Innovation requires resources to invest, and you can see many companies pulling back and going into an intense protective mode in a major extended period of financial distress.

It is a testament to our naïveté about culture that we think that we can change it by simply declaring new values. Such declarations usually produce only cynicism.

New insights fail to get put into practice because they conflict with deeply held internal images of how the world works...images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting. That is why the discipline of managing mental models - surfacing, testing, and improving our internal pictures of how the world works - promises to be a major breakthrough for learning organizations.

The key to success isn't just thinking about what we are doing but doing something about what we are thinking.

Business and human endeavors are systems...we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system. And wonder why our deepest problems never get solved.

Knowledge is constructed, not transferred

Willpower is so common among highly successful people that many see its characteristics as synonymous with success.