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[People with power] don’t really know as much as they think about their own organization because people stop telling them the truth.

Organizations face the challenge of controlling the tendency of executives competing for resources to present overly optimistic plans.

Organizations that take the word of overconfident experts can expect costly consequences.

…there are periods in which competition, among experts and among organizations, creates powerful forces that favor a collective blindness to risk and uncertainty.

Whatever else is produced, an organization is a factor that manufactures judgments and decisions.

…the ability to keep the knowledge for a given product or service owned persistently by the same team can only help an organization looking to evolve into a more product-centric orientation.

[Building fully cross-functional teams] is not trivial and often requires a fundamentally new approach at how to organize, distribute, and cross-train skills throughout the organization.

The organizational structure of a company often gets muddled with the functional design of how teams need to work, creating artificial dependencies that maybe shouldn’t even be there.

Things can go bad very quickly in an organization when the leadership team is weak or gets distracted.

Employees should be able to look at themselves in the mirror and feel strongly that they matter to the organization, that they contribute in significant ways, that their absence would significantly hurt its results.