Because these firms listened to their customers, invested aggressively in new technologies that would provide their customers more and better products of the sort they wanted, and because they carefully studied market trends and systematically allocated investment capital to innovations that promised the best returns, they lost their positions of leadership.

Its actually really important that you succeed at what youre succeeding at, but that isnt going to be the measure of your life.

I've concluded that the metric by which God will assess my life isn't dollars but the individual people whose lives I've touched.

Core competence, as it is used by many managers, is a dangerously inward-looking notion. Competitiveness is far more about doing what customers value than doing what you think you're good at.

Often they [writers on the study of management] have a point of view based upon intuition and experience. They then offer a cadence of two-paragraph examples carefully selected to "prove" their theory, and then they write "one size fits all" books. The message is, "If you'd do what these companies did, you'd be successful too."

If you take away religion, you can't hire enough police.

The best strategy is a balance between having a deliberate one, and a flexible, or emergent strategy.