The more you focus on control, the more likely you're working on a project that's striving to deliver something of relatively minor value.

Product quality has almost nothing to do with defects or their lack.

Computer system analysis is like child-rearing; you can do grievous damage, but you cannot ensure success.

The purpose of a team is not goal attainment but goal alignment.

The pathology of setting a deadline to the earliest articulable date essentially guarantees that the schedule will be missed.

If you find yourself concentrating on the technology rather than the sociology, you're like the vaudeville character who loses his keys on a dark street and looks for them on the adjacent street because, as he explains, "The light is better there."

What we are looking for is managers who are awake enough to alter the world as they find it, to make it harmonize with what they and their people are trying to accomplish.