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Since I got involved in Telco, we first developed the first modular truck, the 407, then the 709, and now the 2213. These trucks broke away from the old face of Telco trucks. I was also just as much involved with the Safari, but nobody talks about the Safari. My involvement has been there with all Telco's projects -somehow the car has got hyped up.
Selling five million units in less than 14 months means DS is the fastest among any game machines ever launched in Japan to hit that level. To achieve this rapid growth, we were required not only to go after frequent game players, but to reel back people who had left games and to make video games enjoyable for those who had not played games at all.
In the digital world, content has the tendency to lose value, especially on smart devices. We finally found solutions to the problem. We will not merely port games developed for our dedicated systems to smart devices just as they are - we will develop brand new software which perfectly matches the play style and control mechanisms of smart devices.
Newspapers are technologically obsolete. In the days of instant electronic communications, its crazy to have to print these newspapers at a central plant and deliver them by truck. They're the biggest problem with our solid-waste disposal. And the news you get is a day old. You can get it off the Internet instantaneously for a fraction of the cost.
From what I've seen, you either get grounded in that kind of positive thinking early on in life or you don't. Establishing priorities and using your time well aren't things you can pick up at the Harvard Business School. Formal learning can teach you a great deal, but many of the essential skills in life are the ones you have to develop on your own.
If you're a leader at any level and your people aren't challenging you, you've got to change that or you can't be a leader here because you're not going to be using ideas, you're not going to have innovation, you're not going to fully develop your people. And if you're working in a group and you don't challenge, then you're not really doing your job.
I love the competitive aspect of it [business]. It's like playing chess. Why do people play chess? Knowing the realm of moves? Even when you get to be a chess master, there are other chess masters you want to beat or outperform. And to me business is just a sport that I love to compete in; a continuous intellectual challenge that really motivates me.
In business, you're trying to make a buck. God was good to me and blessed me. I made some money and started this foundation years ago, and it has grown in size. With the foundation it's a lot different, because the bottom line isn't how you can make more money or get a better return, it's helping the projects that you feel strongly about move forward.
Well, you have to understand where we came from. We are not here because we decided 10 years ago that we were going to be x-size company, and, oh, yeah, Jackson would be a good headquarters. We work here in Mississippi because we started here, and we are certainly happy here. Those of us working out of Jackson intend to continue working out of Jackson.
I learned that unless you start working, if you're frozen out of work, you will never learn the habits, the discipline, the values of cooperation and improvement unless you get a job, and that's what statistic show. It's, unless you get a job and keep it, you will not get out of poverty. If you do, you have a very good chance of working out of poverty.
If you go back in my career, you'll find I've always been a lead-from-the-front people-manager guy. I've always been outspoken. I've always attempted to break the mold. My advice to myself, then, would be to go all in on it. The world doesn't need another cookie-cutter business-school leader. The world needs somebody to stick out and be loud and proud.
So I learned that the people who make the most of the process of encountering reality, especially the painful obstacles, learn the most and get what they want faster than people who do not. ... In short, I learned that being totally truthful, especially about mistakes and weaknesses, led to a rapid rate of improvement and movement toward what I wanted.
The most important thing you can learn as CEO- one of the hardest things to do is, you have to discipline yourself to see your company... through the eyes of the people that you're working through. Through the eyes of the employees, through the eyes of your partners... through the eyes of the people who you're not talking to and who are not in the room.
It's fascinating as we continue to innovate and lead the way in both the application space and the database space. In the very beginning, people said you couldn't make relational databases fast enough to be commercially viable. I thought we could, and we were the first to do it. But we took tremendous abuse until IBM said, "Oh yeah, this stuff is good."
It is called working your ass off. The difference is what you are willing to sacrifice. For every writer who wants balance in their life, there is a guy like me who gives up a lot to make their dreams come true. There is always going to be someone out there that knows they have to compensate for maybe having less talent with harder work and preparation.
All my days are themed. Monday is managementTuesday is product, engineering, and design. Wednesday is marketing, growth, and communications. Thursday is partnership and developers. Friday is company and cultureOn the days beginning with T, I start at Twitter in the morning, then go to Square in the afternoon. Sundays are for strategySaturday is a day off.
We did start with a simple manifesto, as we called it, which was a description of what we were about, and it was the Un-carrier. It was about finding and solving customer pain points in an attempt to fix a stupid, broken, arrogant industry. It was something we felt passionate about. It was our goal to make changes and have the industry make the same ones.
