John Kay

Digital media is the future and two decades from now the book business will look very different.

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.

Markets are not a well-oiled machine: they are a constantly changing, adaptive biological system.

Markets are not a well oiled physical machine: they are a constantly changing, adaptive biological system. Pluralism is their motive force, their essence chaotic, their development inherently uncertain. If we could predict the evolution of markets, we would not need markets in the first place.

Bogus quantification attempts to compress complex problems and analyses into single observations.

Dominance of an industry or activity is not the same as scale. International trade is conducted by individuals and businesses, not governments, and it is them, who negotiate the division of the value added trade creates.

Our capacity to learn from the Great Depression is limited because we do not know how economies would have evolved after 1938 if politics had not supervened.

Commercial and economic success, even in technological industries, depends not on the quality of technology, but on the match between technology and the needs of its customers.