My Golden Rules

Chris Albrecht

CEO, Home Box Office

Surround yourself with people smarter than you and be comfortable with that. I went to a high school for gifted students and went from being one of the smartest kids in the class to being near the bottom of the pack. I got very comfortable with being in that situation and realizing how much I could learn from people who are as smart as or smarter than I am. Now that I'm running HBO, it's so important that the answers about how HBO continues its success come from the people sitting in the room with me. My job is to help guide them to the right answer.

I'm thinking of the first season of The Sopranos. In episode five, Tony Soprano goes to look at colleges with his daughter and finds the guy who was a mafia rat in years past, and Tony decides to kill him. I looked at the script and thought, "This is horrible. We're going to totally blow this show. The audience isn't ready for this. We haven't earned it." I called David [Chase, the show's creator and director] and really went full-bore at him as to why this was a bad idea. David said to me, "Listen, if the guy that Tony is doesn't kill that guy in that situation, then Tony's full of sh** and the whole show is full of sh**." I told him to go ahead with the script. It turned out to be the tipping point for the show. The juxtaposition of this guy going to look at schools with his daughter and then murdering someone blew people away. I was wrong, but I trusted someone who knew better.

Brad Anderson

Vice-chairman and CEO, Best Buy

When a company starts its life, those who create it are very aware that it's a people-powered effort. They're a group of people with a good idea, trying to make something out of nothing. But as companies grow, something strange happens. They start to think of themselves in terms of what they are, rather than who they are. The irony is that just about every company that goes from "who" to "what" spends an extraordinary amount of energy fighting to regain that sense of "who." Trying, with apologies to Lennon and McCartney, to get back to where it once belonged.

Every organization gets its energy from the relationship between the customer and the person who serves that customer. If a company makes the leap-honestly listening to customers-employees will bring the best of themselves and pour their energy into their work. At Best Buy, we don't always get this right, but when we do, it's a beautiful thing. I can recite dozens of stories about employees who transformed our business because they saw a need and had the freedom to use their own talents to fill it.

Any organization is a human endeavor, but most big organizations work hard to dehumanize, to depersonalize. Why? They're scared, because we humans are unpredictable and messy. I say, Turn around and embrace it. Celebrate it. One of our employees said it best: Try to be "a company with a soul."

Steve Ballmer

CEO, Microsoft

Not long after I joined Microsoft in 1980, Bill Gates put me in charge of recruiting. The business was growing fast, but we were badly understaffed. I asked Bill to approve the hiring of about 50 people. He said no. I told him I thought we needed more great people in order to grow; he thought I was going to bankrupt the company. Bill was pretty conservative. He's since said that he always wanted to have enough money in the bank to pay a year's worth of payroll, even if we didn't have any revenue coming in.

We didn't hire as fast as I wanted, but we did hire, and I did all the hiring myself for a long time. No one joined Microsoft without my interviewing them and liking them. I made every offer, decided how much to pay them, and closed the deals. I can't do that anymore, but I still invest a significant amount of time in ensuring that we're recruiting the best people. You may have a technology or a product that gives you an edge, but your people determine whether you develop the next winning technology or product.

Carol Bartz

CEO, Autodesk

Often I'm put in the position of persuading people to do something I want them to do, but they don't want to. So first I have to hear the "can'ts" -- the limitations they carry in their minds. I always listen closely to the reasons why people feel they can't do something. I'll even bring them to the point where they say to me, "Now you're getting it, boss! That's why we can't do it."

When I hear that, I've laid my trap. I start by asking the person who is resisting me to tell me how much he or she can do toward the goal I'm expressing. That's because I have this core belief that you can do anything if you try. That's why we release new versions of our core AutoCad program annually -- because when people say it can't be done, I say we can, we just don't know how. So we learn.

There are times, of course, when people convince me that something can't be done. I'm really just trying to get a balanced view, to get people to be honest about both sides. My rule helps me to do that. It's a gimmick, sure, but it's a way to help people avoid getting stuck in the negative.

Marc Benioff

CEO, Salesforce.com

Why have a few hundred salespeople when you can have a few hundred thousand -- especially when those few hundred thousand aren't on the payroll? This idea, which proved to be one of the most important eureka moments for Salesforce.com, came to me while I was at Ozumo, a popular sushi bar in San Francisco, where I often go after work. I was dining with an important prospective client, and I was working hard to sell him on Salesforce.com and our future strategy when -- without any prompting -- an existing customer approached me and told me how successful his company had been with Salesforce.com. At that moment I realized that no amount of marketing or promotional gimmicks like T-shirts, buttons, and chocolate cigars would ever match that endorsement.

Word of mouth can make or break a product offering. While many companies have lost their market positions because of the well-known product failures they've experienced, just the opposite can also be true. It's important to note that the first step in building this groundswell depends on having a great product that customers love. By offering customers an opportunity to talk about their success, companies can create what author Malcolm Gladwell calls the "tipping point" -- a convergence that can propel a small company into a household brand. At Salesforce.com, this has meant developing our 308,000 subscribers into the biggest sales force in the business. Sure, our customers may be getting a free hamburger on us, but with their endorsements to prospects, we're getting the ketchup and mustard on top.