At that time when I was struggling with being successful in a financial way, people would say, "You should be very happy. Look how well you're doing financially," and I was struggling to find purpose, if you would. There's quote from Einstein that said, "Happiness and well-being are the ambitions of a pig." And I thought, "Boy, that's exactly how I feel."
If I see a black kid in a hoodie and it's late at night, I'm walking to the other side of the street. And if on that side of the street, there's a guy that has tattoos all over his face, white guy, bald head, tattoos everywhere, I'm walking back to the other side of the street, and the list goes on of stereotypes that we all live up to and are fearful of.
Basically what my mom told me - I was extremely shy, I didn't have any girlfriends 'til I was 21 - my mom would see me suffering and tell me, "Just focus on your school, study very hard, and some day you will be successful and you can use all the resources that you have to a dating advantage." Ultimately, I took that advice and turned it into dating sites.
And there are some - Bernie [Ecclestone] and others - who are embracing new technologies. When Sky UK started to broadcast there was an argument that audience would come down because it is pay TV. But the actual quality of the production and the use of technology and the engagement of the viewer is much better than it ever was. The product is simply better.
The story of the entrepreneur... is the story of forward progress, of pursuing one's dreams and goals no matter how outlandish they seem to others. The entrepreneur, like the pioneer, pushes boundaries in search of what's new, what's next. Sometimes, he brings the whole society with him, rushing forward together into a next phase of our communal human life.
Now the guy that got to the top, the CEO, would obviously be stupid to have a number two guy who was a lot smarter than he is. So by definition, since he's a survivor and he got to the top and he isn't that brilliant, his number two guy is going to always be a little worse than he is. So, as time goes on, it's anti-Darwinism, the survival of the un- fittest.
The real challenge is not to get people to remember more, but to get them to understand better. We're just now beginning to be able to show what we can implement with technological tools. I think our interest at Apple is to be the provider of the instruments that will help educators and students create and entirely new kind of learning than what we have now.
I was raised to give back. I was born to immigrant parents and was fortunate to become successful at an early age. I've always felt a strong sense of national service to my country, and I may have been able to provide leadership in the political arena. I don't regret the decision not to enter politics, I just wonder sometimes if I could have changed anything.
Often, there is no correlation between the success of a company's operations and the success of its stock over a few months or even a few years. In the long term, there is a 100 percent correlation between the success of the company and the success of its stock. This disparity is the key to making money; it pays to be patient, and to own successful companies.
The next most dangerous thing [after nuclear proliferation] is probably... global warming, and then, right behind that are overpopulation -- we need to get serious about family planning-and trying to alleviate poverty, to get clean, renewable energy, probably with solar panels to the billion and a half people in the world who don't have access to electricity.
The creative process requires more than reason. Most original thinking isn't even verbal. It requires 'a groping experimentation with ideas, governed by intuitive hunches and inspired by the unconscious.' The majority of business men are incapable of original thinking because they are unable to escape from the tyranny of reason. Their imaginations are blocked.
Years later, I found myself running a network television division and then a movie studio and now an entire entertainment company. But, much of the success I've achieved can be traced to the direct and metaphorical lessons I learned in building those campfires. I can hardly think of an aspect of my life that wasn't positively affected by my camping experience.
Radical transparency is critical to having an idea meritocracy because it shows what's actually happening without spin and prevents people from maneuvering politically behind each others' backs. It brings problems and weaknesses to the surface and allows people to see how they are dealt with, so it's great for training people on how to deal with real problems.
Every NBA arena has six cameras in the ceiling. The question is what does the software do with video feeds? How to surface that in a set of analytics? There are some "playbooks," but in most sports these days what you really want to share out with coaches and players is a set of video that lets you visualize what's going on and what's the best way to do things.
Don't be misled into believing that somehow the world owes you a living. The boy who believes that his parents, or the government, or any one else owes him his livelihood and that he can collect it without labor will wake up one day and find himself working for another boy who did not have that belief and, therefore, earned the right to have others work for him.
Opposition work is not without its dangers. But if you've chosen a job like that for yourself, you then subsequently shouldn't spend your time every second thinking, oh my God, what might happen to me? Oh my God, what might happen to me? Your colleagues include quite a large number of war correspondents. Their job is not the least dangerous in the world, either.
Once upon a time I was riding on the top of a First Avenue bus, when I heard a mythical housewife say to another, "Molly, my dear, I would have bought that new brand of toilet soap if only they hadn't set the body copy in ten point Garamond." Don't you believe it. What really decides consumers to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form.
