You take an educated gamble. If you don't occasionally make a mistake, you're not doing your job.

When employees are happy, they are your very best ambassadors.

Obscene salaries send the wrong message through a company. The message is that all brilliance emanates from the top; that the worker on the floor of the store or the factory is insignificant.

You could raise the price of, say, a bottle of ketchup to $1.03 instead of $1, and no one would know. Raising prices just 3% per product would add 50% to your pretax income. Why not do it? It's like heroin: You do a little and you want a little bit more. Raising prices is the easy way.

Paying good wages is not in opposition to good productivity.

When you hire good people, and you provide good jobs and good wages and a career, good things are going to happen.

If somehow a proclamation were made that C.E.O.'s could only make a maximum of $300,000 a year, you would not have any shortage of very qualified men and women seeking the jobs.