I was frustrated for a long time with my colleagues in the business school world and with so many management authors who didn't really see themselves as innovators. They were glorified journalists.

Large organizations don't worship shareholders or customers, they worship the past. If it were otherwise, it wouldn't take a crisis to set a company on a new path.

All too often, legacy management practices reflexively perpetuate the past - by over-weighting the views of long-tenured executives, by valuing conformance more highly than creativity and by turning tired industry nostrums into sacred truths.

Today, no leader can afford to be indifferent to the challenge of engaging employees in the work of creating the future. Engagement may have been optional in the past, but it's pretty much the whole game today.

In 1948 I entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, undecided between studies of chemistry and physics, but my first year convinced me that physics was more interesting to me.

When I went to my local grammar school, Lurgan College, girls were not encouraged to study science. My parents hit the roof and, along with other parents, demanded a curriculum change.

There is actually a fair amount of money being put behind science today.

In my early teens, science fiction and fantasy had an almost-total hold over my imagination. Their outcast status was part of their appeal.