We live in an age of unprecedented opportunity: If you’ve got ambition and smarts, you can rise to the top of your chosen profession, regardless of where you started out.

The only industries that function well are the industries that take responsibility for training. The Japanese, you know, assume that when you first come to work you know absolutely nothing. School isn't preparation for work and never was.

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.

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

I no longer think that learning how to manage people, especially subordinates, is the most important for executives to learn. I am teaching above all else, how to manage oneself.

There are just two questions to ask to attain success in business: First, "What business am I in?" Second, "How's business?"

Most executives have learned that what one postpones, one actually abandons ... timing is a most important element in the success of any effort. To do five years later what would have been smart to do five years earlier, is almost a sure recipe for frustration and failure.