- Become
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- Nov 07, 2020
James Surowiecki Quotes
Most Famous James Surowiecki Quotes of All Time!
We have created a collection of some of the best james-surowiecki quotes so you can read and share anytime with your friends and family. Share our Top 10 James Surowiecki Quotes on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.
- Last Updated on May 30, 2021
- Capitalism
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Business
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- Nov 07, 2020
If being the biggest company was a guarantee of success, we'd all be using IBM computers and driving GM cars.
- Fragmentation
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- Nov 07, 2020
If you thought the advent of the Internet, the spread of cheap and efficient information technology, and the growing fragmentation of the consumer market were all going to help smaller companies thrive at the expense of the slow-moving giants of the Fortune 500, apparently you were wrong.
- Fear
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- Nov 07, 2020
The reason advertising is governed by fear, after all, is that most agencies rely on just a few clients to bring in the lion's share of their revenues.
- Harshly
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- Nov 07, 2020
In the days when corporate downsizing was all the rage, Wall Street took a lot of flak for judging companies too harshly and setting the bar for corporate performance so high that executives felt their only option was to slash payrolls.
- More
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- Nov 07, 2020
What an economy really wants, after all, is not more investment per se but 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.
- Only
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- Nov 07, 2020
You can't fuel real economic growth with indiscriminate credit. You can only fuel it with well-allocated, long-term investment.
- General Motors
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- Nov 07, 2020
Instead of mindlessly tossing billions at or taking billions from the Net as such, investors should be spending their time making sure that it's the future Fords and General Motors of cyberspace that are getting the capital they need.
- Options
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- Nov 07, 2020
In confusing stock options with ownership, corporations confuse trappings with substance.
- Competition
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- Nov 07, 2020
What corporations fear is the phenomenon now known, rather inelegantly, as 'commoditization.' What the term means is simply the conversion of the market for a given product into a commodity market, which is characterized by declining prices and profit margins, increasing competition, and lowered barriers to entry.
- Great
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- Nov 07, 2020
Since the Protestant majority in Northern Ireland wants to remain a part of Great Britain, and since Ireland itself has shown little interest in reunification, the IRA's prospects for success through political channels have always been limited.
- Good
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- Nov 07, 2020
Moviegoers love the intricacies of a crime all the more when it's for a good cause.
- Messy
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- Nov 07, 2020
Real politics is messy and morally ambiguous and doesn't make for a compelling thriller.
- Getting
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- Nov 07, 2020
The problem with venality in business is that getting outraged about it makes it easy to miss the systemic problems that venality often disguises.
- Allocation
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Great
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- Nov 07, 2020
Wall Street has come a long way from the insider-dominated world that was blown apart by the Great Depression.
- Long
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- Nov 07, 2020
To be sure, if you watch CNBC all day long you'll pick up some interesting news about particular companies and the economy as a whole. Unfortunately, to get to the useful information, you have to wade through reams of useless stuff, with little guidance on how to distinguish between the two.
- God
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Even
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- Nov 07, 2020
The oil market is especially sensitive even to a hint of expansion or contraction in supply.
- Economic System
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- People
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- Nov 07, 2020
In practice, downsizing is too often about cutting your work force 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.
- Economy
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- Nov 07, 2020
Downsizing itself is an inevitable part of any creatively destructive economy.
- Investment
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- Nov 07, 2020
What the investment community does like is short-term measures designed to boost share prices.
- Confronting
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- Nov 07, 2020
Defense contractors are able to reap tremendous profits while rarely confronting the risks for which those profits are supposed to be the reward.
- Crazy
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- Nov 07, 2020
In a world where companies increasingly know about their business in real time, it makes no sense that public reporting mostly follows the old quarterly schedule. Companies sit on vital information until reporting day, at which point the market goes crazy.
- Getting
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- Nov 07, 2020
Flexible supply chains are great for multinationals and consumers. But they erode already thin profit margins in developing-world factories and foster a pell-mell work environment in which getting the order out the door is the only thing that matters.
- Hallway
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- Nov 07, 2020
On the simplest level, telecommuting makes it harder for people to have the kinds of informal interactions that are crucial to the way knowledge moves through an organization. The role that hallway chat plays in driving new ideas has become a cliche of business writing, but that doesn't make it less true.
- Good
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- Nov 07, 2020
Workers who come to the U.S. see their wages and their standard of living boosted sharply simply by crossing the border. That's a good thing, and one of the best arguments for immigration reform, even if you'll rarely hear a politician make it.
- Banking
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- Nov 07, 2020
The fundamental problem with banks is what it's always been: they're in the business of banking, and banking, whether plain vanilla or incredibly sophisticated, is inherently risky.
- Prohibition
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- Nov 07, 2020
The ban on sports betting does exactly what Prohibition did. It makes criminals rich.
- Government
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- Nov 07, 2020
Unlike most government programs, Social Security and, in part, Medicare are funded by payroll taxes dedicated specifically to them. Some of the tax revenue pays for current benefits; anything that's left over goes into trust funds for the future. The programs were designed this way for political reasons.
- Future
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- Nov 07, 2020
Politically speaking, it's always easier to shell out money for a disaster that has already happened, with clearly identifiable victims, than to invest money in protecting against something that may or may not happen in the future.
- Guaranteeing
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- Nov 07, 2020
Of course, plenty of people don't think that guaranteeing affordable health insurance is a core responsibility of government.
- Corporate
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- Nov 07, 2020
Corporate welfare isn't necessarily a bad thing.
- Need
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- Nov 07, 2020
Campaigns fail if they waste resources courting voters who are unpersuadable or already persuaded. Their most urgent task is to find and persuade the few voters who are genuinely undecided and the larger number who are favorably disposed but need a push to actually vote.
- Rest
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- Nov 07, 2020
The U.S. is excellent at importing cheap products from the rest of the world. Let's try importing some human capital instead.
- People
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- Nov 07, 2020
Congressional Republicans themselves have vehemently defended the idea that preexisting conditions should not be used to deny people insurance.
- Deserve
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- Nov 07, 2020
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 insure that shirkers get what they deserve, we are prepared to make ourselves poorer.
- Bribery
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- Nov 07, 2020
Until the nineteen-seventies, Western countries paid little attention to corruption overseas, and bribery was seen as an unpleasant but necessary part of doing business there. In some European countries, businesses were even allowed to deduct bribes as an expense.
- Developing Countries
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- Nov 07, 2020
Developing countries often have hypertrophied bureaucracies, requiring businesses to deal with enormous amounts of red tape.
- Good
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- Nov 07, 2020
I started in business journalism from the outside, so when I started writing about markets and business, I was struck by the fact that markets seemed to work well even though people are often irrational, lack good information and are not perfect in the way they think about decisions.
- People
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- Nov 07, 2020
Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably smart - smarter even sometimes than the smartest people in them.
- Nov 07, 2020
Sometimes even a smart crowd will make a mistake.
- Challenge
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- Nov 07, 2020
The challenge for capitalism is that the things that breed trust also breed the environment for fraud.
- Consolidated
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- Nov 07, 2020
Nike used to be known as Blue Ribbon Sports. What's now Sara Lee used to be Consolidated Foods. And Exxon was once 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.
- Most
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- Nov 07, 2020
Most corporate name changes are the result of mergers and acquisitions. But these tend to be unimaginative.
- Desire
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Best
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- Nov 07, 2020