Corporate America is drowning in meetings. To make one thing clear, I am not against communication. Quick one-on-ones can be extremely effective. I am talking about those hour-long recurring meetings, devoid of a clear agenda, and attended by many. I dread them.

Anyone who has followed the U.S. economy in recent years can tell you while corporate America and their wealthy executives have recovered from the last recession, middle-class families have not. About 95 percent of income gains between 2009 and 2012 went to the top one percent.

I like to bring people together so we don't waste opportunities and resources and keep doing the wrong things when we know better. Corporate America makes great things and things that can hurt us. They have to be part of the solutions. There's nothing to say you don't make a profit by doing good.

Corporate America limits the world to consumerism. Science can limit it to the material world. Even religion limits it to a lot of theories that can explain everything. I think we need cinema to break that apart and remind us that we're not in control, and we don't understand as much as we think do.

With so many part-time people on - and not on - the job, corporate America has started to feel like it's on a permanent maternity leave. Colleagues are an amorphous, free-floating army of rotating waifs whose voicemails are clogged with plaintive requests from their own offices for missing information.

Silos and bureaucracy are well-oiled machines in corporate America, but they are ultimately perpetuated by individual behavior. If we start behaving differently, we can create change. In other words, shifting your focus onto the team - or the ship as a whole, not just yourself - will have meaningful impact.

I knew a gentleman who was 65 who had a consulting firm outside of Kansas City, Mo. I convinced him to sell me the business, which did auditing and reviewing of freight bill charges, for nothing down. It was a step out of working in this bureaucratic setting of corporate America and going out on my own in 1984.

I think there's a big difference between the impact of trade agreements on corporate America and the impact on Mr. and Mrs. America. Corporate America has adjusted to them by investing lots of capital offshore... What we're doing is we're exporting jobs and importing products instead of exporting products and keeping jobs.

When you see the misogyny of hip-hop, it's so horrible, it's so putrid, it's so, you know, odious, that we know, we smell, we see it. The misogyny that is reified, that is reinforced, that is subtly reproduced in corporate America or in church life or in synagogues and temples and the like, is sometimes more subtly dealt with.

Corporate America was hurling offers at her. Thinking even bigger, wanting even more, she had dreams of starting a Martha Stewart magazine and starring in her own regularly scheduled Martha Stewart television show. Martha saw herself as Betty Crocker, Julia Child, Miss Manners, Emily Post, and Rupert Murdoch all rolled into one juicy pie.

It is time for corporate America to become 'the third pillar' of social change in our society, complementing the first two pillars of government and philanthropy. We need the entire private sector to begin committing itself not just to making profits, but to fulfilling higher and larger purposes by contributing to building a better world.

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