How can you motivate yourself to continue to follow a leader when he appears to be going around in circles?

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.

You need to plan the way a fire department plans: it cannot anticipate where the next fire will be, so it has to shape an energetic and efficient team that is capable of responding to the unanticipated as well as to any ordinary event.

The new environment dictates two rules: first, everything happens faster; second, anything that can be done will be done, if not by you, then by someone else, somewhere.

What kind of a society are we going to have if it consists of highly paid people doing high-value-added work - and masses of unemployed?

You have to understand what it is that you are better at than anybody else and mercilessly focus your efforts on it.

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