What goes wrong [in long-range planning] is that sensible anticipation gets converted into foolish numbers: and their validity always hinges on large… - Robert Heller

Two of my favourite current management writers are Americans – Clayton Christensen and Peter Senge. My all-time favourite gurus are Peter Drucker, who became a greatly admired friend, and W. Edwards Deming. The thing that set these people apart from many other business commentators is that they didn’t propose any all - encompassing theories, they simply told it like it is. The fact is that life cannot be summarised as a simple set of rules; it’s far too complicated for that and it’s always changing. Unfortunately, all-encompassing panaceas do seem to be popular and certainly sell books, which is why I so value the objectivity of thought that each of these people brought to the debate.

Common sense suggests that some factors in a [risk management] process are more important than others — and analysis supports this. In reality, only 20 percent of activities. In reality, only 20 percent of activities may account for up to 80 percent of results. This is known as Pareto's law, the “80/20 rule”...Pareto's law concentrates on the significant 20 percent and gives the less important 80 percent lower priority.

Management — The definition that includes all the other definitions in this book and which, because of that, is the most general and least precise. Its concrete, people meaning — the board of directors and all executives with the power to make decisions — is no problem, except for the not-so-little matter of where to draw the line between managers who are part of "the management" and managers who are not.