I was frustrated for a long time with my colleagues in the business school world and with so many management authors who didn't really see themselves as innovators. They were glorified journalists.

Large organizations don't worship shareholders or customers, they worship the past. If it were otherwise, it wouldn't take a crisis to set a company on a new path.

All too often, legacy management practices reflexively perpetuate the past - by over-weighting the views of long-tenured executives, by valuing conformance more highly than creativity and by turning tired industry nostrums into sacred truths.

Today, no leader can afford to be indifferent to the challenge of engaging employees in the work of creating the future. Engagement may have been optional in the past, but it's pretty much the whole game today.

When I play a gig and look out at the audience, you're literally looking at a sea of Joy Division T-shirts.

Short stories are wonderful and extremely challenging, and the joy of them, because it only takes me three or four months to write, I can take more risks with them. It's just less of your life invested.

The thing that means most to me is the joy that my mom and my dad got because of my career... They raised seven children on domestic wages, in a city like San Francisco, and did nothing but work, work, work.

I used to let other people's struggles affect my happiness. If they weren't happy, there was no way I was going to be happy. The opposite was also true: If I wasn't happy, I didn't want anyone around me to be happy.