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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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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I walk into all these organizations, and I'm always puzzled when I realize that people still want to be there. Most people really want to love their organizations. We need that level of commitment... Yet organizations have done very little to deserve that kind of staying-power.

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If you're trying to create a healthy organization, one that can sustain itself over time, simply legislating and dictating behavior and outcomes doesn't work at all.

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In organizations where people trust and believe in each other, they don't get into regulating and coercing behaviors. They don't need a policy for every mistake... people in these trusting environments respond with enormous commitment and creativity.

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People are definitely a company's greatest asset. It doesn't make any difference whether the product is cars or cosmetics. A company is only as good as the people it keeps.

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