I describe management as arts, crafts and science. It is a practice that draws on arts, craft and science and there is a lot of craft - meaning experience - there is a certain amount of craft meaning insight, creativity and vision, and there is the use of science, technique or analysis.

It is time to recognize conventional MBA programs for what they are - or else to close them down. They are specialized training in the functions of business, not general educating in the practice of management.

If the private sectors are about markets and the public sectors are about governments, then the plural sector is about communities.

Management is a curious phenomenon. It is generously paid, enormously influential, and significantly devoid of common sense

Strategy is a pattern in a stream of decisions

Leadership, like swimming, cannot be learned by reading about it.

The great myth is the manager as orchestra conductor. It's this idea of standing on a pedestal and you wave your baton and accounting comes in, and you wave it somewhere else and marketing chimes in with accounting, and they all sound very glorious. But management is more like orchestra conducting during rehearsals, when everything is going wrong.