If you want to make better theory, you've got to use the best that's available and look through the lens of another discipline to see if you can uncover more anomalies. By looking at the phenomena of failure from the perspective of sales, marketing, finance, general management, and the equity markets, I was able to see things that Rebecca [Henderson] hadn't.

In 15 years from now half of US universities may be in bankruptcy ... in the end I'm excited to see that happen. So pray for Harvard Business School if you wouldn't mind.

We don't hire ministers or priests to teach and care for us. This forces us to teach and care for each other - and in my view, this is the core of Christian living as Christ taught it.

If you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you'll find this predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification.

There are direct paths to a successful career. But there are plenty of indirect paths, too.

The important thing is that over time, scientific progress transforms things that used to have to be dealt with in a problem-solving mode down to the pattern-recognition space; and from pattern recognition into the rules-based mode. This is the mechanism by which less-trained people are enabled to do more sophisticated things. This is always the way disruption happens. It enables a larger population of less-experienced people to do more sophisticated things.

It is when the product is not good enough that proprietary integration gives you a competitive edge. You cannot outsource and be competitively successful in this situation. But at the other end, where standard components assembled in standard ways can yield acceptable performance, you must outsource.