The key to greatness is to look for people's potential and spend time developing it.

Growth that adds volume without improving productivity is fat. Growth that diminishes productivity is cancer.

The fewer data needed, the better the information. And an overload of information, that is, anything much beyond what is truly needed, leads to information blackout. It does not enrich, but impoverishes.

There is no reason to believe that the people who staff the managerial and professional positions in our service institutions are any less qualified, any less competent or honest, or any less hard-working than the men who manage businesses. Conversely, there is no reason to believe that business managers, put in control of service institutions, would do better than the 'bureaucrats'. Indeed, we know that they immediately become bureaucrats themselves.

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.

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

If you have too many problems, maybe you should get out of business. There is no law that says a company must last forever.