Bits of advice from Steven Ballmer, the chief executive of Microsoft:

On work ethic:

Something that my dad always told me growing up, which is a simple piece of advice that really shaped my approach to life and to business.

My dad worked for Ford for 30 years. When I was a kid, he’d say: “If you’re going to do a job, do a job. If you’re not going to do a job, don’t do a job.” What he meant was, if you really want to accomplish anything, you have to be committed, motivated, tenacious and smart about what you do. That’s really just the essence of the American work ethic, but it’s one of the most important things I ever learned.

Lessons on leadership from growing from 30 employees to 90,000:

I’ve come to believe that to be a great leader, you have to combine thought leadership, business leadership and great people management. I think most people tend to focus more on one of those three. I used to think it was all about thought leadership. Some people think it’s all about your ability to manage people. But the truth is, great leaders have to have a mix of those things.

The most challenging part of his job:

Finding the right balance between optimism and realism. I’m an optimist by nature, and I start from the belief that you can always succeed if you have the right amount of focus combined with the right amount of hard work. So I can get frustrated when progress runs up against issues that should have been anticipated or that simply couldn’t have been foreseen. A realist knows that a certain amount of that is inevitable, but the optimist in me always struggles when progress doesn’t match my expectations.

Read the entire New York Times interview here.

“Linear analysis will get you a much-changed caterpillar but it won’t get you a butterfly. For that you need a leap of imagination.”

— Robert Hutchings, Chairman of the National Intelligence Council in the cover letter for Mapping the Global Future (National Intelligence Council 2004)

On the web, the raw material is data. It is often shaped (produced) by volunteers, and it costs almost nothing to replicate and distribute the resulting product. This is profoundly different than the current industrial economy. Our investment strategy is to arbitrage the difference between the capabilities of the new medium and readiness of the existing economic and social structures to exploit those capabilities. — Brad Burnham, Union Square Ventures

Bingo.

At Zappos, we have 10 core values that act as a formalized definition of our company culture. Our core values weren’t formed by a few people from senior management that sat around in a room at a company offsite. Instead, we invited every employee at Zappos to participate in the process, and here’s the final list we collectively came up with:

1) Deliver WOW Through Service
2) Embrace and Drive Change
3) Create Fun and A Little Weirdness
4) Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded
5) Pursue Growth and Learning
6) Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication
7) Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit
8) Do More With Less
9) Be Passionate and Determined
10) Be Humble

Source

Personal values ~ company values? Yep.