When product performance outstrips the ability of customers to use that performance in an industry, the competitive game changes. Under those circumstances you have to decouple components businesses from assembly businesses.

Year after year after year, people write books about managing innovation or about leadership, for example, without ever going through the pain of saying, "This kind of leadership will cause this result in these circumstances and a very different result in those circumstances." This is academic malpractice of the worst kind.

There needs to be conviction and action behind rules.

Intimate, loving, and enduring relationships with our family and close friends will be among the sources of the deepest joy in our lives.

To prop up the stock price, managers have to turn down the screws on everybody. That forces them to cancel all the projects that would lead to future growth in order to drop money to the bottom line. This is HP's dilemma today. Once a company's growth has stopped, the game as we have known it is over. It's a scary thing.

The only useful information about the market will be what I create through expeditions into the market, through testing and probing, trial and error, by selling real products to real people who pay real money.

Because if the decisions you make about where you invest your blood, sweat, and tears are not consistent with the person you aspire to be, you’ll never become that person.