The great mystery isn't that people do things badly but that they occasionally do a few things well. The only thing that is universal is incompetence. Strength is always specific! Nobody ever commented, for example, that the great violinist Jascha Heifetz probably couldn't play the trumpet very well.

The great challenge to management today is to make productive the tremendous new resource, the knowledge worker. This, rather than the productivity of the manual worker, is the key to economic growth and economic performance in today's society.

The purpose of information is not knowledge. It is being able to take the right action.

All companies are service companies; some also manufacture products.

There is a point at which a transformation has to take place.

The more successful the unit, the more difficult it is to make sure that the large company doesn't put the same expectations on it as it does for the rest of the company. When it's a new venture, whether it's outside or inside the business, it's a child. And you don't put a 40-pound pack on a 6-year-old's back when you take her hiking.

I find more and more executives less and less well informed about the outside world, if only because they believe that the data on the computer printouts are ipso facto information.