For one thing, there's an essential human factor in every business endeavor. It doesn't matter if you have a perfect product, production plan and marketing pitch; you'll still need the right people to lead and implement those plans.

We make the future sustainable when we invest in the poor, not when we insist on their suffering.

Certainly I'll never be able to put myself in the situation that people growing up in the less developed countries are in. I've gotten a bit of a sense of it by being out there and meeting people and talking with them.

Other paths would include making nuclear fission cheap enough and safe enough that people broadly embrace it, so that could be scaled up.

Going out in the field, it's always enlightening to see what's working and what's not and to sit down and talk - I was with young girls in south Africa - understanding why our tools for prevention aren't being adopted, and what way may need to invent to help protect them.

I'm not big on to-do lists. Instead, I use e-mail and desktop folders and my online calendar. So when I walk up to my desk, I can focus on the e-mails I've flagged and check the folders that are monitoring particular projects and particular blogs.

America and Japan are the two leading world economies in terms of technology and innovative products. And in software, information-age technology and biotechnology the U.S. has an amazing lead.