Why would people ever think, when thinking deprives them of “the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved”—especially in an online environment where the social approval of one’s attitudes is so much easier to acquire, in the currency of likes, faves, followers, and friends?

— Alan Jacobs, How to Think

As a leader, you should be working very intentionally to spark as much emotion and passion as you can among your team rather than worrying about running the kinds of conventional management studies that try to measure how hard or fast people are working.

— Jim Whitehurst and Gary Hamel, The Open Organization

For me, this is exactly what’s so pernicious about the morality of debt: the way that financial imperatives constantly try to reduce us all, despite ourselves, to the equivalent of pillagers, eyeing the world simply for what can be turned into money – and then tell us that it’s only those who are willing to see the world as pillagers who deserve access to the resources required to pursue anything in life other than money.

— David Graeber, Debt

“every village boy of twelve knows how to use a lever better than the cleverest mechanician in the academy” because they learned it through play. “The lessons you learn in the playground are worth a hundredfold more than what they learn in the classroom.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile: Or On Education

Focusing on the “self” gives management unprecedented cultural power. It intensifies work in ways which are nearly impossible to resist. Who would be able to refuse the invitation to express themselves and their presumed potential or talents?

— Bogdan Costea, Today’s management-speak has a lot in common with 1930s Soviet propaganda—and it’s making people miserable