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“showed that even with the considerable increase in the average level of education over the course of the twentieth century, earned income inequality did not decrease. Qualification levels shifted upward: a high school diploma now represents what a grade school certificate used to mean, a college degree what a high school diploma used to stand for, and so on.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“Throughout most of the twentieth century, however, and still today, the available data suggest that social mobility has been and remains lower in the United States than in Europe. One possible explanation for this is the fact that access to the most elite US universities requires the payment of extremely high tuition fees. Furthermore, these fees rose sharply in the period 1990–2010, following fairly closely the increase in top US incomes, which suggests that the reduced social mobility observed in the United States in the past will decline even more in the future.29 The issue of unequal access to higher education is increasingly a subject of debate in the United States. Research has shown that the proportion of college degrees earned by children whose parents belong to the bottom two quartiles of the income hierarchy stagnated at 10–20 percent in 1970–2010, while it rose from 40 to 80 percent for children with parents in the top quartile.30 In other words, parents’ income has become an almost perfect predictor of university access.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“By comparing various sources of data, moreover, it is possible to estimate that the average income of the parents of Harvard students is currently about $450,000, which corresponds to the average income of the top 2 percent of the US income hierarchy.32 Such a finding does not seem entirely compatible with the idea of selection based solely on merit. The contrast between the official meritocratic discourse and the reality seems particularly extreme in this case. The total absence of transparency regarding selection procedures should also be noted.33”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“As different as Emily Dickinson’s parents’ life in America seems from that of Sitaram Gawande’s in India, both relied on systems that shared the advantage of easily resolving the question of care for the elderly. There was no need to save up for a spot in a nursing home or arrange for meals-on-wheels. It was understood that parents would just keep living in their home, assisted by one or more of the children they’d raised. In contemporary societies, by contrast, old age and infirmity have gone from being a shared, multigenerational responsibility to a more or less private state—something experienced largely alone or with the aid of doctors and institutions. How did this happen? How did we go from Sitaram Gawande’s life to Alice Hobson’s?”
― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

“Scientology, as its critics point out, is unlike any other Western religion in that it withholds key aspects of its central theology from all but its most exalted followers. This would be akin to the Catholic Church telling only a select number of the faithful that Jesus Christ died for their sins.”
― Janet Reitman, Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion

“The traditional religious bedrock—worship, God, love and compassion, even the very concept of faith—is wholly absent from its precepts. And, unique among modern religions, Scientology charges members for every service, book, and course offered, promising greater and greater spiritual enlightenment with every dollar spent. People don’t “believe” in Scientology; they buy into it.”
― Janet Reitman, Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion

“What unites all of these individual Scientologists is a belief in their inherent spiritual imperfection, which can be rectified—if not totally reversed—only through intense study of, and rigid adherence to, the teachings of a single man: Scientology’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard. Though he has been dead some twenty years, Hubbard’s followers regard him as a living, vital entity—a personal Jesus of sorts.”
― Janet Reitman, Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion

“What’s more, a real premium began to be placed on being part of this knowledge oeuvre—not just in what McKinsey knew but in who at McKinsey knew these subject areas. An unstated understanding emerged that if you were a logistics expert in, say, the retail sector and you were called by a partner you had never met who mainly did work with pharmaceutical companies, you would nevertheless return the call. That reputation for contributing was your asset in the firm.”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm

“In 1988 two consultants, Jim Rosenthal and Juan Ocampo, wrote Securitization of Credit, a road map that helped Citibank and Chase Manhattan survive the South American debt crisis. The book, the first on a subject that soon washed over the financial world like a tsunami, showed the banks, unable to earn their way out of their bad debt situation, that by securitizing the loans on their books—packaging them up and selling them into the secondary debt markets—they could effectively walk away from the loans, albeit while still taking a hit to their balance sheets.”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm

“In many important ways the book really was an attack on McKinsey thinking, on the idea that the secrets of success could be found in an analytical framework or in a new corporate structure. It was an attack on the rationalist idea that businesses were machines that could be fine-tuned. The work of Peters and Waterman served to remind managers about first principles in business: If they didn’t listen to their customers or employees, then the rest was irrelevant. If the strategy revolution was forcing companies to look outward more than they ever had before, what Excellence did was force that gaze right back inside again. And it wasn’t talking only about financial management. It was also talking about how you treated the people who worked for you. It was, in short, the first great manifesto of the idea of corporate culture.”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm

