The margin for making mistakes has gotten much smaller. In a commodity economy, it's hard to kill off your business. You still have the mine. You still have oil wells. You can always rebuild. In a knowledge economy, if you make a mistake, you're in t...
My sports were team sports: ice hockey and baseball. The whole team dynamic is similar in business. Leadership is earned - the captain earns that role; it's not because he's the coach's son. These are all things we know, but in today's world, it's no...
When you read reviews on Yelp, you get a good sense of what's going to happen when you walk in the door of that business. The challenge is that there are fifteen million businesses in the U.S., and its very hard to communicate with all of them about ...
A strategy is something like, an innovative new product; globalization, taking your products around the world; be the low-cost producer. A strategy is something you can touch; you can motivate people with; be number one and number two in every busine...
If you create something, you don't want someone else to go and profit from it; you have your right to make a living and everything. So I respect copyright. What I don't respect is copyright extremism. And I what I don't respect is a business model th...
The Small Business 'common app' would function much like the one that students complete to apply to multiple colleges and universities simultaneously. It would ensure that small businesses across the country can concentrate on growing and creating jo...
My relationship with Salman Khan is too personal to talk about. I take my work like any other regular job, and what I do in my personal life is no one's business. I'd rather let my work do all the talking.
My first real business was bootlegging T-shirts - I was just a dumb kid. You go to a concert and pay $25 for a cotton T-shirt that says 'Rolling Stones,' 'Lollapalooza,' or whatever. On the outside they're 10 or 15 bucks. We were the guys selling the...
And our size: The company this year is going to be close to $50 billion, so if that's the case and you can continue to grow that fast, I would rather put my energies to solving customer problems and growing our business than worrying about integratin...
I think running a business, doing what I've done for the last - since 1996, has taught me so many things because I started from just an idea and then had to figure out how to make it, market it, every single thing from soup to nuts on how to get a pr...
Early in my career, I sometimes found it difficult to make the tough people decisions - I had to learn that. In business, you want to listen. You want to learn. You want to make sure you're not proceeding without information. But if you wait too long...
If you have a business website, make it stickier; redo the merchandising often and try new things until you hit the right homepage... then try and beat that. The most important audience drivers on the Internet are paid search and key word optimizatio...
That's the way this business works: if your movies do well at the box office, you will be offered more movies. It doesn't matter if you're a nice guy or you're a prick. If your movies do well, there's a job waiting for you in Hollywood. It's not any ...
I feel fine, I don't care who the director is. All you have to do is know what your doing - all of us - everybody in the business - that's all you ask anyone - you know your job, I know mine, let's go do it.
One reason the United States is one of three countries in the world that do not have any form of paid maternity leave is that many American business leaders, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, oppose any family-friendly policies. They scare people in...
Take the leap. If you love theater more than anything, take the leap. It's so rich if you give over fully to it; there are no halfers or returnsies in this business - if you don't... There's no way to go other than full tilt with your life and job.
After adding trillions to the debt on big-government policies most Americans didn't ask for and which we couldn't afford, Democratic leaders say they need more money, which they intend to take from small business, even though small businesses create ...
As a multisport athlete, I was always fascinated with competition and how to win. At HBS and later at the Harvard Department of Economics, I was drawn to the field of competition and strategy because it tackles perhaps the most basic question in both...
Some people say the reason I am not married is that I don't understand small business and the toughest small business in the world is a family. But when you are happy and feel every minute of your life, what is the reason to get married?
I started my career as a journalist, writing about science and technology for 'Business Week' magazine. Then I decided to make a career shift. I went to graduate school in computer science, and I began developing educational technologies - in particu...
I founded Atari in my garage in Santa Clara while at Stanford. When I was in school, I took a lot of business classes. I was really fascinated by economics. You end up having to be a marketeer, finance maven and a little bit of a technologist in orde...
