The paradox of the prophet: his very success is his failure. The prophet whose time has come no longer shocks; he entertains.

What people in business think they know about the customer and market is likely to be more wrong than right...the customer rarely buys what the business thinks it sells him.

There are just two questions to ask to attain success in business: First, "What business am I in?" Second, "How's business?"

Every first-rate editor I have ever heard of reads, edits and rewrites every word that goes into his publication.... Good editors are not 'permissive'; they do not let their colleagues do 'their thing'; they make sure that everybody does the 'paper's thing.' A good, let alone a great editor is an obsessive autocrat with a whim of iron, who rewrites and rewrites, cuts and slashes, until every piece is exactly the way he thinks it should have been done.

If general perception changes from seeing the glass as 'half-full' to seeing it as 'half empty' there are major innovative opportunities.

Everything must degenerate into work if anything is to happen.

In the Western tradition, we have focused on teaching as a skill and forgotten what Socrates knew: teaching is a gift, learning is a skill.