Listen while you can, so that you can lead when you must.

Community. A friend started a real estate brokerage a few years ago. By the time she'd added her second employee, she was a pillar of her 35,000-person community. No rule says that only the local banker or car dealer can organize the program to raise supplemental funds for the public library or send the high school band on a well-earned special trip. Participating in community affairs, with time more than dollars, is good business from day one. It gets your name around, adds to your distinctiveness, and, best of all, makes you an attractive employer (which is the key to sustained success).

Skill at creating, exploiting, and exiting crucial alliances beats ownership of fixed assets

Forget all the conventional 'rules' but one. There is one golden rule: Stick to topics you deeply care about and don't keep your passion buttoned inside your vest. An audience's biggest turn-on is the speaker's obvious enthusiasm. If you are lukewarm about the issue, forget it!

The world has not just "turned upside down". It is turning in every which way at an accelerating pace.

For me, reading is reading.

Now it is much faster and cheaper to bring thedocument to the user, rather than ask the user to come to the document or collection.