Miracles are great, but they're so damn unpredictable.

Checking the results of a decision against its expectations shows executives what their strengths are, where they need to improve, and where they lack knowledge or information.

No organization can depend on genius; the supply is always scarce and unreliable. It is the test of an organization to make ordinary people perform better than they seem capable of, to bring out whatever strength there is in its members, and to use each person's strength to help all the other members perform.

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.

Communication always makes demands. It always demands that the recipient become somebody, do something, believe something. It always appeals to motivation.

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'.

The single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that results exist only on the outside.The result of a business is a satisfied customer. The result of a hospital is a satisfied patient. The result of a school is a student who has learned something and puts it to work ten years later. Inside an enterprise there are only costs.