Perseverance may be just as important as speed in the battle for the future.

In an ideal world, an individual's institutional power would be correlated perfectly with his or her value-add. In practice, this is seldom the case.

In a world of commoditized knowledge, the returns go to the companies who can produce non-standard knowledge.

Businesses fail when they over-invest in what is at the expense of what could be.

Most of us understand that innovation is enormously important. It's the only insurance against irrelevance. It's the only guarantee of long-term customer loyalty. It's the only strategy for out-performing a dismal economy.

In most companies, the formal hierarchy is a matter of public record - it's easy to discover who's in charge of what. By contrast, natural leaders don't appear on any organization chart.

The only thing that can be safely predicted is that sometime soon your organization will be challenged to change in ways for which it has no precedent.