As a manager you're paid to be uncomfortable. If you're comfortable, it's a sure sign you're doing things wrong.

Innovation is the specific tool of entrepreneurs, the means by which they exploit change as an opportunity for a different business or a different service. It is capable of being presented as a discipline, capable of being learned, capable of being practiced. Entrepreneurs need to search purposefully for the sources of innovation, the changes and their symptoms that indicate opportunities for successful innovation. And they need to know and to apply the principles of successful innovation.

The only things that evolve by themselves in an organization are disorder, friction and malperformance.

In the next economic downturn there will be an outbreak of bitterness and contempt for the supercorporate chieftains who pay themselves millions. In every major economic downturn in US history the villains have been the heroes during the preceding boom.

The most valuable assets of a 20th-century company were its production equipment. The most valuable assets of a 21st-century institution, whether business or nonbusiness, will be its knowledge, workers, and their productivity.

The ultimate resource in economic development is people. It is people, not capital or raw materials that develop an economy.

Important decisions are risky. They should be controversial. Acclamation means that nobody has done the homework.