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

By themselves, character and integrity do not accomplish anything. But their absence faults everything else.

Few relationships are as critical to the business enterprise as the relationship to the government. Managers have responsibility for this relationship as part of their responsibility to the enterprise itself. It is an area of social impact of the business. To a large extent the relationship to government results from what businesses do or fail to do.

Most discussions of decision making assume that only senior executives make decisions or that only senior executives' decisions matter. This is a dangerous mistake.

Conductors do not know how the oboe does its work, but they know what the oboe should contribute.

For new technology to replace old, it has to have at least ten times the benefit.

What is the manager's job? It is to direct the resources and the efforts of the business toward opportunities for economically significant results. This sounds trite - and it is. But every analysis of actual allocation of resources and efforts in business that I have ever seen or made showed clearly that the bulk of time, work, attention, and money first goes to problems rather than to opportunities, and, secondly, to areas where even extraordinarily successful performance will have minimal impact on results.