Most Americans do not know what their strengths are. When you ask them, they look at you with a blank stare, or they respond in terms of subject knowledge, which is the wrong answer.

Inside an organization there are only cost centers. The only profit center is a customer whose check has not bounced.

Trust is congruence between what you say and what you do.

Every organization must be prepared to abandon everything it does to survive in the future.

Never ask who's right. Start out by asking what is right. And you find that out by listening to dissenting, disagreeing opinions.

Understanding our strengths, articulating our values, knowing where we belong -- these are also essential to addressing one of the great challenges of organizations: improving the abysmally low productivity of knowledge workers.

If the feudal knight was the clearest embodiment of society in the early Middle Ages, and the "bourgeois" under Capitalism, the educated person will represent society in the post-capitalist society in which knowledge has become the central resource.