Spontaneity is an infinite number of rehearsed possibilities.

The job of a professional manager is not to like people. It is not to change people. It is to put their strengths to work.

We all have a vast number of areas in which we have no talent or skill and little chance of becoming even mediocre. In those areas a knowledge workers should not take on work, jobs and assignments. It takes far more energy to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.

The best plan is only a plan... unless it degerates into work.

To be effective, every knowledge worker, and especially every executive, therefore needs to dispose of time in fairly large chunks. To have small dribs and drabs of time at his disposal will not be sufficient even if the total is an impressive number of hours.

There's nothing so useless than executing a task efficiently when it actually never should have been executed at all.

The true business of every company is to make and keep customers.