One practical point many experts will attest to is that if you want to develop someone as a leader, give them lots of responsibility early in their lives and careers. The military does that. I can remember being officer of the deck on a destroyer, on watch and in charge at two in the morning as we plowed through the Mediterranean while 300 shipmates slept below decks. I was 25 at the time. I don't know how much of a leader I ever became, but the experience certainly brought home to me a sense of responsibility for others.

The most important change, and it's been going on for at least three decades, is the increasing "professionalization," if that's a word, of the faculty. By professionalization I mean the tendency of faculty members to have Ph.D.'s in their academic specialties, and for these specialties to be ever more narrowly defined. The higher-rated schools may have chief executives in residence or retired execs on three-year teaching fellowships, but the days when most faculty members had considerable prior experience as businessmen or women - those days are mostly over.

People believe that management consultants are mostly useless parasites. Up until about 1980 it was consultants more than anyone else who came up with the critical concepts behind strategy. The history of strategy suggests there are lots of things consultants can do for a company that the company can't typically do for itself.

People believe that companies have always had strategies, dating back at least to likes of Henry Ford or Andrew Carnegie, maybe to the contractors who built the Pyramids. As it turns out, it was only in the 1960s and 1970s that a new breed of "business intellectuals" began to develop the intellectual framework that allowed companies to look at the three "C's" of any good strategy - namely their costs, customers, and competitors - in an integrated way.

One practical point many experts will attest to is that if you want to develop someone as a leader, give them lots of responsibility early in their lives and careers. The military does that. I can remember being officer of the deck on a destroyer, on watch and in charge at two in the morning as we plowed through the Mediterranean while 300 shipmates slept below decks. I was 25 at the time. I don't know how much of a leader I ever became, but the experience certainly brought home to me a sense of responsibility for others.

The best discipline, maybe the only discipline that really works, is self- discipline.

People say that ideas aren't important in business. Okay, people say, maybe an idea for a new product, but the rest is all execution, making it happen. Not so. As the strategy revolution demonstrated, ideas can be the key tools for making your business competitive.