Want to accomplish something, any-damn-thing? Sharpen your political skills!

Authority never matches responsibility. That's one of the great myths and delusions of all times. Winning managers and individual performers at all levels know that effectiveness means building your own network and creating your own authority. Those who succeed always reach far beyond formal deputation, take initiatives, and take the heat when things go awry. That's true in the military in times of war, true for 200 person manufacturing firms, and true at giant automakers or software companies.

I am confident that for the foreseeable future (barring some catastrophic event affecting economic, energy, electrical, and communications systems), many subpopulations that use information intensively (e.g., students, academics, library patrons, white collar workers) will be using some sort of portal information appliance.

There's nobody in the world that wouldn't change places with the Americans. The economy is phenomenally large, the entrepreneurial class is very alive and very well, the universities, despite budget problems, still turn out something like 90 percent of the refereed academic and technical articles in the world. There's a lot on everybody's agenda.

If your company has a clean-desk policy, the company is nuts and you're nuts to stay there.

If there is a single tragic flaw that mars our biggest enterprises, it is conservatism - the failure to fail, and fail big, in an era of unprecedented volatility and ambiguity.

Forget loyalty. Or at least loyalty to one's corporation. Try loyalty to your Rolodex-your network-instead.