John Kay

Like all business success, innovative success is based on matching capabilities to market.

All our experience of the development of information technology starts from what the customer might want rather than what the technology might do.

If you aim to create a dynamic, successful business, a state-owned utility is not the place to start.

A stance which is pro-business must be distinguished from a stance which is pro-market. In the two decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, that distinction has not been appreciated well enough.

Maintain a clear sense of long-term objectives but acknowledge the limits on your day-to-day actions.

Regulation as supervision can be simultaneously extensive and intrusive, yet ineffective and prone to regulatory capture. History suggests that supervision is rarely a success.

Businesses are complex systems. We tend to infer design where there was only adaptation and improvisation, and to attribute successful business outcomes to the realisation of some deliberate plan.

If financial institutions are to survive, they must behave more like supermarkets

It is particularly easy for those who work in financial institutions to make the mistake of believing that their success is the result of exceptional skill rather than good fortune. Until vanity is vanquished, I anticipate that diversification to the level of incompetence will continue to be a powerful element in business behaviour.

Do not waste any time on sermons and the prohibition. Even if the Good Lord himself were to deliver the Sermon on the Mount, He would be ignored. Hardened gamblers only give up when they have made the resolution to quit themselves.