Look upon every obstacle as part payment towards your success.

What we are good at comes easy, and we believe that unless it comes hard, it can't be very good.

Decision making is the specific executive task.

The talk you hear about adapting to change is not only stupid, it's dangerous. The only way you can manage change is to create it.

Most people think they know what they are good at. They are usually wrong... And yet, a person can perform only from strength.

The effective executive knows that it is easier to raise the performance of one leader than it is to raise the performance of a whole mass. She therefore makes sure she puts into the leadership position, into the standard-setting, the performance-making position the person who has the strength to do the outstanding pacesetting job. This always requires focus on the one strength of a person and dismissal of weaknesses as irrelevant unless they hamper the full deployment of the available strength.

The task of leadership is to create an alignment of strengths so strong that it makes the system's weaknesses irrelevant.