Objectives are not commands; they are commitments.

Adequacy is the enemy of excellence.

Nothing else, perhaps, distinguishes effective executives as much as their tender loving care of time.

What is the manager's job? It is to direct the resources and the efforts of the business toward opportunities for economically significant results. This sounds trite - and it is. But every analysis of actual allocation of resources and efforts in business that I have ever seen or made showed clearly that the bulk of time, work, attention, and money first goes to problems rather than to opportunities, and, secondly, to areas where even extraordinarily successful performance will have minimal impact on results.

Innovation opportunities do not come with the tempest but with the rustling of the breeze.

Innovation requires us to systematically identify changes that have already occurred in a business - in demographics, in values, in technology or science - and then to look at them as opportunities. It also requires something that is most difficult for existing companies to do: to abandon rather than defend yesterday.

Business exists to supply goods and services to customers and economic surplus to society, rather than to supply jobs to workers and managers or even dividends to shareholders.