The only role other than paying their taxes, whatever those are, the only role for philanthropy broadly - of which the rich should give disproportionately - the more, the better - and I think there is a positive trend in that direction - there are certain risk-taking things, like trying out a new type of charter school or funding a new kind of medicine.

Here at work we're all just trying to get a job done. My people have the confidence of their convictions and they know their skills. And that occupies most of my time.

It's really kind of cool to have solar panels on your roof.

I set a rule that people weren't allowed to send good news unless they sent around an equal amount of bad news. We had to get a balanced picture. In fact, I kind of favored just hearing about the accounts we were losing because ... bad news is generally more actionable than good news.

The trick generally is to break programs into pieces and have those pieces be individually testable and so then when you move on to the other pieces you treat it as a black box knowing that it either works or doesn't work.

What's amazing is, if young people understood how doing well in school makes the rest of their life so much interesting, they would be more motivated. It's so far away in time that they can't appreciate what it means for their whole life.

How fast a company can respond in an emergency is a measure of its corporate reflexes.