The worst kind of management seeks a single optimum, a one-scale index of efficiency, like the mindless scales of 1 to 10 for grading a woman's beauty or one to four stars for a movie's appeal.

A rigid America is also weak and vulnerable, because it sacrifices its unique strength: the energy of people who think they can always make something new of their lives.

"Up or out" greatly magnified the careerist emphasis on holding a position rather than doing a job.

It is not widely known that, ever since the end of the Korean War, the United States has spent essentially the same amount of money on defense, in real terms, every single year.

According to the Office of Technology Assessment, 3 Minuteman missiles and 7 Poseidon missiles could destroy 73 percent of oil-refining capacity in the Soviet Union.

Racial prejudice boils down to the deeply anti-American message that some people are born to fail.

Our military plans should be based on the assumption of unpredictability, rather than on carefully drawn, static models of the world.

Societies are healthiest when their radius of trust is broad and when people feel they can influence their own fate.

Successful societies-those which progress economically and politically and can control the terms on which they deal with the outside world-succeed because they have found ways to match individual self-interest to the collective good.