Managing innovation will increasingly become a challenge to management, and especially to top management, and a touchstone of its competence.

Successful careers are not planned. They develop when people are prepared for opportunities because they know their strengths, their method of work, and their values. Knowing where one belongs can transform an ordinary person - hardworking and competent but otherwise mediocre - into an outstanding performer.

Effective innovations start small. They are not grandiose. They try to do one specific thing.

..there is need for a person to be generally educated. Otherwise you shrivel up much too soon. Whether this means reading the bible (I read the New Testament every few years) or reading the great 19th century novelists (the greatest and shrewdest judge of people and of society who ever lived), or classical philosophy (which I cannot read-it puts me to sleep immediately), or history (which is secondary). What matters is that the knowledge worker, by the time he or she reaches middle age, has developed and nourished a human being rather than a tax accountant or a hydraulic engineer.

The only industries that function well are the industries that take responsibility for training. The Japanese, you know, assume that when you first come to work you know absolutely nothing. School isn't preparation for work and never was.

"Plastic moments" are those periods that overlap when the old has gone but the new has not yet arrived and when the course of history is more open to being shaped and steered than any other time.

Look at government programs for the past fifty years. Every single one - except warfare - achieved the exact opposite of its announced goal.