If you want to be happy, set a goal that commands your thoughts, liberates your energy, and inspires your hopes.

Rather than seeking out contrary or little-understood points of view, many of us need so badly to be told we’re right that we’ll pay people to do it.

I’d rather have a lot of talent and a little experience than a lot of experience and a little talent.

Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.

Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.

One way to stimulate a creative mindset is to avoid the typical focus of organizations on what is and to ask, instead, what if questions. Doing this regularly tests your ability to see things anew.

There are three different ways frms are agile. They can be agile within their operations. That’s kind of the Toyota story or the Southwest Air story; a clearly defned industry. You’re constantly spotting and seizing opportunities quicker than your rivals.

The second way is through portfolio agility. You can pull resources from slower declining businesses and put them against faster growing or more promising opportunities.

A third category is what I call strategic agility, and that’s seizing the opportunities that arise—golden opportunities that arise every so often. That might be entering the market when the [Berlin] Wall falls or [seizing] the opportunity to buy assets on the cheap, as is possible in many industries right now in the current downturn. It’s the ability to seize those rare opportunities when they arise.

a key distinction for managers to focus on is the one between coordination and cooperation.

Coordination—the ability to work together—involves the alignment of "hard" phenomena: activities, processes, and information. Most companies begin with this and simply assume that mandating shared tasks and information exchange will suffice. It does to a degree but can be severely limiting in how much firms can achieve. At best, they are able to respond in a somewhat coordinated fashion when customers come to them. What they don't get is proactive development of new ideas that can be taken to the market before the market comes to them. To achieve this loftier goal, you need the second half of collaboration, which is cooperation.

Cooperation—the willingness to work together—involves the alignment of "soft" phenomena: goals, attitudes, and behaviors, people-related issues. Most companies focus on coordination among silos and pay insufficient attention to encouraging employees to cooperate. And when they do consider cooperation, they rely too heavily on incentives alone as the panacea. Those who get it right recognize that changing behavior requires a multipronged effort that ultimately shifts the culture of the organization.

The obligations people create for themselves are stronger and more psychologically binding than the directions they are given by someone else.

We human beings are not prepared at all for the explosion of new practices the Internet will produce. Education is going to be in networks and it will not be about knowledge. It will be about being successful in relationships, about how to make offers, how to build trust, how to cultivate prudence and emotional resilience.