The characteristics that I look for when I'm looking for really good entrepreneurs to lead companies are you have to have an inquiring mind, you have to say there must be a better way to do things, and now with technology at a point where everything is possible, how do we turn the possible into the probable? And it all starts with a passion to do something really well, to solve a problem in a way that's never been solved before, and to have just an incredible work ethic, to be persistent.

In many cases, jobs that used to be done by people are going to be able to be done through automation. I don't have an answer to that. That's one of the more perplexing problems of society.

In the industrial age, the CEO sat on the top of the hierarchy and didn't have to listen to anybody ... In the information age, you have to listen to the ideas of people regardless of where they are in the organization.

The new leaders face new tests such as how to lead in this idea-intensive, interdependent network environment

The boards had to be beautiful in Steve [Jobs]'s eyes when you looked at them, even though when he created the Macintosh he made it impossible for a consumer to get in the box, because he didn't want people tampering with anything.

I feel most badly, though, [because] after 10 years, I was at the company, I wanted to go back to New York where I was from. Why I didn’t go to Steve Jobs and say, ‘Steve, let’s figure out how you can come back and lead your company.’ I didn’t do that, it was a terrible mistake on my part. I can’t figure out why I didn’t have the wisdom to do that. But I didn’t. And as life has it, shortly after that, I was fired.

Steve Jobs was not an engineer: He was a brilliant individual with this ability to see around corners, to see things that other people couldn't see. I've learned over the years in the Apple that there are some really talented people who can take the same evidence, the same facts, and look at them and see them in a way that interprets those facts entirely different than most people do.