The path to success used to be up and through an organization. Now the path to success is increasingly through self-promotion.

America has become the most unequal society among advanced countries, and rich people are now free to spend as much money on political campaigns as they wish.

We are creating a one size fits all system that needlessly brands many young people as failures, when they might thrive if offered a different education whose progress was measured differently. Paradoxically we're embracing standardized tests just when the economy is eliminating standardized jobs.

One of the things I tell my students is that if you want to understand what's been going on and also what needs to be done, you've got to get out of the blame game. Some people on the left want to blame the rich and corporations. Some people on the right want to blame the poor and government. Either of those frames of reference gets you nowhere and they aren't even truthful. You've got to understand the dynamic itself.

There is a crisis of public morality. Instead of policing bedrooms, we ought to be doing a better job policing boardrooms.

The industrial leader of the 20th century was a system-builder. He was a visionary in terms of what could be built; got the capital together; certainly convinced investors that it was possible; and then ran a high-volume production system that would spew out a vast array of almost identical goods and services. They would be changed from time to time; there was research and development, to be sure. But the system was built around production, not innovation.

You`ve got to just follow the money [in Washington]. You see it. There`s no countervailing power.