I have no interest in celebrities. If all the superrich disappeared, the world economy would not even notice. The superrich are irrelevant to the economy.

Elephants have a hard time adapting. Cockroaches outlive everything.

Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results, not attributes.

More business decisions occur over lunch and dinner than at any other time, yet no MBA courses are given on the subject.

Concentration is the key to results. No other principles of effectiveness is violated as constantly today as the basic principle of concentration.

There are no creeds in mathematics.

Profit for a company is like oxygen for a person. If you don't have enough of it, you're out of the game. But if you think your life is about breathing, you're really missing something.

The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.

Successful careers are not planned. They develop when people are prepared for opportunities because they know their strengths, their method of work, and their values. Knowing where one belongs can transform an ordinary person -- hardworking and competent but otherwise mediocre -- into an outstanding performer.

It does not follow from the separation of planning and doing in the analysis of work that the planner and the doer should be two different people. It does not follow that the industrial world should be divided into two classes of people: a few who decide what is to be done, design the job, set the pace, rhythm and motions, and order others about; and the many who do what and as they are told.

What is the major problem? It is fundamentally the confusion between effectiveness and efficiency that stands between doing the right things and doing things right. There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.

Tomorrow everybody -- or practically everybody -- will have had the education of the upper class of yesterday, and will expect equivalent opportunities. That is why we face the problem of making every kind of job meaningful and capable of satisfying every educated man.

To be a manager requires more than a title, a big office, and other outward symbols of rank. It requires competence and performance of a high order.

Time is totally perishable and cannot be stored. Yesterday's time is gone forever, and will never come back. Time is always in short supply. There is no substitute for time. Everything requires time.

Until we can manage time, we can manage nothing else.

Yet there is nothing more dangerous than to be premature in exploiting a change in perception.

In the Western tradition, we have focused on teaching as a skill and forgotten what Socrates knew: teaching is a gift, learning is a skill.

Management and union may be likened to that serpent of the fables who on one body had two heads that fighting each other with poisoned fangs, killed themselves.

As to the idea that advertising motivates people, remember the Edsel.

The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday's logic.