When I returned as CEO in 2008, Starbucks had forgotten that meaningful innovations balance an organization's heritage with modern-day relevance and market differentiation, so we had to reorient. In one brainstorming session, we visited and observed great retailers, then asked ourselves, 'If Starbucks did not exist, what type of coffee experience would we create?
You have to make a bet one way or another. We believe that overall demand is going to continue to grow, and its absolutely being fueled by the Internet. If anything, we're just building a little bit ahead of the curve. There's clearly a curve toward growth, and the question is 'How do you intercept that?' We've decided to intercept it as aggressively as possible.
It's an amazing time to be an entrepreneur because not only is the stuff getting more capable and powerful, but it's becoming more reliable and the costs are coming down dramatically. So you can go out as an entrepreneur and start a company on a credit card and go to AWS and a few other services and be pretty virtual and, who knows, you may be the next Steve Jobs.
The truth is at Legendary we really make movies that we want to see, and someday I'm sure that won't work but - I remember, it's obviously a completely different thing, but our first movie was Batman Begins, and there was a lot of things about Batman back then, and there was this guy named Christopher Nolan, that seemed to have worked out okay with him at the helm.
I think that the best training a top manager can be engaged in is management by example. I want to make sure there is no discrepancy between what we say and what we do. If you preach accountability and then promote somebody with bad results, it doesn't work. I personally believe the best training is management by example. Don't believe what I say. Believe what I do.
The arguments of waste are heavily overdone, because what you do is to accelerate the infrastructure that you have to build anyway, like airports and roads, and in this case it happens much faster. So speaking of a roadmap, without being specific, I would still go for Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East - that's what our clients are really interested in.
From a client perspective, I really think the work Microsoft's doing with Surface, with HoloLens, with Xbox, that stuff's absolutely essential to the company's future. Because innovation in the future will either be from the cloud out to all devices, or from devices as supported by software in the cloud. I think it's important for Microsoft to participate both ways.
Let's face it: Most companies in most industries have a kind of tunnel vision. They chase the same opportunities that everyone else is chasing, they miss the same opportunities that everyone else is missing. It's the companies that see a different game that win big. The most important question for innovators today is: What do you see that the competition doesn't see?
Most scientists assumethat life can only exist in physical life form. They send spaceships to other planets, looking for signs of physical life, not considering that life "may" also exist as energy or etheric form. Based on clairvoyant investigation, life also exists in etheric (energy) form; there are etheric beings of different degrees of awareness and development.
There isn’t any significant difference between the various brands of whiskey, or cigarettes or beer. They are all about the same. And so are the cake mixes and the detergents, and the margarines… The manufacturer who dedicates his advertising to building the most sharply defined personality for his brand will get the largest share of the market at the highest profit.
We have to find areas in our lives that we feel most uncomfortable about and want to change. I decided to push myself because it allowed me to give back. I have a scholarship program. When I found out the average age of a homeless person is 9½ years old, I said there must be something that I can do. Now, I am the spokesman for the National Coalition for the Homeless.
You could be beaten down by anybody and by everybody and it doesn't matter what everybody else thinks it's how you see yourself and what your own dreams are. And, you know, anybody who started a business and build a business knows there's going to be lots of times when you feel beaten down and you need some motivation and that's when I turn to that book among others.
Viewers have a way of remembering the celebrity while forgetting the product. I did not know this when I paid Eleanor Roosevelt $35,000 to make a commercial for margarine. She reported that her mail was equally divided. "One half was sad because I had damaged my reputation. The other half was happy because I had damaged my reputation." Not one of my proudest memories.
You have to take a broader view and realize this is an industry like any other - telecoms, Railroads; they went through consolidation. Why shouldn't the computer industry be any different? This shouldn't have been a surprise to anybody but it seemed to be, and a lot of people thought I was nuts when I said these things. And that's why they are alone as a consolidator.
My father told me "If you choose to let this money destroy your initiative and independence, then it will be a curse to you and my action in giving it to you will have been a mistake. I shall regret very much to have you miss the glorious feeling of accomplishment. Remember that often adversity is a blessing in disguise and is certainly the greatest character builder."
Putting aside all the things that are said about Hillary [Clinton], my main difference with her is on the vision of what kind of society will make people's lives better. So this is a vision of society in which people are too evil or stupid to run their own lives, but those in power are perfectly capable of running everybody else's lives because they're so much smarter.