 20 that don’t.”-James Surowiecki
“Most corporate name changes are the result of mergers and acquisitions. But these tend to be unimaginative.”-James Surowiecki
“The Xbox 360 is the best game console ever designed. It’s fast and powerful – games look as good on the 360 as on high-end PCs that cost six times as much. It’s easy to navigate and has lots of useful secondary features – the ability to play digital video, stream MP3s, and so on.”-James Surowiecki
Famous James Surowiecki Quotes
“As technology improves, on-screen avatars look more and more like real people. When they start looking too real, though, we pull away. These almost-humans aren’t quite right; they look creepy, like zombies.”-James Surowiecki
“By the time of the ’90s boom, CEOs had become superheroes, accorded celebrity treatment and followed with a kind of slavish scrutiny that Alfred P. Sloan could never have imagined.”-James Surowiecki
“Self-dealing, essentially, occurs when managers run companies to line their own pockets instead of those of the companies’ owners. It’s been a perennial problem in American capitalism and became a real dilemma when America moved toward a model in which corporations would be run by professional managers who had only small ownership stakes.”-James Surowiecki
“If being the biggest company was a guarantee of success, we’d all be using IBM computers and driving GM cars.”-James Surowiecki
“What an economy really wants, after all, is not more investment per se but a better investment. It wants capital to flow to companies that will create value – not in the form of a rising stock price but in the form of more goods for less cost, more jobs, and rising wages – by enhancing productivity.”-James Surowiecki
“You can’t fuel real economic growth with indiscriminate credit. You can only fuel it with well-allocated, long-term investment.”-James Surowiecki
James Surowiecki Good Quotes
“The stock market has an insidious effect on C.E.O.s’ moods, because of its impact not just on their companies but on their own bank accounts.”-James Surowiecki
“In confusing stock options with ownership, corporations confuse trappings with substance.”-James Surowiecki
“Speculators get a bad rap. In the popular imagination, they’re greedy, heedless, and amoral, adept at price manipulations and dirty tricks. In reality, they often play a key role in making markets run smoothly.”-James Surowiecki
“Moviegoers love the intricacies of a crime all the more when it’s for a good cause.”-James Surowiecki
“Real politics is messy and morally ambiguous and doesn’t make for a compelling thriller.”-James Surowiecki
“The problem with venality in business is that getting outraged about it makes it easy to miss the systemic problems that venality often disguises.”-James Surowiecki
“If someone really wants my company’s business, why shouldn’t he be able to do everything he can – including paying me off – to get that business? Because bribery encourages people to make decisions based on the wrong criteria, which means in the business world that it distorts the efficient allocation of resources.”-James Surowiecki
“Wall Street has come a long way from the insider-dominated world that was blown apart by the Great Depression.”-James Surowiecki
James Surowiecki Quotes About Business
“Although oil is a commodity, it’s still not a commodity like coffee, which, thank God, we will have with us always. At some point, the oil will run out.”-James Surowiecki
“The oil market is especially sensitive even to a hint of expansion or contraction in supply.”-“-James Surowiecki
“The fact that industries wax and wane is a reality of any economic system that wants to remain dynamic and responsive to people’s changing tastes.”-James Surowiecki
“In practice, downsizing is too often about cutting your workforce while keeping your business the same, and doing so not by investments in productivity-enhancing technology, but by making people pull 80-hour weeks and bringing in temps to fill the gap.”-James Surowiecki
“Corporate welfare isn’t necessarily a bad thing.”-James Surowiecki
“Tough times have always lent themselves to nativist sentiments and closed-door policies. But in the case of highly skilled immigrants, these policies are a recipe for stagnation.”-James Surowiecki
“The U.S. is excellent at importing cheap products from the rest of the world. Let’s try importing some human capital instead.”-James Surowiecki
“In order to work well, markets need a basic level of trust.”-James Surowiecki
“Behavioral economists have shown that a sizable percentage of people are willing to pay real money to punish people who are taking from a common pot but not contributing to it. Just to ensure that shirkers get what they deserve, we are prepared to make ourselves poorer.”-James Surowiecki
James Surowiecki Quotes About Developing
“Developing countries often have hypertrophied bureaucracies, requiring businesses to deal with enormous amounts of red tape.”-James Surowiecki
“Being unemployed is even more disastrous for individuals than you’d expect. Aside from the obvious harm – poverty, difficulty paying off debts – it seems to directly affect people’s health, particularly that of older workers.”-James Surowiecki
“Being out of a job can erode people’s confidence and their sense of possibility; and employers, often unfairly, tend to take long-term unemployment as a signal that something is wrong.”-James Surowiecki
“A long-term crisis, after a certain point, no longer seems like a crisis. It seems like the way things are.”-James Surowiecki
“There’s no debt limit in the Constitution.”-James Surowiecki
“Sometimes you have to destroy your business in order to save it.”-James Surowiecki
“Markets work best when there’s lots of information available and a historical track record to go on; they excel at predicting things like horse races, election outcomes, and box-office results. But they’re bad at predicting things like who will be the next Supreme Court nominee, as that depends on the whim of the president.”-James Surowiecki
“Besides great climates and lovely beaches, California and Greece share a fondness for dysfunctional politics and feckless budgeting.”-James Surowiecki
Top 10 James Surowiecki Quotes
“In American politics, ‘Europe’ is usually a code word for ‘big government.'”-James Surowiecki
“On Wall Street, fraudulent schemes tend to thrive during economic booms and to blow up when times turn tough.”-James Surowiecki
“In conditions of uncertainty, humans, like other animals, herd together for protection.”-James Surowiecki
“It may be that the very qualities that help people get ahead are the ones that make them ill-suited for managing crises. It’s hard to prepare for the worst when you think you’re the best.”-James Surowiecki
“Traditionally, tours were a means of promoting a record. Today, the record promotes the tour.”-James Surowiecki
“Companies often become victims of their own mythologies.”-James Surowiecki
“Republicans like to indict Democrats as anti-corporate zealots.”-James Surowiecki
“All things being equal, letting people make decisions for themselves will produce smarter outcomes, collectively, than relying on government planners.\”-James Surowiecki
“You can’t be rich unless everyone else agrees that you’re rich.”-James Surowiecki
“The business of America shouldn’t be subsidizing business.”-James Surowiecki
“In the business world, the bad news is usually good news – for somebody else.”-James Surowiecki
“Companies, like people, don’t much like to change.”-James Surowiecki
