The discipline of personal mastery...starts with clarifying the things that really matter to us (and) living our lives in the service of our highest aspirations.

Governments, especially democratic ones, are short-term and nationalistic.

Trusting people to be creative and constructive when given more freedom does not imply an overly optimistic belief in the perfectibility of human nature. It is, rather, belief that the inevitable errors and sins of the human condition are far better overcome by individuals working together in an environment of trust and freedom and mutual respect than by individuals working under a multitude of rules, regulations, and restraints imposed upon them by another group of imperfect individuals.

The company-as-a-machine model fits how people think about and operate conventional companies. And, of course, it fits how people think about changing conventional companies: You have a broken company, and you need to change it, to fix it.

Few, if any, forces in human affairs are as powerful as shared vision.

Perhaps for the first time in history, human-kind has the capacity to create far more information than anyone can absorb; to foster far greater interdependency than anyone can manage, and to accelerate change far faster than anyone's ability to keep pace.

Dialogue starts with the willingness to challenge our own thinking, to recognize that any certainty we have is, at best, a hypothesis about the world.