Personal Highlights:

• You can argue opinions, but you generally can’t argue principles, since everyone has already agreed upon them. As Bill would point out, it’s the leader’s...
• Does the aberrant genius have her priorities straight? Eccentric behavior can be okay as long as it is in the service (or intended to be...
• if you have the right product for the right market at the right time, go as fast as you can. There are minor things that...

Personal Highlights:

• viewers sense not just movement but intention—or, put another way, emotion—then the animator has done his or her job.
• One of my classmates, Jim Clark, would go on to found Silicon Graphics and Netscape. Another, John Warnock, would co-found Adobe, known for Photoshop and...
• My invention of something called the “Z-buffer” was a good example of this, in that it built on others’ work. The Z-buffer was designed to...

Personal Highlights:

• If you take one typewriter and build 100, you have made horizontal progress. If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress.
• Spreading old ways to create wealth around the world will result in devastation, not riches. In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.
• Conventional beliefs only ever come to appear arbitrary and wrong in retrospect; whenever one collapses, we call the old belief a bubble. But the distortions...

Personal Highlights:

• The fact that he willingly took on responsibility for product quality and any other unattractive duties that fell through the gaps allowed her to focus on more pressing concerns.
• department to another in the middle of the quarter in order to make sure that you could achieve a goal that was in jeopardy?”
• Politics is when people choose their words and actions based on how they want others to react rather than based on what they really think.”

Personal Highlights:

• productivity is the act of bringing a company closer to its goal. Every action that brings a company closer to its goal is productive. Every...
• To make money by increasing net profit, while simultaneously increasing return on investment, and simultaneously increasing cash flow.
• did we sell any more products (i.e., did our throughput go up?); did we lay off anybody (did our operational expense go down?); and the...

Personal Highlights:

• The method of principled negotiation is hard on the merits, soft on the people.
• the more attention that is paid to positions, the less attention is devoted to meeting the underlying concerns of the parties.
• Apart from the substantive merits, the feeling of participation in the process is perhaps the single most important factor in determining whether a negotiator accepts...

Personal Highlights:

• People often ask me how we’ve managed to work effectively across three companies over eighteen years. Most business relationships either become too tense to tolerate...
• The standard pedagogical argument is that high schools should get rid of calculus and replace it with statistics, which is really important and actually useful....
• You must consider first all of the other employees and second your friend. The good of the individual must be sacrificed for the good of the whole.