Vision is easy. It's so easy to just point to the bleachers and say I'm going to hit one over there. What's hard is saying, OK, how do I do that? What are the specific programs, what are the commitments, what are the resources, what are the processes we need in play to go implement the vision, turn it into a working model that people follow every day in the enterprise. That's hard work.

In the end an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.

You can’t mandate [cultural change], can’t engineer it. What you can do is create the conditions for transformation. You can provide incentives. You can define the marketplace realities and goals. But then you have to trust. In fact, in the end, management doesn’t change culture. Management invites the workforce itself to change the culture.

Lou Gerstner knows how to do a deal, and George Bush Sr., less so.

Technology has limitations on what it can accomplish. You do not.

I just think we should look at this as a chess match," he said, "between the world's greatest chess player and Garry Kasparov.

No institution will go through fundamental change unless it believes it is in deep trouble and needs to do something different to survive.