Every institution is an assemblage of choices about how best to organize human beings in light of some particular goal. The premise of this book is that most of these choices can and must be revisited.
I don’t know whether the universe contains any evidence of intelligent design, but I can assure you that thousands of everyday products do not.
Taking risks, breaking the rules, and being a maverick have always been important but today they are more crucial than ever.
In a well-functioning democracy, citizens have the option of voting their political masters out of office. Not so in most companies.
In a world of commoditized knowledge, the returns go to the companies who can produce non-standard knowledge.
The problem is not one of prediction. It is one of imagination.
What matters in the new economy is not return on investment, but return on imagination.
Dakota tribal wisdom says that when you’re on a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. Of course, there are other strategies. You can change riders. You can get a committee to study the dead horse. You can benchmark how other companies ride dead horses. You can declare that it’s cheaper to feed a dead horse. You can harness several dead horses together. But after you’ve tried all these things, you’re still going to have to dismount.
All of us are prisoners, to one degree or another, of our experience.
There’s no such thing as “sustaining” leadership; it must be reinvented again and again.
To discover the future it is not necessary to be a seer, but it is absolutely vital to be unorthodox.
Our species exists thanks to four billion years of genetic innovation.
Executives often wrongly equate “good value” with “low price.” Instead, “good value” should mean outstanding value for the price.
We don’t know where we’re going, but we’re not going to stray from familiar paths.
A good strategy with a bad implementation is a bad strategy.
Because competence-building represents more cumulative learning than great leaps of inventiveness, it is difficult to “time compress” competence-building.
In our company the trick is to change jobs in time to guarantee that the long-term pay-off you promised four years ago in your capital budget proposal becomes someone else’s short-term performance target.
In a survey we conducted for Harvard Business Review, 63 percent of respondents listed the reluctance of leaders to surrender power as a significant barrier to reducing bureaucracy.
Initiative, creativity, and valor can’t be commanded.
There’s no secret about what drives engagement. From Douglas McGregor’s The Human Side of Enterprise to Dan Pink’s Drive, the formula hasn’t changed in sixty years: purpose, autonomy, collegiality, and the opportunity to grow.