The task of industry is continuously, year on year, to make more and better things, using less of the world's resources.

How do you know you have won? When the energy is coming the other way and when your people are visibly growing individually and as a group.

If you are doing things the same way as two years ago, you are almost certainly doing them wrong.

In order to solve problems, information has to be shared; and not only information, but doubts, fears and questions.

It is the responsibility of leadership and management to give opportunities and put demands on people which enable them to grow as human beings in their work environment.

People who don't make mistakes are no bloody good to you at all.

Problems can only be solved by the people who have them. You have to try and coax them and love them into seeing ways in which they can help themselves.

The only companies that innovate are those who believe that innovation is vital for their future.

The trouble is that all-encompassing though information technology may be, it will always convey facts and numbers ... what it does not convey is perception, belief and motivation.

It horrifies me that ethics is only an optional extra at Harvard Business School.

People are unlikely to know that they need a product which does not exist and the basis of market research in new and innovative products is limited in this regard.

While I was not entirely satisfied with the circumstances of my existence, I felt like the possibility of improvement still existed. That I could make happiness happen.

Before publishers' blurbs were invented, authors had to make their reputations by writing.

So many questions. Could she not think about what the answers might be before asking?

Are you willing to die for what you believe in? The real courage is in living and suffering for what you believe.

If I'm at somebody's house and they have magazines on the table and people are chatting, I feel almost a physical urge to start reading the magazines instead of talking to people.

Our concern for the loss of our friends is not always from a sense of their worth, but rather of our own need of them and that we have lost some who had a good opinion of us.

It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all.

As long as we give room for domination and the dominators, there will be worries and worried people. Poverty and pestilence will live eternally in the country.

Solitude is an excellent laboratory in which to observe the extent to which manners and habits are conditioned by others.

Thank you to my wonderful actors, the triangle of man-love which is Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush and me.