What is the major problem? It is fundamentally the confusion between effectiveness and efficiency that stands between doing the right things and doing things right. There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.

The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The true dangerous thing is asking the wrong question.

Management must take the lead in making obsolete its own products and services rather than waiting for a competitor to do so.

In business school classrooms they construct wonderful models of a non- world.

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.

An executive should be a realist; and no one is less realistic than the cynic.

We always remember best the irrelevant.