The one thing with stress is, you've got to keep your focus on what you can do, not what happened to you.

It's pretty clear that [customers] know what their budgets are now, and what they want to spend it on.

Your employees know each other better than they know you.

To succeed at selling a losing product, you must develop seriously superior sales techniques. In addition, you have to be massively competitive and incredibly hungry to survive in that environment.

A CEO needs great intelligence and great courage. And I always found my courage was tested more.

How do you make your company a good place to work in general? That's a really really really large and complex set of skills. A lot of it is on the job training, combined with excellent mentorship.

Generally the reason they fail in the job is, you made some mistake in the hiring process in that you didn't match... them to the needs of your company accurately enough. That's the #1 reason this fails. And that's generally a good place to start: Here's where we are and here's what I didn't recognize about us and about you when I made the decision, and now it is what it is.