Born of the impossibly varied options we have to amuse ourselves, cutting-edge companies are finding innovative ways to tailor our entertainment choices to who we are, relieving us of the burden of finding the diamond in the rough of 500 TV channels or thousands of movies and music albums released every year.
When you feel as though you can't do something, the simple antidote is action: Begin doing it. Start the process, even if it's just a simple step, and don't stop at the beginning.
Men have the choice to arrange their schedules so they can pick up the kids from school twice a week. And they have the choice not to, and then to feel guilty about this choice.
In a war, no matter the outcome of a certain skirmish or battle, the winner is the party whose attitudes, behaviors and preoccupations come to dominate the postwar landscape. By this measure, the outcome of the gender wars, if wars they were, is clear: women won.
I think a good business book has one coherent idea that is richly played out.
You won't find a CEO who doesn't talk about a 'powerful culture' as a source of competitive advantage. At the same time, you'd be hard-pressed to find a CEO who has much of a clue about the strength of that culture.
The corporate world is appallingly bad at capitalizing on the strengths of its people.
CEOs hate variance. It's the enemy. Variance in customer service is bad. Variance in quality is bad. CEOs love processes that are standardized, routinized, predictable. Stamping out variance makes a complex job a bit less complex.
Innovation and best practices can be sown throughout an organization - but only when they fall on fertile ground.
Always work hard. Intensity clarifies. It creates not only momentum, but also the pressure you need to feel either friction, or fulfillment.
Gen Y is really quite distinct from Gen X; it's really self-involved and very narcissistic - their cameras are filled with pictures of themselves; Facebook, it's about me. It's a generation that's been pampered by their parents and their schools, given prizes for just taking part.
A note of caution: We can never achieve goals that envy sets for us. Looking at your friends and wishing you had what they had is a waste of precious energy. Because we are all unique, what makes another happy may do the opposite for you. That's why advice is nice but often disappointing when heeded.
I do still get extremely nervous before speeches. My biggest fear is that I'll be standing there in front of hundreds of people and be incapable of talking. I'm afraid that I'll make a complete fool of myself and be unable to go on.
American culture is CEO obsessed. We celebrate the hard-charging heroes and mythologize the iconoclastic visionaries. Those people are important.
The true genius of a great manager is his or her ability to individualize. A great manager is one who understands how to trip each person's trigger.
It's a special person - and personality - who can lead a start-up to soaring success and sustain that success for the long term. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg are star examples.
Emphasize your strengths on your resume, in your cover letters and in your interviews. It may sound obvious, but you'd be surprised how many people simply list everything they've ever done. Convey your passion and link your strengths to measurable results. Employers and interviewers love concrete data.
People buy pads all the time, because they want to write stuff down. We're never going to get away from paper, ever. People like writing; that's why more people are writing more real thank-you notes now - not just to stand out, but because there's something about pen to paper, about holding something cool in your hands.
Google and Facebook, each in their own way, have revolutionized the delivery of advertising based on search and social networking, creating a sort of anti-Spam: targeted, relevant ads that a consumer might actually welcome rather than spurn.
The best way to find out whether you're on the right path? Stop looking at the path.
