The single biggest reason companies fail is they overinvest in what is, as opposed to what might be.

Business leaders must find ways to infuse mundane business activities with deeper, soul-stirring ideals, such as honor, truth, love, justice, and beauty.

As human beings, we are the genetic elite, the sentient, contemplating and innovating sum of countless genetic accidents and transcription errors.

Dakota tribal wisdom says that when you're on a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. Of course, there are other strategies. You can change riders. You can get a committee to study the dead horse. You can benchmark how other companies ride dead horses. You can declare that it's cheaper to feed a dead horse. You can harness several dead horses together. But after you've tried all these things, you're still going to have to dismount.

It doesn't matter much where your company sits in its industry ecosystem, nor how vertically or horizontally integrated it is - what matters is its relative 'share of customer value' in the final product or solution, and its cost of producing that value.

Competition for the future is competition to create and dominate emerging opportunities-to stake out new competitive space. Creating the future is more challenging than playing catch up, in that you have to create your own roadmap.

The biggest barriers to strategic renewal are almost always top management's unexamined beliefs.