Competition is warfare. Mostly it is played by prescribed rules--there is a sort of Geneva Convention for competition--but it's thorough and often brutal.

Pickups, S.U.V.'s, vans and the like represent about 80 million vehicles, with mileage of perhaps 13 to 16 miles per gallon. Converting those should be our first priority.

Only the paranoid survive.

I think Amazon is the preeminent pioneer in building a new way of doing commerce: personalized, database-driven commerce, where the big value is not in the purchase fulfillment, but in knowing as much about a customer base of ten or twenty million people as a corner store used to know about a customer base of a few hundred. In today's mass-merchandising world, that's largely gone; Amazon is trying to use computer technology to re-establish it.

There is at least one point in the history of any company when you have to change dramatically to rise to the next level of performance. Miss that moment - and you start to decline.

I wasn't cut out to be an opera singer, but it was a nice fantasy for a teenager growing up in Hungary during the Stalinist era.

Assume any career move you make won't go smoothly. They won't. But don't look back.