Consider the many financial industry executives who walked away with many millions as their organizations failed - I think the expression is "failing upward." People also need to understand that their "technical" job performance is correlated with their career success, but again, many other factors such as educational credentials, length of service, and yes, political skills, also contribute to success. So people need to understand business and technical issues but they also need to master organizational dynamics.

People will envy you to the extent that you start out with a group of people and you rise up the organization faster than them. Get over what your peers are thinking about you because your peers are also your competitors.

We need to reexamine and reassess the purpose of the corporation, and go back to the idea that senior leadership has responsibilities not just to shareholders but also to customers and employees.

Doing the right thing is important, which is where strategy comes in. But doing that thing well—execution—is what sets companies apart. After all, every football play is designed to go for a huge gain. The reason it doesn’t is because of execution—people drop balls, miss blocks, go to the wrong place, and so forth. So, success depends on execution—on the ability to get things done.

The class focuses intensely on making people more comfortable with doing a wider range of things - such as networking, self-promotion, building their own personal brand, cleverly acquiring resources, getting known - that they may have been less comfortable with before.

Great strategy, not executed, can't possibly have any effect on performance because it doesn't actually affect anything. It's like planning for a successful surgery to remove a tumor. If no one picks up the knife and actually operates effectively, the diseases will persist.

We give up and don't try. We don't take sufficient chances or risks. We aren't resilient in the face of failure. We follow the "rules" too much and don't push the envelope.