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

Decide what you stand for. And then stand for it all the time.

There's usually some process by which a potentially great idea gets prostituted into something lacklustre, or by which the wrong idea gets put forward.

To prop up the stock price, managers have to turn down the screws on everybody. That forces them to cancel all the projects that would lead to future growth in order to drop money to the bottom line. This is HP's dilemma today. Once a company's growth has stopped, the game as we have known it is over. It's a scary thing.

Ultimately, when you come up with a classification scheme that is collectively exhaustive and mutually exclusive, then the theory can become what Kuhn called a paradigm.

Disruptive technology is a theory. It says this will happen and this is why; it's a statement of cause and effect. In our teaching we have so exalted the virtues of data-driven decision making that in many ways we condemn managers only to be able to take action after the data is clear and the game is over. In many ways a good theory is more accurate than data. It allows you to see into the future more clearly.

Because we employ no professional preachers, it means that every sermon or lesson in church is given by a regular member - women and men, children and grandparents.