What we call a financial crisis is really at its core a crisis of management, and not just a crisis of management, but a crisis of management culture. ...In other words, what you had is a detachment of people who know the business from people who are running the business.

Strategy is not the consequence of planning, but the opposite: its starting point.

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.

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

The prime occupational hazard of a manager is superficiality.

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

Management and leadership are not separate spheres. The two skills work together in the larger realm of “communityship.