I wanted to be an industrial designer, so I went to business school for that, and I then went on to marketing at Interpublic Group of Companies, which was one of the first organizations to actually think about brand marketing. I worked on Coca Cola's account, and then I was recruited by Pepsi, and I ended up being Pepsi's first MBA. I was called the High Wire Act because I was in my 20s and I was given jobs of increasing responsibility that I was totally unqualified for.

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 Mac defined personal technology, and the iPhone defines intimate technology as a convergence of communications, content and location.

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

Everything at Apple can be best understood through the lens of designing. Whether it's designing the look and feel of the user experience, or the industrial design, or the system design, and even things like how the boards were laid out.

It's an amazing time to be an entrepreneur because not only is the stuff getting more capable and powerful, but it's becoming more reliable and the costs are coming down dramatically. So you can go out as an entrepreneur and start a company on a credit card and go to AWS and a few other services and be pretty virtual and, who knows, you may be the next Steve Jobs.

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.