Managers are agents of transformation, converting the workforce in developed countries from one of manual workers to one of highly educated knowledge workers.

Capital formation is shifting from the entrepreneur who invests in the future to the pension trustee who invests in the past.

Listening is not a skill; it is a discipline.

Marketing and innovation make money. Everything else is a cost.

If you want it, measure it. If you can't measure it, forget it.

The most important, and indeed the truly unique, contribution of management in the 20th century was the fifty-fold increase in the productivity of the MANUAL WORKER in manufacturing. The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is similarly to increase the productivity of KNOWLEDGE WORK and the KNOWLEDGE WORKER.

There is no reason to believe that the people who staff the managerial and professional positions in our service institutions are any less qualified, any less competent or honest, or any less hard-working than the men who manage businesses. Conversely, there is no reason to believe that business managers, put in control of service institutions, would do better than the 'bureaucrats'. Indeed, we know that they immediately become bureaucrats themselves.