The boom was healthy too, even with its excesses. Because what this incredible valuation craze did was draw untold sums of billions of dollars into building the Internet infrastructure. The hundreds of billions of dollars that got invested in telecommunications, for example.

A fundamental rule in technology says that whatever can be done will be done.

Bad companies are destroyed by crisis, Good companies survive them, Great companies are improved by them.

In the first round of work simplification...you can reasonably expect a 30 to 50 percent reduction...To implement the actual simplification, you must question why each step is performed. Typically, you will find that many steps exist in your work flow for no good reason. Often they are there by tradition or because formal procedure ordains it, and nothing practical ordains it.

Just as you would not permit a fellow employee to steal a piece of office equipment, you shouldn't let anyone walk away with the time of his fellow managers.

The most important role of managers is to create environment in which people are passionately dedicated to winning in marketplace.

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.