My conclusion: Management is the most noble of professions if it's practiced well. No other occupation offers as many ways to help others learn and grow, take responsibility and be recognized for achievement, and contribute to the success of a team.

The transformation at the corporate level was achieved by selling off business units in old markets and by creating new business units to pursue the new opportunities. But the individual business units themselves within those transformed corporations were almost inert to change.

If I know what to spec, and I can measure it, and there are no unpredictable interdependencies between what you do and what I must do in response, then an economist would say that is sufficient information for a market to emerge between you and me.

Innovation almost always is not successful the first time out. You try something and it doesn't work and it takes confidence to say we haven't failed yet. Ultimately you become commercially successful.

Regulatory fiat cannot create a market at a technologically interdependent interface. And by the same token, regulation and so-called monopoly power rarely prevail at modular interfaces between stages of value-added technology.

What you need is a fundamental humility - the belief that you can learn from anyone.

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."