“And McKinsey never really left the building. A decade later, when John Birt, then director-general of the BBC, stepped down from his job, McKinsey brought him on as a part-time consultant. In 2005 Birt severed all ties with the firm after critics suggested that working for 10 Downing Street in London and McKinsey posed a conflict of interest—as if hiring him shortly after extracting millions of pounds out of the BBC hadn’t been. Birt’s replacement at the BBC’s helm—Greg Dyke—immediately slashed spending on outside consultants by 75 percent.”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm

“What have they fixed?” asked former McKinsey consultant Michael Lanning. “What have they changed? Did they take any voice in the way banking has evolved in the past thirty years? They did study after study at GM, and that place needed the most radical kind of change you can imagine. The place was dead, and it was just going to take a long time for the body to die unless they changed how they operated. McKinsey was in there with huge teams, charging huge fees, for several decades. And look where GM came out.”13 In the end, all the GM work did was provide a revenue stream to enrich a group of McKinsey partners, especially those working with the automaker. The last time McKinsey was influential at Apple Computer was when John Sculley was there, and that’s because he’d had a brand-marketing heritage from Pepsi. And Sculley was a disaster. Did McKinsey do anything to help the great companies of today become what they are? Amazon, Microsoft, Google? In short, no.”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm

“Still, McKinsey’s high self-regard survives even in the face of evidence to the contrary. McKinsey consultant Tom Steiner recalled a strategy study done for the New York office by another partner, Chuck Farr. “He had two slides. The first was the top clients of the New York office, by billings—companies like AT&T, American Express, and Manufacturers Hanover. All the partners got up to talk about what special thing McKinsey had done to become so vital to those clients. Before we knew it, there were only fifteen minutes left of what was supposed to be a two-hour meeting. Someone said, ‘What’s on the second slide?’ It was Booz Allen’s top clients. And they were pretty much the same companies.”14 McKinsey may have been earning more than Booz at the time, but it was from a client base that was clearly willing to pay for advice from everyone. There’s nothing special about that kind of product.”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm

“Smart clients say that the best way to use McKinsey is not to let them insinuate themselves—to prohibit walking the halls of the client’s offices looking for new business. Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, for example, will hire McKinsey, but for one-off projects in which the entire body of knowledge generated is transferred to JPMorgan Chase at the end of the project. The firm’s operating committee has to approve any consulting engagement, and the JPMorgan Chase executives don’t take just any consultants; they pick and choose the specific people they want on the project.”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm

“But that was thirteen years ago. Today, the crème de la crème flock to younger, more vibrant companies, in both entry-level and much higher positions. The brightest students tend to not want to work for large companies anymore, and McKinsey is a large company. In the 1970s every smart student received an offer from Arthur Andersen, then about ten thousand strong. The more adventurous went to McKinsey, which employed a paltry four hundred by comparison. Today Arthur Andersen is gone, and McKinsey has taken its place in the student imagination. It’s for the average Harvard Business School graduate, not the Baker scholars. And, as has always been the case, McKinsey consultants continue to leave for big positions elsewhere. Among others, Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg is a McKinsey alumnus, as is Google chief financial officer Patrick Pichette. McKinsey may be a career firm for some, but it tends to lose its best people.”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm

“Enron. One: The firm endorsed Enron’s asset-light strategy. In a 1997 edition of the Quarterly, consultants wrote that “Enron was not distinctive at building and operating power stations, but it didn’t matter; these skills could be contracted out. Rather, it was good at negotiating contracts, financing, and government guarantee—precisely the skills that distinguished successful players.” Two: The firm endorsed Enron’s “loose-tight” culture. Or, more precisely, McKinsey endorsed Enron’s use of a term that came straight out of In Search of Excellence. In a 1998 Quarterly, the consultants peripherally praised Enron’s culture of “[allowing executives] to make decisions without seeking constant approval from above; a clear link between daily activities and business results (even if not a P&L); something new to work on as often as possible.” Three: The firm endorsed Enron’s use of off–balance-sheet financing. In that same 1997 Quarterly, the consultants wrote that “the deployment of off–balance-sheet funds using institutional investment money fostered [Enron’s] securitization skills and granted it access to capital at below the hurdle rates of major oil companies.” McKinsey heavyweight Lowell Bryan—godfather of the firm’s financial institutions practice—put it another way: “Securitization’s potential is great because it removes capital and balance sheets as constraints on growth.” Four: The firm endorsed Enron’s approach to “atomization.” In a 2001 Quarterly, the consultants wrote: “Enron has built a reputation as one of the world’s most innovative companies by attacking and atomizing traditional industry structures—first in natural gas and later in such diverse businesses as electric power, Internet bandwidth, and pulp and paper. In each case, Enron focused on the business sliver of intermediation while avoiding the incumbency problems created by a large asset base and vertical integration.”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm

