You ask, "Could we have an honest discussion about earnings insurance?" I think we could, if people understood that the alternative was to build up a backlash against global capital, against free trade, against technological change.

You ask, "Could we have an honest discussion about earnings insurance?" I think we could, if people understood that the alternative was to build up a backlash against global capital, against free trade, against technological change.

There will always be a business cycle, and white-collar workers will get hit in the next recession like they always do in recessions.

As a top manager, you have to not just reward truth-telling, you've got to beg for it, and you've got to demand that everyone around you gives you constructive criticism, constantly. You've got to get out of the bubble, so that you can get direct feedback from everybody who's being affected.

I think that in politics, when people want to discredit a particular position, they say, "Oh, they are liberals," or "They are conservatives; we are centrists." Everybody wants to be a centrist.

The intellectual equipment needed for the job of the future is an ability to define problems, quickly assimilate relevant data, conceptualize and reorganize the information, make deductive and inductive leaps with it, ask hard questions about it, discuss findings with colleagues, work collaboratively to find solutions and then convince others.

Today, for good or ill, people are thinking about many social problems from the standpoint of their own kitchen tables. I think the way to begin a conversation with people about what's going on is to address their daily experiences, and what their fears and frustrations, as well as their exhilarations, are.