Every line in the government's budget has its own constituency.

Countries don't go out of business....The infrastructure doesn't go away, the productivity of the people doesn't go away, the natural resources don’t go away. And so their assets always exceed their liabilities, which is the technical reason for bankruptcy. And that's very different from a company.

The person who figures out how to harness the collective genius of his or her organization is going to blow the competition away.

Banking is a branch of the information business.

Failure is not a crime. Failure to learn from failure is.

We're not in cultures which support learning; we're in cultures that give us the message consistently: "Don't mess up, don't make mistakes, don't make the boss look bad, don't give us any surprises." So we're asking for a kind of predictability, control, respect, and compliance that has nothing to do with learning.

A truly global economy, as opposed to the multinational economy of the recent past, will require concessions of national power ... that seemed impossible a few years ago and which even now we can but partly imagine.