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…recessions are precious things because they shake conventional wisdom, even complacent lean wisdom, and motivate managers to make hard choices.

…the higher you climb in the hierarchy, the more oblivious the managers are likely to be – but at the same time, the more formal authority they tend to have.

…extra managers are hired with the ostensible purpose of improving efficiency.

Good bosses also spend time managing uncertainty and adapting the company’s strategy and structure by handling overall coordination between employees and units.

…the basic problem of management and business – how to assemble, organize, and motivate groups of people and resources to produce the goods and services consumers want – is the same as it ever was.

Paradoxically, management and hierarchy can help companies become agile and adaptive.

…meeting the demands of the current environment has made managerial authority even more essential than it was in earlier periods.

Managers need to move away from specifying methods and processes, in favor of defining the principles they want people to apply or the goals they want people to meet.

In the knowledge economy, the main task for top management is to define and implement the organizational rules of the game.

…the kernel of truth in the bossless company narrative is that sometimes peer organization and peer monitoring beats supervision by middle managers.