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!

Ready, fire, aim. Do it! Make it happen! Action counts. No one ever sat their way to success.

Unless you walk out into the unknown, the odds of making a profound difference in your life are pretty low.

Anybody who is an entrepreneur is a person who essentially has impaired judgment. The odds of success are zilch. This valley is loaded to the gills with a whole lot of totally insane people who honest to God believe that they can be the next Bill Gates or the next Scott McNealy. And that is genuinely stupid.

Excellent firms don't believe in excellence - only in constant improvement and constant change.

Regardless of age, regardless of position, regardless of the business we happen to be in, all of us need to understand the importance of branding. We are CEOs of our own companies: Me, Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.

If future competitiveness depends on treating people as an important part of the institution, the least respectful thing I can imagine doing to a human being is asking him to urinate in a cup.