To operate a company of the size of Sears Holdings or Wal-Mart or Target or Home Depot or Lowe's, you need a combination of skills, and each of those skills needs to be sufficiently strong.
For too long people have backed companies on hope value rather than solid products coming out. Now we are coming out the other side.
As a singer, I just want to try to honor what the writers create - and as someone who's trying to write songs, I just hope I can stand in their company and not embarrass myself.
Making media companies that you hope to sell is not a lot of fun for anyone who cares deeply about making media.
Kai-Fu's Innovation Works is the top very-early-stage fund in China. We are proud to be an investor, and hope that IW will help to produce in China companies on the scale of Facebook, Zynga, or Groupon.
In taking Dell private, we plan to go back to our roots, focusing on the entrepreneurial spirit that made Dell one of the fastest-growing and most successful companies in history.
China has legally purchased high performance computers, advanced machine tools, and semiconductor-manufacturing equipment from several American companies.
When I left Apple, it had $2 billion of cash. It was the most profitable computer company in the world - not just personal computers - and Apple was the number one selling computer.
My goal wasn't to make a ton of money. It was to build good computers. I only started the company when I realized I could be an engineer forever.
So a more sensible thing it seemed to me was to go to Silicon Valley and be pushing on the technology companies to accelerate the use of audio and music in computers.
Since acquiring major interests in Dole Food Company 28 years ago, educating the public on proper diet has constituted the agenda of the Dole Nutrition Institute.
I studied to be an architect. And I find tremendous similarities between building a company and the design process. Businesses have to do their planning on the fly in a fashion similar to an architect sketching.
I've been very engaged in Illinois and Chicago civic activities for a long time; mostly around building businesses and helping entrepreneurs grow companies, but also around education and education reform.
Unions inherently create an 'us versus them' dynamic that makes winning against a company's management the top goal, not serving customers, innovating, or in the case of education, teaching kids.
Of the 55 refineries closed in America in the last 10 years, they were all closed for economic reasons, mostly oil company mergers. Not a single one was closed for environmental purposes or objections.
For me, prayer is not so much me setting out a shopping list of requests for God to consider as it is a way of 'keeping company with God.'
Building companies involves creating great wealth. If that means I am an oligarch, OK, it's fine. But if being an oligarch is about buying football clubs, it is not for me.
The most important thing for us is investing and making companies great, and then they have all the options they want, whether that's to go public or stay private.
The early part of my career was the 1990s, and I was living in New York working as an actor. It was the world I was in. A lot of companies had a great deal of money.
I didn't want to just work within Hollywood when I started a production company. I wanted to be able to collaborate with great artists from all over the world.
I work for a place that's been great to me over the years, and when you make a mistake, you're hurting your company as well.
