I've never looked at my career as something that I was striving to get to one position or another. For me, it was one step at a time.

Back when I was 15 or 16, in Dallas there was a department store called Sanger-Harris. One holiday season, I got a job as a gift wrapper there. The others were all experts who did that job every year, and I was by far the youngest person, who was totally inexperienced. In those days, department stores around Christmastime were a total frenzy.

While looking ahead, we know challenges remain, but we are encouraged by the strategies we have in place to improve our operational efficiencies and performance.

What's changed in New York, and what made us really change our thinking about New York, is that the different neighborhoods are becoming more important as shopping destinations than they used to be.

The Chinese public is deeply nationalist, which matters to China's unelected political leadership as much as U.S. nationalism does to American politicians. As China becomes the world's largest economy, there is meaningful public pressure for its power status to advance in parallel. Any alternative would be humiliating.

Unlike President Obama, I would say that I support the long-standing bipartisan post-war belief that American global strength and leadership secures our national-security interests, and it also promotes order and stability in the world. And it gives us immense influence in the world and deters our adversaries and reassures our allies.

Guerrilla leaders win wars by being paranoid and ruthless. Once they take power, they are expected to abandon those qualities and embrace opposite ones: tolerance, compromise and humility. Almost none manages to do so.

Authenticity is the alignment of head, mouth, heart, and feet - thinking, saying, feeling, and doing the same thing - consistently. This builds trust, and followers love leaders they can trust.