People who don't take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.

..there is need for a person to be generally educated. Otherwise you shrivel up much too soon. Whether this means reading the bible (I read the New Testament every few years) or reading the great 19th century novelists (the greatest and shrewdest judge of people and of society who ever lived), or classical philosophy (which I cannot read-it puts me to sleep immediately), or history (which is secondary). What matters is that the knowledge worker, by the time he or she reaches middle age, has developed and nourished a human being rather than a tax accountant or a hydraulic engineer.

If a business is to be considered a continuous process, instead of a series of disjointed stop-and-go events, then the economic universe in which a business operates-and all the major events within it-must have rhyme, rhythm, or reason.

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

What you have to do and the way you have to do it is incredibly simple. Whether you are willing to do it is another matter.

Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. Within a few short decades, society - its worldview, its basic values, its social and political structures, its art, its key institutions - rearranges itself. We are currently living through such a time.

The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different.