James Surowiecki Quotes & Sayings (Page 3)

“Intellectual-property rules are clearly necessary to spur innovation: if every invention could be stolen, or every new drug immediately copied, few people would invest in innovation. But too much protection can strangle competition and can limit what economists call 'incremental innovation' - innovations that build, in some way, on others.”

“In confusing stock options with ownership, corporations confuse trappings with substance.”

“If being the biggest company was a guarantee of success, we'd all be using IBM computers and driving GM cars.”

“Patrimonial capitalism's legacy is that many people see reform as a euphemism for corruption and self-dealing.”

“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.”

“Movies' mistrust of capitalism is almost as old as the medium itself.”

“Wall Street has come a long way from the insider-dominated world that was blown apart by the Great Depression.”

“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.”

“The history of the Internet is, in part, a series of opportunities missed: the major record labels let Apple take over the digital-music business; Blockbuster refused to buy Netflix for a mere fifty million dollars; Excite turned down the chance to acquire Google for less than a million dollars.”

“The Internet has become a remarkable fount of economic and social innovation largely because it's been an archetypal level playing field, on which even sites with little or no money behind them - blogs, say, or Wikipedia - can become influential.”