Understanding our strengths, articulating our values, knowing where we belong -- these are also essential to addressing one of the great challenges of organizations: improving the abysmally low productivity of knowledge workers.

Listening is not a skill; it is a discipline.

As soon as you move one step up from the bottom, your effectiveness depends on your ability to reach others through the spoken and written word.

The fewer data needed, the better the information. And an overload of information, that is, anything much beyond what is truly needed, leads to information blackout. It does not enrich, but impoverishes.

The single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that there are no results inside its walls. The result of a business is a satisfied customer.

I would hope that American managers-indeed, managers worldwide-continue to appreciate what I have been saying almost from day one: that management is so much more than exercising rank and privilege, that it is much more than "making deals." Management affects people and their lives.

Economists think the poor need them to tell them that they are poor.