HR should be every company's killer app. What could possibly be more important than who gets hired?

Give me a highly successful unionized industry.

People always overestimate how complex business is. This isn't rocket science. We've chosen one of the world's simplest professions.

Leading a big company means never allowing a company to take itself too seriously.

Excellence and competitiveness aren't incompatible with honesty and integrity.

Short cycle business are being impacted by credit, and are being impacted by gasoline prices, food, distribution businesses, chemical business.

If you pick the right people and give them the opportunity to spread their wings and put compensation as a carrier behind it you almost don't have to manage them.

We bring together the best ideas -- turning the meetings of our top managers into intellectual orgies.

If you have a reputation as a big, stiff bureaucracy, you're stuck.

Business success is less a function of grandiose predictions than it is a result of being able to respond rapidly to real changes as they occur.

If you reward candor, you'll get it.

No doubt emotional intelligence is more rare than book smarts, but my experience says it is actually more important in the making of a leader. You just can't ignore it.

Strategy means making clear-cut choices about how to compete.

The biggest opportunity for big companies has come by far in the digitization of internal processes.

The quality of an idea does not depend on its altitude in the organization...An idea can be from any source. So we will search the globe for ideas. We will share what we know with others to get what they know. We have a constant quest to raise the bar, and we get there by constantly talking to others.

The binders, the charts, the grids may seem formidable, but the meetings themselves are built around informality, trust, emotion and humor.

Focus on a few key objectives ... I only have three things to do. I have to choose the right people, allocate the right number of dollars, and transmit ideas from one division to another with the speed of light. So I'm really in the business of being the gatekeeper and the transmitter of ideas.

Strategy is not a lengthy action plan. It is the evolution of a central idea through continually changing circumstances.

Out-innovating them is the way to beat China. And to do everything that we do in this country to support innovative policy, that drives innovation and new products and more jobs and creates jobs. You can't -- you can't put a wall up around here. We tried that in the '30s. It didn't work.

A good leader remains focused. Controlling your destination is better than being controlled by it.