Who comes first? Don't be silly, says King Hal; it's employees. That is - and this dear Watson, is elementary - if you genuinely want to put customers first, you must put employees more first.

A passive approach to professional growth will leave you by the wayside.

Nearly 100% of innovation-from business to politics-is inspired not by "market analysis" but by people who are supremely pissed off by the way things are.

I don't believe in holy writ. Buy fifty books or twenty-five books, take three weeks off, read them and make up your own theory. The fact that you end up literally burning twenty-two out of twenty-five books is beside the point.

Business, life itself, is damned hard work if you wanna be good at it. Actually, that's precisely wrong. Business ceases to be work when you're chasing a dream that has engorged you. ("Work should be more fun than fun" - Noel Coward.) And if the passion isn't there. then biotech and plumbing will be equal drags.

If I read a book that cost me $20 and I get one good idea, I've gotten one of the greatest bargains of all time.

I used to be skeptical when educators and technologists predicted that we may be entering a new era of oral culture, in which audible information will be at least as important as visible information. Now that I have adopted into my own daily life a device that makes music and spoken-word files easy to access from anywhere, I have tempered my skepticism.