A career is a portfolio of projects that teach you new skills, gain you new expertise, develop new capabilities, grow your colleague set, and constantly reinvent you as a brand.

Leadership is about tapping the wellsprings of human motivation - and about fundamental relations with one's fellows.

The simple act of paying positive attention to people has a great deal to do with productivity.

Steve Jobs is perhaps the most competitive human being I have ever met in my life, and yet I would argue one of the most artistic human beings I have ever met in my life. You can trash the movies all you want, but they do have an artistic component. And yet brutal competition knows no peers when it comes to Hollywood.

I urge you to set a tough, quantitative target for adding "differentiators" as I call them, to every service you provide.

But there's no substitute for getting smarter faster. And the way you get smarter is to screw around vigorously. Try stuff. See what works. See what fails miserably. Learn. Rinse. Repeat.

To meet the demands of the fast-changing competitive scene, we must simply learn to love change as much as we have hated it in the past.