Leaders such as Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Franklin D. Roosevelt and others promulgated a vision and a moving story of how their people could achieve a great purpose.

Every company should work hard to obsolete its own product line - before its competitors do.

When it comes to efficiency and effectiveness, I would always start with effectiveness. I am interested in achieving a certain outcome. Only secondarily do I worry about achieving it as efficiently as possible.

Companies pay too much attention to the cost of doing something. They should worry more about the cost of not doing it.

When managers overdo micromanaging of others, they probably hired the wrong people or failed to give them a clear idea of what each one is to accomplish. I prefer to train employees to be self-managers, just as in an orchestra each performer knows his or her role without being micromanaged.

My primary early interest was in marketing and my aim was to improve its theories, methods and tools. Early on I pressed companies to adopt a consumer orientation and to be in the value creation business. I didn't pay much attention to the social responsibilities of business until later. Now I am pressing companies to address the triple bottom line: people, the planet, and profits. I found that companies were too much into short term profit maximization and they needed to invest more in sustainability thinking.

Our infrastructure of bridges, roads and ports has been given a D-level rating by many civil engineer societies. The government should shift some money from the Defense budget and hire companies to fix our infrastructure. As for non-construction workers, we need to do job retraining in those growing areas where more skilled workers will be needed.