Brilliant men are often strikingly ineffectual; they fail to realize that the brilliant insight is not by itself achievement. They never have learned that insights become effectiveness only through hard systematic work.

By themselves, character and integrity do not accomplish anything. But their absence faults everything else.

In business school classrooms they construct wonderful models of a nonworld.

My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions.

No decision has been made unless carrying it out in specific steps has become someone's work assignment and responsibility.

So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.

Strong people have strong weaknesses.

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." They understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don't sidestep it, but "we" gets the credit.

The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being said.

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

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

The talk you hear about adapting to change is not only stupid, it's dangerous. The only way you can manage change is to create it.

We know nothing about motivation. All we can do is write books about it.

When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course.

When the government talks about raising capital it means printing it. That's not very creative, but it's what we're going to do.

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