Ajay Kelkar: “Today’s businesses have the opportunity to work with all sorts of data: contact details, location information, purchasing history, social and professional contacts, browsing history and online behavior, workouts, store visits, television preferences, and their personal views—much of which is gathered in real-time. big data is fundamentally allowing businesses to “mash-up” both structured and unstructured data, from a host of sources, sites, and sensors. And yet with so much data everywhere, the danger lies in trusting the data analysis implicitly without grasping its limitations and the possibly flawed judgments of the people who build predictive models.”
Adrian Wooldridge: “Meritocracy was a real creation that took time, and that took a certain self-denying ordinance—we were pushing against some of the most obvious things about human nature. So, meritocracy has a relatively brief history, in the sense that it’s the creation of the French Revolution, the American Revolution, and of what I call the the “English Revolution,” the Gladstonian revolution of the 19th century—all of which were taking the old social order and tearing it up, saying, “Let’s reconstitute the social order on the basis of a set of new principles, open competition, testing people’s promise and ability, getting rid of nepotism, getting rid of feudal restrictions.””
Jeff Immelt: “1,000 books get written about leadership and change and all that stuff. Knowing what to do isn’t that hard, knowing how to do it isn’t that hard. Knowing when to do it is really hard.” [via Shane Parish]
