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The only things that evolve by themselves in an organization are disorder, friction and malperformance.

Once we realize that imperfect understanding is the human condition, there is no shame in being wrong, only in failing to correct our mistakes.

A man flattened by an opponent can get up again. A man flattened by conformity stays down for good.

Leadership is about taking an organization to a place it would not have otherwise gone without you, in a value-adding, measurable way.

The optimist proclaims we live in the best of all possible worlds ... the pessimist fears this is true.

Where you can identify the information content of the relationship independent of the people, therein lies the possibility for an e-business that will truly "blow up" its offline competitors.

What is the first duty--and continuing responsibility--of the business manager? To strive for the best possible economic results from the resources currently employed or available.

Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises.

Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.

The government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it.

People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.

War is ninety percent information.

It doesn't TAKE all kinds, we just HAVE all kinds.

Anything worth doing at all is worth doing poorly. It may be worth more if it's done well, but it's worth something if it's done poorly.

You decide the substance and I'll decide the process, and I'll beat you every time.

There are only two lasting bequests we can give our children ... one is roots, the other wings.

anyone who's idiot enough to read a business book and follow the words exactly to the letter is just that -- an idiot.

The seductive pull of equilibrium poses a constant danger to successful established companies.

...While equilibrium endangers living systems, it often wears the disguise of an attribute. Equilibrium is concealed inside strong values or a coherent, close-knit social system, or within a company's well-synchronized operating system (often referred to as "organizational fit"). Vision, values, and organizational fit are double-edged swords.

Note: Business 2.0 is now part of CNNmoney and some older articles are no longer available

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You can't let the new revolution fall into the hands of the people who ran the last revolution. That's a legal disaster and it's an economic disaster.

Note: Business 2.0 is now part of CNNmoney and some older articles are no longer available

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The greatest weakness of American business is that it knows no history.

People pay for a lot of things that they could get for free; bottled water is doing so well that Coke and Pepsi have rolled out water products. You have to make it easier and more enjoyable to pay a little money than it is to steal.

When a great question is first started, there are very few, even of the greatest minds, which suddenly and intuitively comprehend it in all of its consequences.

Labor's real crisis is not unemployment but unemployabilityÂ… Labor unions will not make a difference. It was precisely because direct labor used to be so simple, mechanical and yet critical to value creation that labor unions made senseÂ… Anyway, the logic behind unions may still apply to some kinds of work -- fast-food servers, apparel assemblers, hospital orderlies. But, again, any job that is simple and repetitive, that requires so little individual creativity that an employee would rather join a union than negotiate an individual career path, will become a prime target for the computer-integrative technologies as the years go by.

All of this means that 10 or 20 or 30 million people -- people with children, people hobbled by dullness and self-doubt, people who played by rules that simply evaporated from the time they were 15 to the time they were 35 -- are hard pressed to see a future. Or make sense of the past. After all, the school system we conceived, the union movements we adjusted to, the "leading" economic indicators we tracked, the Government programs we put in place -- none of these things assumed that virtually every member of society would need the equivalent of college-level skill just to get a decent job.

What, then, can be done about chronically unemployable people? What can businesses do? My answer would not be a new social compact, but a determination to remember the old one more precisely and live up to it more intelligently.

The old compact had always assumed that companies would self-interestedly support certain government actions to enforce the rules of the competitive game. Government would police property rights, establish the courts to punish criminals and settle judicial disputes, build roads and bridges, defend borders. Read "The Wealth of Nations." The mutual obli-gations of companies and governments were specified from the start, and haven't really changed. Though Adam Smith opposed anything like labor unions, one could find a rationale for most New Deal regulations, even collective bargaining, in what Smith had to say about government's obligation to protect competition from the dangers of private monopolies.

But in one crucial respect, the old compact clearly needs an amendment, the part that has to do with education. The old compact assumed that government would educate children to be qualified for work, and that businesses would go along willingly. But to be qualified for a factory job, all that was necessary was bare literacy.

But none of this means businesses can themselves become responsible for education. Our companies invest more and more in training, but we cannot make our employees trainable. Businesses are more like specialized graduate schools than elementary schools; we need people to present themselves for work ready to learn and practice our marketing, design and production strategies, ready to learn our high technologies and quality systems. We cannot teach the basics.

..you don't search for an idea. You search for questions. Every single major piece of work I have been involved with came because some great student asked me a question that I could only stare at and say, "that's a great question. I will have to get back to you."

If two people agree all the time, one of them is redundant.

Note: Business 2.0 is now part of CNNmoney and some older articles are no longer available

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Fundamentally, prediction is never valued as much as explanation in academia.

By now we know that government cannot take care of community problems. We know that business and the free market also cannot take care of community problems. We have now come to accept that there has to be a third sector, the social sector of (mostly nonprofit) community organizations. But we also know that all institutions, no matter what their legal status, have to be run autonomously and have to be focused on their own tasks and their own mission. We know, in other words, that it is almost irrelevant whether a university is private or is tax supported and owned by the state of California. However funded, it functions like other universities. We know that it makes little difference whether a hospital is a nonprofit institution or owned by a profit-making corporation. It has to be run the same way, that is, as a hospital. And the reality in which every modern society lives is therefore one of rapidly increasing pluralism, in which institutions of all kinds, sizes, values, missions, and structures constitute society. But we also know that this means that no one is taking care of the community.

There is one simple reason why the last 150 years have been years in which one institution after the other has become autonomous: the task-centered and autonomous institution is the only one that performs. Performance requires clear focus and narrow concentration. Multipurpose institutions do not perform. The achievements of the last 150 years in every single area are achievements of narrow focus, narrow concentration, and parochial self-centered values. All performing institutions of modern society are specialized. All of them are concerned only with their own task.

How to balance the two, the common good and the special purpose of the institution, is the question we must answer. If we cannot accomplish this integration, the new pluralism will surely destroy itself, the way the old pluralism did five hundred years ago. It will destroy itself because it will destroy community. But if at the same time institutions abandon their single purpose or even allow that purpose to weaken, the new pluralism will destroy itself through lack of performance.

There is a ready bounty of CEO material currently available, but there is an unholy alliance between risk-averse boards and executive recruiters promoting marquee candidates that gives the appearance of a shortage. That very small group can't possibly perform at the messianic level expected of them, and the list gets shorter and shorter over time as the unrealistic expectations become apparent.

Note: Business 2.0 is now part of CNNmoney and some older articles are no longer available

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Customers think about products and markets very differently from the way products and markets are bundled and sold in the physical marketplace. Customers think in terms of activities, while firms think in terms of products. Activities that are logically related in cognitive space may be spread across very diverse providers in the marketplace.