“The reality of your life always comes out in pathology,”
― Michael Mosley, The Fast Diet: The Simple Secret of Intermittent Fasting: Lose Weight, Stay Healthy, Live Longer

“There is no reason to be alarmed by benign, occasional, short-term hunger. Given base-level good health, you will not perish. You won’t collapse in a heap and need to be rescued by the cat. Your body is designed to go without food for longish periods, even if it has lost the skill through years of grazing, picking, and snacking. Research has found that modern humans tend to mistake a whole range of emotions for hunger.6 We eat when we’re bored, when we’re thirsty, when we’re around food (when aren’t we?), when we’re with company, or simply when the clock happens to tell us it’s time for food. Most of us eat, too, just because it feels good. This is known as hedonic hunger,”
― Michael Mosley, The Fast Diet: The Simple Secret of Intermittent Fasting: Lose Weight, Stay Healthy, Live Longer

“Meditate. Neuroscientists have found that monks who spend years meditating actually grow their left prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most responsible for feeling happy. But don’t worry, you don’t have to spend years in sequestered, celibate silence to experience a boost. Take just five minutes each day to watch your breath go in and out.”
― Shawn Achor, The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work

“Just as our view of work affects our real experience of it, so too does our view of leisure. If our mindset conceives of free time, hobby time, or family time as non-productive, then we will, in fact, make it a waste of time. For example, many of the business leaders and Harvard students I work with exhibit the telltale symptoms of the “workaholic’s curse.” They conceive of all the time spent away from actual work to be a hindrance to their productivity, so they squander it. As one CEO of a telecommunications company in Malaysia told me: “I wanted to be productive because that’s what makes me happy, so I tried to maximize the time I spent working. But, as I later realized, I had too narrowly defined what ‘being productive’ was. I started to feel guilty when I did anything that wasn’t work. Nothing else, not exercise or time with my wife or relaxation, was productive. So I never had time to recharge my batteries, which meant that, ironically, the more I worked, the more my productivity plummeted.”
― Shawn Achor, The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work

“Over the past year, as I have been working with the global tax-accounting firm KPMG to help their tax auditors and managers become happier, I began to realize that many of the employees were suffering from an unfortunate problem. Many of them had to spend 8 to 14 hours a day scanning tax forms for errors, and as they did, their brains were becoming wired to look for mistakes. This made them very good at their jobs, but they were getting so expert at seeing errors and potential pitfalls that this habit started to spill over into other areas of their lives. Like the Tetris players who suddenly saw those blocks everywhere, these accountants experienced each day as a tax audit, always scanning the world for the worst. As you can imagine, this was no picnic, and what’s more, it was undermining their relationships at work and at home. In performance reviews, they noticed only the faults of their team members, never the strengths. When they went home to their families, they noticed only the C’s on their kids’ report cards, never the A’s. When they ate at restaurants, they could only notice that the potatoes were underdone—never that the steak was cooked perfectly. One tax auditor confided that he had been very depressed over the past quarter. As we discussed why, he mentioned in passing that one day during a break at work he had made an Excel spreadsheet listing all the mistakes his wife had made over the past six weeks. Imagine the reaction of his wife (or soon to be ex wife) when he brought that list of faults home in an attempt to make things better. Tax auditors are far from the only ones who get stuck in this”
― Shawn Achor, The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work

“My heart sank. It’s hard to describe how small $50,000 is to an investment banker. Linda Evangelista, a supermodel from the 1980s and 1990s, once famously declared, “I don’t get out of bed for less than ten thousand dollars a day.” For an investment banker, that number is more like $1 million. But here I was having earned nothing for Salomon, and $50,000 was that much more than zero, so I agreed.”
― Bill Browder, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice

“This whole exercise was teaching me that Russian business culture is closer to that of a prison yard than anything else. In prison, all you have is your reputation. Your position is hard-earned and it is not relinquished easily. When someone is crossing the yard coming for you, you cannot stand idly by. You have to kill him before he kills you. If you don’t, and if you manage to survive the attack, you’ll be deemed weak and before you know it, you will have lost your respect and become someone’s bitch. This is the calculus that every oligarch and every Russian politician goes through every day.”
― Bill Browder, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice

