We owe our existence to innovation. Our species exists thanks to four billion years of genetic innovation.

During the ten years I lived in the U.K., I frequently attended an Anglican church just outside of London. I enjoyed the energetic singing and the thoughtful homilies. And yet, I found it easy to...

Most of us do more than subsist. From the vantage point of our ancestors, we live lives of almost unimaginable ease. Here again, we have innovation to thank.

Today, no leader can afford to be indifferent to the challenge of engaging employees in the work of creating the future. Engagement may have been optional in the past, but it’s pretty much the whole...

Most companies don’t have the luxury of focusing exclusively on innovation. They have to innovate while stamping out zillions of widgets or processing billions of transactions.

An uplifting sense of purpose is more than an impetus for individual accomplishment, it is also a necessary insurance policy against expediency and impropriety.

I’m a capitalist by conviction and profession. I believe the best economic system is one that rewards entrepreneurship and risk-taking, maximizes customer choice, uses markets to allocate scarce resources and minimizes the regulatory burden on...

In most languages, ‘control’ is the first synonym for the word ‘manage.’ Control is about spotting and correcting deviations from pre-defined standards; thus to control, one must first constrain.

Over time, a successful company will acquire much in the way of resources and momentum, and these things often insulate it from reality once it has stopped being successful.

A noble purpose inspires sacrifice, stimulates innovation and encourages perseverance.

The biggest barriers to strategic renewal are almost always top management’s unexamined beliefs.

In a well-functioning democracy, citizens have the option of voting their political masters out of office. Not so in most companies.

Large organizations don’t worship shareholders or customers, they worship the past. If it were otherwise, it wouldn’t take a crisis to set a company on a new path.

What’s true for churches is true for other institutions: the older and more organized they get, the less adaptable they become. That’s why the most resilient things in our world – biological life, stock markets,...

Like a child star whose fame fades as the years advance, many once-innovative companies become less so as they mature.

As human beings, we are the only organisms that create for the sheer stupid pleasure of doing so. Whether it’s laying out a garden, composing a new tune on the piano, writing a bit of...

If organized religion has become less relevant, it’s not because churches have held fast to their creedal beliefs – it’s because they’ve held fast to their conventional structures, programs, roles and routines.