There are only two things in a business that make money - innovation and marketing, everything else is cost.

The knowledge we now consider knowledge proves itself in action. What we now mean by knowledge is information effective in action, information focused on results. Results are outside the person, in society and economy, or in the advancement of knowledge itself. To accomplish anything this knowledge has to be highly specialized.

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.

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.

Objectives are not commands; they are commitments.

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

Here I am, fifty-eight, and I still don't know what I'm going to be when I grow up.