People in any organization are always attached to the obsolete – the things that should have worked but did not, the things that once were productive and no longer are.

Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.

Success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves – their strengths, their values, and how they best perform.

Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art.

No one learns as much about a subject as one who is forced to teach it.

Your first and foremost job as a leader is to take charge of your own energy and then help to orchestrate the energy of those around you.

Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes; but no plans.

Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.

What’s measured improves

The human being is a very poorly designed machine tool. The human being excels in coordination. He excels in relating perception to action. He works best if the entire human being, muscles, senses, and mind,...

People who don’t take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.

A manager is responsible for the application and performance of knowledge.

Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window.

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

The knowledge that we consider knowledge proves itself in action. What we now mean by knowledge is information in action, information focused on results.

If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old

To be sure, the fundamental task of management remains the same: to make people capable of joint performance through common goals, common values, the right structure, and the training and development they need to perform...

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.

Work is a process, and any process needs to be controlled. To make work productive, therefore, requires building the appropriate controls into the process of work.

This defines entrepreneur and entrepreneurship – the entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.

And it is change that always provides the opportunity for the new and different. Systematic innovation therefore consists in the purposeful and organized search for changes, and in the systematic analysis of the opportunities such...

The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.

Entrepreneurship rests on a theory of economy and society. The theory sees change as normal and indeed as healthy. And it sees the major task in society – and especially in the economy – as...

Efficiency is doing the thing right. Effectiveness is doing the right thing.

Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship…the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.

The companies that refused to make hard choices, or refused to admit that anything much was happening, fared badly. If they survive, it is only because their respective governments will not let them go under.

The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say “I.” And that’s not because they have trained themselves not to say “I.” They don’t think “I.” They think “we”; they think “team.”...

There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.

The people who work within these industries or public services know that there are basic flaws. But they are almost forced to ignore them and to concentrate instead on patching here, improving there, fighting the...