What I observe in our business organizations-even in our public institutions�is that after a crisis or breakdown, or after something worked really well, we don't get together and say, �Okay, what do we each think happened, and what can we learn from it?� We either take credit for it, or, if it's an error, we try to bury it as fast as we can and move on.

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Many organizations are now trying to walk under the banner of 'The Learning Organization,' realizing that knowledge is our most important product... But the only place that I've seen it is in the Army. As one colonel said, 'We realized a while ago that it's better to learn than be dead.'

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Whether we like it or not mankind now has a completely integrated international financial and informational marketplace capable of moving money and ideas to any place on this planet in minutes.

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Information about money has become almost as important as money itself. The competitive advantage of the banks used to be that they knew more about their customers than anyone else. Now... that knowledge can be had at the push of a button. The guy with the competitive advantage is the one with the best technology.

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If you're interested in creating sustainable growth, sustainable productivity, sustainable morale, you can't do that through autocracy. You can work the numbers for a quarter or a half a year, you can drive people to exhaustion for a few months or a couple of years. But if you haven't focused on creating capacity in the organization, it will die through those efforts.

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If you look at the companies where the CEO stayed on till he's 80, those are the people who confuse themselves with the company.

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We're not in cultures which support learning; we're in cultures that give us the message consistently; �Don't mess up, don't make mistakes, don't make the boss look bad, don't give us any surprises.� So we're asking for a kind of predictability, control, respect and compliance that has nothing to do with learning.

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As long as capital � both human and money - can move toward opportunity, trade will not balance.

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From leaders, we need clear, consistent and honest attention to the identity of the organization. Identity shows up in our actions, our visions, our relationships inside and out of the organization. Identity gets deepened as we do the work.

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Information is a business in itself. It is also something that has made control impossible... you cannot get customers to accept prices in one place when they know there's a better deal elsewhere. It's a whole new world.

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