You need just the right amount of ambition . . . If you have too little ambition, you don't push or work hard. If you have too much ambition, you put yourself ahead of others, elbow them out of your way.

Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.

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

Most companies don't die because they are wrong; they die because they don't commit themselves. They fritter away their momentum and their valuable resources while attempting to make a decision. The greatest danger is standing still.

Congress will pass a law restricting public comment on the Internet to individuals who have spent a minimum of one hour actually accomplishing a specific task while on line.

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.

With all due respect to Microsoft and Intel, there is no substitute for being in the right place at the right time.