The better a man is, the more mistakes he will make, for the more new things he will try. I would never promote to a top-level job a man who was not making mistakes...otherwise he is sure to be mediocre.

Doing the right thing is more important than doing the thing right.

The most valuable assets of a 20th-century company were its production equipment. The most valuable assets of a 21st-century institution, whether business or nonbusiness, will be its knowledge, workers, and their productivity.

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.

If there is any one secret of effectiveness, it is concentration. Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time.

Listening is not a skill; it is a discipline.

Of all the decisions an executive makes, none is as important as the decisions about people, because they determine the performance capacity of the organization.