The greatest challenge to organizations is the balance between continuity and change. You need both. At different times, the balance is slightly more over here, or slightly more over there, but you need both. And balance is basically the greatest task in leadership. Organizations have to have continuity, and yet if there is not enough new challenge, not enough change, they become empty bureaucracies, awfully fast.

The true business of every company is to make and keep customers.

Company cultures are like country cultures. Never try to change one. Try, instead, to work with what you've got.

You cannot predict the future, but you can create it.

We no longer even understand the question whether change is by itself good or bad, ...We start out with the axiom that it is the norm. We do not see change as altering the order... We see change as being order itself - indeed the only order we can comprehend today is a dynamic, a moving, a changing one.

Knowledge people and service people learn the most when they teach .

The most valuable assets of a 20th-century company were its production equipment. The most valuable assets of a 21st-century institution, whether business or nonbusiness, will be its knowledge, workers, and their productivity.