Innovation-the heart of the knowledge economy-is fundamentally social.

I'm in the storytelling business, and so you're always drawn to the unusual. And early on, I discovered that's the easiest way to tell stories... If you come up through a newspaper as I did, your whole goal is to get a story on the front page, and you only get something on the front page if it's unusual.

An incredibly high percentage of successful entrepreneurs are dyslexic. That's one of the little-known facts.

A prediction, in a field where prediction is not possible, is no more than a prejudice.

I became convinced that knowing lots of people was kind of skill, something that the diligent can overcome.

The conventional explanation for Jewish success, of course, is that Jews come from a literate, intellectual culture. They are famously "the people of the book." There is surely something to that. But it wasn't just the children of rabbis who went to law school. It was the children of garment workers. And their critical advantage in climbing the professional ladder wasn't the intellectual rigor you get from studying the Talmud. It was the practical intelligence and savvy you get from watching your father sell aprons on Hester Street.

I know it sounds hard to believe, but habits laid down by our ancestors persist even after the conditions that created those habits have gone away.