You have to pretend you're 100 percent sure. You have to take action; you can't hesitate or hedge your bets. Anything less will condemn your efforts to failure.

There's a tendency at the senior and middle-manager level to be too big-picturish and too superficial. There is a phrase, "The devil is in the details." One can formulate brilliant global strategies whose executability is zero. It's only through familiarity with details - the capability of the individuals who have to execute, the marketplace, the timing - that a good strategy emerges. I like to work from details to big pictures.

Detect and fix any problem in a production process at the lowest stage possible.

So give me a turbulent world as opposed to a quiet world and I'll take the turbulent one.

The worse the news, the more effort should go into communicating it.

I'm a great believer in particularly being alert to changes that change something, anything, by an order of magnitude, and nothing operates with the factors of 10 as profoundly as the Internet.

Just as we could have rode into the sunset, along came the Internet, and it tripled the significance of the PC.