Because these firms listened to their customers, invested aggressively in new technologies that would provide their customers more and better products of the sort they wanted, and because they carefully studied market trends and systematically allocated investment capital to innovations that promised the best returns, they lost their positions of leadership.

Almost always great new ideas don't emerge from within a single person or function, but at the intersection of functions or people that have never met before.

There are other dimensions of biotechnology. If you think of biotechnology like the Internet, it's not a category - it's an infrastructure that can be deployed to sustain or disrupt. In health care, the most complex problems at the high end have to be dealt with in a problem-solving mode by the best, most experienced physicians you can find.

I have been blessed to see visions of eternity; and events in my future that have been important for me to foresee, have been revealed to me.

Many think of management as cutting deals and laying people off and hiring people and buying and selling companies. That's not management, that's deal making. Management is the opportunity to help people become better people. Practiced that way, it's a magnificent profession.

Don't worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people.

If you defer investing your time and energy until you see that you need to, chances are it will already be too late.