Watching how customers actually use a product provides much more reliable information than can be gleaned from a verbal interview or a focus group.

When product performance outstrips the ability of customers to use that performance in an industry, the competitive game changes. Under those circumstances you have to decouple components businesses from assembly businesses.

Management is the most noble of professions if it's practiced well.

Purpose must be deliberately conceived and chosen, and then pursued.

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.

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.

The whole enterprise of teaching managers is steeped in the ethic of data-driven analytical support. The problem is, the data is only available about the past. So the way weve taught managers to make decisions and consultants to analyze problems condemns them to taking action when its too late.