When the business grows, the person who founded it is incredibly busy. Rapid growth puts an enormous strain on a business. You outgrow your production facilities. You outgrow your management capabilities.

Fortunately or unfortunately, the one predictable thing in any organization is the crisis. That always comes. That's when you do depend on the leader: The job of the leader is to build an organization that is battle-ready, that has high morale, that knows how to behave, that trusts itself, and where people trust one another.

Teaching 23-year-olds in an MBA programme strikes me as largely a waste of time. They lack the background of experience. You can teach them skills - accounting and what have you - but you can't teach them management.

Work is an extension of personality. It is achievement. It is one of the ways in which a person defines himself, measures his worth, and his humanity.

Strategic planning is the continuous process of making present entrepreneurial (risk-taking) decisions systematically and with the greatest knowledge of their futurity; organizing systematically the efforts needed to carry out these decisions; and measuring the results of these decisions against the expectations through organized, systematic feedback.

The organization is, above all, social. It is people.

The leader of the past was a person who knew how to tell. The leader of the future will be a person who knows how to ask.