Change and reinvention require a commodity that is absent in our time as it never has been before. That commodity—the catalytic ingredient of all change—is slack. Slack is the time when reinvention happens. It is time when you are not 100 percent busy doing the operational business of your firm.

— Tom DeMarco, Slack

Beneficial historical developments often create losers together with the winners, and the apparent economic losers of globalization (namely the lower classes of rich countries) are often said to be the supporters of authoritarian populism.

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

…we all have unconscious biases that push us toward certain associations, but the math-trained person may be more equipped with examples that highlight the logical flaws in doing so.

— Francis Su, Mathematics for Human Flourishing

Once you know that the tendency to think dichotomously and militaristically is not just a local phenomenon, pertaining to this or that particular case, but exemplary of “our deeper error in parsing the complexities of human conflicts and natural continua into stark contrasts formulated as struggles between opposing sides,” then you have set yourself a task, not completed one. For now you must try to figure out how these nondichotomous forces work in relation to one another.

— Alan Jacobs, How to Think

The far more common worst case is a company constrained by your personal limitations, and the only company that can tolerate being constrained by you is a company that doesn’t grow.

— Will Larson and Tanya Reilly, Staff Engineer