Government mandates, incidentally, are likely to distort rather than solve the problem of finding a market. I would, therefore, force my organization to live by its wits rather than to rely on capricious subsidies or non-economic-based regulation to fuel my business.

One reason there are so many short-lived management fads is that their prescriptions were derived and advocated in precisely this way. So managers read about a fad and try it, find that it doesn't work, abandon the effort, and move on to the next thing. In reality, it is usually the case that the faddish prescription was indeed sound advice in certain circumstances, but actually was poor advice in other circumstances.

Almost always great new ideas don't emerge from within a single person or function, but at the intersection of functions or people that have never met before.

The only useful information about the market will be what I create through expeditions into the market, through testing and probing, trial and error, by selling real products to real people who pay real money.

You can't find returns in investments you haven't made.

Management has to provide the coordinating mechanism between what the supplier provides and what the user needs in not-good-enough situations where product architecture is consequently interdependent. Management always beats markets when there is not sufficient information.

How can you make sense of the future when you only have data about the past?