The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is ... to increase the productivity of knowledge work and the knowledge worker

Success? Odd as it seems, you will achieve the greates results in business and career if you drop the word 'achievement' from your vocabulary and replace it with 'contribution'.

Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two - and only these two — basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are 'costs'.

Now that knowledge is taking the place of capital as the driving force in organizations worldwide, it is all too easy to confuse data with knowledge and information technology with information.

Knowledge has become the key economic resource and the dominant-and perhaps even the only-source of competitive advantage.

The correct assumption is that what individuals have learned by age twenty-one will begin to become obsolete five to ten years later and will have to be replaced-or at least refurbished-by new learning, new skills, new knowledge.

To make the future demands courage. It demands work. But it also demands faith.