“While these tactics were aggressive and crude, they confirmed that our legislation had touched a nerve. I wasn’t the only one who recognized this. Many other victims of human rights abuses in Russia saw the same thing. After the bill was introduced they came to Washington or wrote letters to the Magnitsky Act’s cosponsors with the same basic message: “You have found the Achilles’ heel of the Putin regime.” Then, one by one, they would ask, “Can you add the people who killed my brother to the Magnitsky Act?” “Can you add the people who tortured my mother?” “How about the people who kidnapped my husband?” And on and on. The senators quickly realized that they’d stumbled onto something much bigger than one horrific case. They had inadvertently discovered a new method for fighting human rights abuses in authoritarian regimes in the twenty-first century: targeted visa sanctions and asset freezes. After a dozen or so of these visits and letters, Senator Cardin and his cosponsors conferred and decided to expand the law, adding sixty-five words to the Magnitsky Act. Those new words said that in addition to sanctioning Sergei’s tormentors, the Magnitsky Act would sanction all other gross human rights abusers in Russia. With those extra sixty-five words, my personal fight for justice had become everyone’s fight. The revised bill was officially introduced on May 19, 2011, less than a month after we posted the Olga Stepanova YouTube video. Following its introduction, a small army of Russian activists descended on Capitol Hill, pushing for the bill’s passage. They pressed every senator who would talk to them to sign on. There was Garry Kasparov, the famous chess grand master and human rights activist; there was Alexei Navalny, the most popular Russian opposition leader; and there was Evgenia Chirikova, a well-known Russian environmental activist. I didn’t have to recruit any of these people. They just showed up by themselves. This uncoordinated initiative worked beautifully. The number of Senate cosponsors grew quickly, with three or four new senators signing on every month. It was an easy sell. There wasn’t a pro-Russian-torture-and-murder lobby in Washington to oppose it. No senator, whether the most liberal Democrat or the most conservative Republican, would lose a single vote for banning Russian torturers and murderers from coming to America. The Magnitsky Act was gathering so much momentum that it appeared it might be unstoppable. From the day that Kyle Scott at the State Department stonewalled me, I knew that the administration was dead set against this, but now they were in a tough spot. If they openly opposed the law, it would look as if they were siding with the Russians. However, if they publicly supported it, it would threaten Obama’s “reset” with Russia. They needed to come up with some other solution. On July 20, 2011, the State Department showed its cards. They sent a memo to the Senate entitled “Administration Comments on S.1039 Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law.” Though not meant to be made public, within a day it was leaked.”
― Bill Browder, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice

“For the previous few years, Putin had sat comfortably in the Kremlin, knowing that whatever happened in the US Congress, President Obama opposed the Magnitsky Act. In Putin’s totalitarian mind, this was an ironclad guarantee that it would never become law. But what Putin overlooked was that the United States was not Russia.”
― Bill Browder, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice

“While Putin expected a bad reaction from the United States, he had no idea what kind of hornet’s nest he’d stirred up in his own country. One can criticize Russians for many things, but their love of children isn’t one of them. Russia is one of the only countries in the world where you can take a screaming child into a fancy restaurant and no one will give you a second look. Russians simply adore children.”
― Bill Browder, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice

“I wasn’t optimistic. Interpol has a reputation for cooperating with authoritarian regimes to chase down political enemies. In many cases Interpol had done the wrong thing. The most egregious example of this was in the lead-up to World War II, when Interpol helped the Nazis pursue prominent Jews who’d fled the Reich. There have been many shocking examples since.”
― Bill Browder, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice

“Early in this book, I said that the feeling I got from buying a Polish stock that went up ten times was the best thing to ever happen to me in my career. But the feeling I had on that balcony in Brussels with Sergei’s widow and son, as we watched the largest lawmaking body in Europe recognize and condemn the injustices suffered by Sergei and his family, felt orders of magnitude better than any financial success I’ve ever had. If finding a ten bagger in the stock market was a highlight of my life before, there is no feeling as satisfying as getting some measure of justice in a highly unjust world.”
― Bill Browder, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice

“Like conventional weapons, most digital weapons have two parts—the missile, or delivery system, responsible for spreading the malicious payload and installing it onto machines, and the payload itself, which performs the actual attack, such as stealing data or doing other things to infected machines. In this case, the payload was the malicious code that targeted the Siemens software and PLCs.”
― Kim Zetter, Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon

“These incidents were all accidental, but in Poland in 2008 a fourteen-year-old boy in Lódz caused several trains to derail when he used the infrared port of a modified TV remote control to hijack the railway’s signaling system and switch the tram tracks. Four trams derailed, and twelve people were injured.”
― Kim Zetter, Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon