Strategically, a major function of the CEO is to look for bad news and encourage the organization to respond to it. Employees must be encouraged to share bad news as much as good news.
You’ve got to give great tools to small teams. Pick good people, use small teams and give them great tools so that they are very productive in terms of what they are doing.
It’s pretty incredible to look back 30 years to when Microsoft was starting and realize how work has been transformed. We’re finally getting close to what I call the digital workstyle.
Long-term vision and product strategy.
An important re-engineering principle is that companies should focus on their core competence and outsource everything else.
Even though I only have a high-school degree, I’m a professional student.
If you’re too focused on your current business, it’s hard to change and concentrate on innovating.
The most important ‘speed’ issue is often not technical but cultural. It’s convincing everyone that the company’s survival depends on everyone moving as fast as possible.
Sometimes, I think my most important job as a CEO is to listen for bad news. If you don’t act on it, your people will eventually stop bringing bad news to your attention and that is the beginning of the end.
The vision is really about empowering workers giving them all the information about what’s going on so they can do a lot more than they’ve done in the past.
Our vision, which has not changed since the day the company was founded.
There were a lot of missteps in the early days, but because we got in early we got to make more mistakes than other people.
Computers are great because when you’re working with them you get immediate results that let you know if your program works. It’s feedback you don’t get from many other things.
I’m cooler than you. WAAAY cooler.
We weren’t trying to just go public and get rich. There was no near-term thing. It always was this many-decades thing where there were no shortcuts and we’d sort of put one foot in front of the other.
Reward worthy failure – Experimentation.
Teams should be able to act with the same unity of purpose and focus as a well motivated individual.
Every company can choose whether to lead or follow the emerging digital trends.
How fast a company can respond in an emergency is a measure of its corporate reflexes.
Success today requires the agility and drive to constantly rethink, reinvigorate, react, and reinvent.