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.

Every organization has to prepare for the abandonment of everything it does.

Systematic decision review also shows executives their own weaknesses, particularly the areas in which they are simply incompetent. In these areas, smart executives don't make decisions or take actions. They delegate.

In all recorded history there has not been one economist who has had to worry about where the next meal would come from.

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

The new information technology... Internet and e-mail... have practically eliminated the physical costs of communications.

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.