[3] While Heffernan's first two books focused on leadership and entrepreneurship and how they impact women in the workplace, her overarching theme is recognizing and releasing the talent that often lies buried inside organizations, under-valued and under-rewarded because it is unconventional.

In the United Kingdom, she ran IPPA and Marlin Gas Trading Ltd. Before running her businesses, she worked for 13 years for the British Broadcasting Corporation, where she produced radio and television programs.

[8] In 2008, Heffernan appeared in the British Channel 4's series Secret Millionaire, in which successful entrepreneurs go undercover to identify and support community heroes.

[11] In May 2015, Heffernan gave a TED talk at TEDWomen 2015, titled "Why it's time to forget the Pecking Order at Work", that highlighted how social capital makes candor safe, encouraging more frequent conflicts and leading to better outcomes.

[12] In July 2019, she gave her fourth talk for TED at TEDSummit 2019 about the need for more human skills and less technology to solve problems in business, government and life in the modern age.

The book examines the statistics underlying the growth and outsize success of female-owned businesses, posing the question: "How is it that women achieve so much more when they get so much less in the way of institutional support and funding?"

Examining women’s motivation, their neurological and social advantages, choice of markets, leadership styles, use of networks and advisors and their different approaches to mergers, acquisitions and exits.

Heffernan cites examples of willful blindness in the Catholic Church, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, Nazi Germany, Bernard Madoff’s investors, BP’s safety record, the military in Afghanistan and the dog-eat-dog world of subprime mortgage lenders.

Instead of breeding innovation, new ideas and inspiring us to do better, competition regularly produces instead more cases of fraud, cheating, stress and inequality whilst suffocating the creative instinct we desperately need to nurture.

By speaking to scientists, musicians, athletes, entrepreneurs and executives Heffernan has found a plethora of examples of individuals and organizations who have implemented creative, cooperative ways of working together.

In Beyond Measure, Margaret Heffernan looks back over her decades spent overseeing different organizations and comes to a counterintuitive conclusion: it's the small shifts that have the greatest impact.

Heffernan argues that building the strongest organization can be accelerated by implementing seemingly small changes, such as embracing conflict as a creative catalyst; using every mind on the team; celebrating mistakes; speaking up and listening more; and encouraging time off from work.