The most significant barrier to female leadership is the actual lack of females in leadership. The best advice I can give to women is to go out and start something, ideally their own businesses. If you can't see a path for leadership within your own company, go blaze a trail of your own.

It is absolutely critical for competitiveness in the United States for us to really raise the bar in education, especially in math, in science, in technology.

What happened in the past can help you know what's going to happen in the future. That insight brings a next level of intelligence not just to sales and marketing but to ERP, where you can save more money in procurement or figure out whether the people you recruit are going to be successful in your organization.

In the finance world, we used to spend all of our time looking backwards, reporting on what happened. Can I book it? What are the numbers? Now it's about looking into the future. It's about planning and integration. The role of finance is now that of a partner in the business.

Learning networking basics is only a gateway to career growth and exploration.

My career, I look at it in a Darwinian framework. I'm going to do exactly what I want, and I'm going to survive, or I'm not. I'm not going to pander. I'm not going to change things. I'm not going to do focus groups. I'll live and die by the sword. I don't care. Because I couldn't live with myself.

For the record, in my long career, I've never knowingly exposed classified information in an inappropriate manner.

My job is to work at song writing and singing and telling the truth in song writing. My job is to be courageous enough to go on stage and tell the truth, the same truth that's gone into my song writing.