eWeek.com has a slide presentation on The Best IT Advice I Ever Got. I thought it was excellent.
What would you add? Some thoughts (I hope to add more later):
- Over-communication is not effective communication
- Don’t under-estimate your talent. Your IT team will raise their performance to meet your expectations, even when you don’t expect that to happen.
- If your leaders can’t describe the problem, they can’t solve it – no matter how much software you buy.
Candid CIO 
Some I would have added if I had been asked by eWeek
– Don’t let “best” get in the way of “better”. (with thanks to Bill Clark)
– People don’t care how much you know until the know how much you care. (with thanks to Russ Svendsen)
I did an own version of one of your thoughts above. This time you will not need to brush up your Swedish to read the quote. http://cio-elisabeth.blogspot.com/2007/01/veckans-it-chefs-citat.html