Enterprise

Quotes

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In the digital age you need to make knowledge workers out of every employee possible.

Business@the Speed of Thought (cowritten with Collins Hemingway; 1999)
Microsoft is always just two years from failure.

Quoted in Goldfinger (Robert Heller; 1998)
Microsoft is not about greed. It's about innovation and fairness.
At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas but the image is that they all come from the top - I'm afraid that's not quite right.
One of the lessons from the Darwinian world is that the excellence of an organism's nervous system helps determine its ability to sense change and quickly respond, thereby surviving or even thriving.

'Leaders Must Be Candid, Consistent,' New York Times (May 21, 1997)
In a budget, how important is art versus music versus athletics versus computer programming? At the end of the day, some of those trade-offs will be made politically.
We all need people who will give us feedback. That's how we improve.
Just having a great Web site is only one step in a company thinking of itself as an Internet company. You also have to change all the processes inside your company to be digital. The people at the desk...the knowledge workers, need to work in a different way.

Speech, Enterprise Solutions Conference, Miami, Florida (March 21, 2000)
I set a rule that people weren't allowed to send good news unless they sent around an equal amount of bad news. We had to get a balanced picture. In fact, I kind of favored just hearing about the accounts we were losing because... bad news is generally more actionable than good news.

Speech, Microsoft's Second Annual CEO Summit. Seattle, Washington (May 28, 1998)
A handful of men have become very rich by paying attention to details that most others ignored.
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On Anger: "For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind."
Essays
On Destiny: "Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today."
Human, All Too Human
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Essays