Unless companies change these rules, any superficial re-organizations they perform will be no more effective than dusting the furniture in Pompeii.

Automating a mess yields an automated mess.

To succeed at re-engineering, you have to be a missionary, a motivator, and a leg breaker.

Reengineering eliminates work, not jobs or people.

A successful career will no longer be about promotion. It will be about mastery.

America's business problem is that it is entering the twenty-first century with companies designed during the nineteenth century to work well in the twentieth.

The transitional concept of management is reaching the end of the road.

If managing were simple, why do the majority of businesses fail? If physicians had the same success rate as executives, the medical schools would have been shuttered long ago.

Reengineering cannot be entrusted to the semi-competent, the hangers-on with nothing better to do.

I just use my life story as a kind of device on which to hang comic observations. It's not my interest or instinct to tell the world anything pertinent about myself or my family.

I love my hunting dog. I loved my hunting dog - I'm not very good at hunting.

A lot of American actors when they do Shakespeare put on a phoney English accent and it drives me crazy. You're always fighting against the idea that only the British know how to do Shakespeare.

A man may be said to love most truly that woman in whose company he can feel drowsy in comfort.

Look at Judi Dench, who's brilliant in whatever bloody job she does.

Bill Gates is the pope of the personal computer industry. He decides who is going to build.

it was a sly trick of God's to give a man work to do - it kept him from asking questions that God couldn't answer.

There's nothing wrong with most men's egos that the kowtowing of a headwaiter can't cure.

My message is not wholly understood; only poets understand it.

What a relief to be empty! Then God can live your life.