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I tend to delay writing by doing more research - it's really the act of writing the piece that I have the hardest time with.

James Surowiecki

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James Surowiecki
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: April 30
Journalist
Writer
Meriden
Connecticut
James Michael Surowiecki
Piece
Research
Pieces
Writing
Really
Time
Delay
Hardest
Tend

More quotes by James Surowiecki

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In the struggle between capital and labor, more often than not capital has won, because the real source of value for most companies has historically been the hard assets that they owned and controlled.
James Surowiecki
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You might think of consumption as a fairly passive activity, but buying new products and services is actually pretty risky, at least if you value your time and money.
James Surowiecki
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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.
James Surowiecki
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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.
James Surowiecki
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Now, modern economies have a very effective mechanism for deciding if salaries are really too high: it's called the free market. That's how most people's salaries are set, after all, including those of major-league baseball players and European soccer players.
James Surowiecki
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In terms of productivity - that is, how much a worker produces in an hour - there's little difference between the U.S., France, and Germany. But since more people work in America, and since they work so many more hours, Americans create more wealth.
James Surowiecki
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Standards wars involve lots of variables, and understanding them often seems more an art than a science. They generally involve just two big players, and end in a winner-take-all situation.
James Surowiecki
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The financial crisis of 2008 was not caused by investment banks betting against the housing market in 2007. It was caused by the fact that too few investors - including all of the big investment banks - bet too heavily on the housing market in the years before 2007.
James Surowiecki
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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.
James Surowiecki
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If small groups are included in the decision-making process, then they should be allowed to make decisions. If an organization sets up teams and then uses them for purely advisory purposes, it loses the true advantage that a team has: namely, collective wisdom.
James Surowiecki
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The profit motive, indecorous though it may seem, may represent the best chance the poor have to reap some of globalization's benefits.
James Surowiecki
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If army ants are wandering around and they get lost, they start to follow a simple rule:Just do what the ant in front of you does. The ants eventually end up in a circle. There's this famous example of one that was 1,200 feet long and lasted for two days the ants just kept marching around and around in a circle until they died.
James Surowiecki
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Punk rock has never really had much patience with musical virtuosity. Actually, it'd be more accurate to say that for most of its history, punk has been actively hostile to virtuosity.
James Surowiecki
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In the heart of the Great Depression, millions of American workers did something they'd never done before: they joined a union. Emboldened by the passage of the Wagner Act, which made collective bargaining easier, unions organized industries across the country, remaking the economy.
James Surowiecki
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The paradox of Steve Jobs's career is that he had no interest in listening to consumers - he was famously dismissive of market research - yet nonetheless had an amazing sense of what consumers actually wanted.
James Surowiecki
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Developing countries often have hypertrophied bureaucracies, requiring businesses to deal with enormous amounts of red tape.
James Surowiecki
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You'll sometimes hear from people that they actually do a better job of getting their work done when they have a lot of other obligations - in effect, it removes the possibility of procrastinating.
James Surowiecki
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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.
James Surowiecki
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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.
James Surowiecki
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Meeting external deadlines is much harder than meeting internal ones. On the other hand, internal deadlines sometimes don't feel real, and are therefore easy to evade.
James Surowiecki