He did not have to have all the answers. Hell, he didn’t have to have any of them. All he could do was the best he could. Nothing else much mattered worth a damn.

Smeds did not give a rat’s ass who ran things as long as they left him alone. Most people felt that way.

It didn't require a Sherlock Holmes to size up the situation.

It doesn't make sense to hire good people and tell them what to do; we hire good people so they can tell us what to do.

you don’t have to be a boss to be a leader

Well, decisions I made were they needed to have a boss for the business. If I didn't have a leader, I shut it. And I had a division of 86 people where four people survived. And you can't really build a business back with four people. Basically, we went from being a great company that was making a million dollars a day to a company that was losing a million dollars a day. But they all have mortgages to pay, and they need to put food on their table. So one of the things I did is I would call the leaders of other companies and say, here, this guy's John. He sells this many products. He's incredibly successful. You would've never been able to hire him. He was never going to come work for you.

He was a tool of the boss, without brains or backbone.

Learn how much confidence to have in your people — don’t assume it. No manager should delegate responsibilities to people they don’t know well.

There was no need to worry about religion or philosophy; the truth was determined by whoever was in power.

Your job isn’t to know the how, it’s to know the what and to be open to discovering, and receiving, the how.

"In most cases being a good boss means hiring talented people and then getting out of their way. [...] Contrary to what I believed as a little girl, being the boss almost never involves marching around, waving your arms, and chanting, "I am the boss! I am the boss!

A lot of companies think their employees are so smart that they require no training. That’s silly. When I first became a manager, I had mixed feelings about training. Logically, training for high-tech companies made sense, but my personal experience with training programs at the companies where I had worked was underwhelming. The courses were taught by outside firms who didn’t really understand our business and were teaching things that weren’t relevant. Then I read chapter 16 of Andy Grove’s management classic, High Output Management, titled “Why Training Is the Boss’s Job,” and it changed my career. Grove wrote, “Most managers seem to feel that training employees is a job that should be left to others. I, on the other hand, strongly believe that the manager should do it himself.

Ideally, our rules should be formed in such a fashion that an ordinary helpful kind thoughtful person doesn't really even need to know the rules.
You just get to work, do something fun, and nobody hassles you as long as you are being thoughtful and kind.

In most cases being a good boss means hiring talented people and then getting out of their way. In other cases, to get the best work out of people you may have to pretend you are not their boss and let them treat someone else like the boss, and then that person whispers to you behind a fake wall and you tell them what to tell the first person. Contrary to what I believed as a little girl, being the boss almost never involves marching around, waving your arms, and chanting, “I am the boss! I am the boss!