Alex Bogusky

Executive creative director, Crispin Porter & Bogusky

I was 24, working at a small ad agency in Miami and trying to become a junior art director, when I read Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, by Al Ries and Jack Trout. One chapter talked about how people position you or a product in their mind, and how you've got to disrupt to get people to take you out of that position. I wondered, what kinds of things did I have to do to disrupt people and make them think differently about me? There is a lot of change in people and in their careers, and people are reluctant to see it. It's the way we think, the way we categorize things.

So I just embraced this notion that every six months I would radically change my look. I mostly did it with my hair, from a crew cut to a Mohawk to long hair to a mullet. I changed the color. It didn't matter what I did -- I just had to change it. I wanted people to have to take the trouble to reanalyze what I was offering.

I'm 42 now, and I've stopped. What does that mean? It means it isn't about me any longer. Now it's about the agency. Sometimes we change the titles of departments and people. We changed the planning department to the "cognitive anthropology" department, and the account service department to "content management." We have to change just as often, so that we're not being evaluated by the same standards as last year.

Richard Branson

Founder and chairman, Virgin Group

To be a good leader, you've got to concentrate on bringing out the best in your people. People are no different than flowers -- they need to be cared for and watered all the time. This is true whether it's a switchboard operator or the chairman who just gave a bad speech. I should know; I gave a bad speech last night. The point is, people know when they've f***** up, and they don't need bosses ramming it down their throats.

When I was 7 or 8, I took some change from my dad's drawer and went 'round to the sweet shop. The shopkeeper called my dad and said, "We've got your son here; could you come down?" Here I am, with 50 pence, and the shopkeeper says, "I assume your son has taken this, that you didn't give it to him?" My dad says, "How dare you accuse him of stealing!" My dad knew I'd taken it, and I gave it back -- but I never stole again.

Years later, when Virgin was about 20 people, the manager of a secondhand music shop tells me that one of our staffers is selling albums that were new from Virgin. It was petty theft. Rather than sacking him, I brought him in and we had a chat. Today he is the head of marketing of one of our companies and one of the best people Virgin has.

Po Bronson

Author, "The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest" and "What Should I Do With My Life?"

I would never want to be the kind of luminary who admits that my wife is smarter than me, but alas, I am, and she is. My wife owes me no deference at all, and so she never hesitates to tell me I'm being ridiculous. I tend to check with her at these three stages:

1. At the very beginning of an idea, when it's still so vague that if she does not like it, I can pretend I simply hadn't thought it through enough to present it well.

2. Right before completing a project, when I'm up against the deadline and I can pretend it's too late to change it even if she doesn't like it.

3. Before going on television, in case she thinks I should wear a different shirt

Warren Buffett

Chairman and CEO, Berkshire Hathaway

When you get out of bed in the morning and think about what you want to do that day, ask yourself whether you'd like others to read about it on the front page of tomorrow's newspaper. You'll probably do things a little differently if you keep that in mind.

John Chambers

CEO, Cisco Systems

My golden rule is to focus almost fanatically on customer success. Living by this rule helped steer Cisco through the tremendous growth of the 1990s. It's allowed us to fine-tune our acquisition strategy and anticipate many challenges and market transitions to stay ahead of our competition.

Jim Collins

Management consultant; author, "Built to Last" and "Good to Great"

I learned this golden rule from the great civic leader John Gardner, who changed my life in 30 seconds. Gardner, founder of Common Cause, secretary of health, education, and welfare in the Johnson administration, and author of such classic books as "Self-Renewal," spent the last few years of his life as a professor and mentor-at-large at Stanford University. One day early in my faculty teaching career -- I think it was 1988 or 1989 -- Gardner sat me down. "It occurs to me, Jim, that you spend too much time trying to be interesting," he said. "Why don't you invest more time being interested?"

If you want to have an interesting dinner conversation, be interested. If you want to have interesting things to write, be interested. If you want to meet interesting people, be interested in the people you meet -- their lives, their history, their story. Where are they from? How did they get here? What have they learned? By practicing the art of being interested, the majority of people can become fascinating teachers; nearly everyone has an interesting story to tell.

I can't say that I live this rule perfectly. When tired, I find that I spend more time trying to be interesting than exercising the discipline of asking genuine questions. But whenever I remember Gardner's golden rule -- whenever I come at any situation with an interested and curious mind -- life becomes much more interesting for everyone at the table.

Simon Cooper

President and COO, Ritz-Carlton

I use this phrase whenever someone convinces me that they can achieve something I consider to be unachievable. In the past I've been known to add focus to a goal by making a bet to see if they can make it -- sometimes with amusing consequences. I remember being at a mountain resort in Canada and proposing an incredible goal for the season. The team convinced me that they could achieve it, and I offered to jump into the lake if they did. It's a long story, but they made it. There's a great scene of a hole being cut in the ice and an ambulance on standby while I gave a whole new meaning to the term "dunking." The cognac was very welcome.

One of the assets I look for in a team or a leader is a bias for action and a willingness to say "We can do it," coupled with a solid strategy. The way I interpret it, execution and commitment are absolutely essential to any strategy or initiative in an era too full of plans, processes, and procrastination. The expression speaks to the need for individuals and teams to commit to goals and actions and be willing to be held accountable for them. There is a flip side that goes something like "No one is more apathetic than in the pursuit of another person's objective."

Stephen Covey

Business consultant; motivational speaker; author, "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People"

I have huge stacks of books that contain a lot of the wisdom literature from all sources, including the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita, the text in Hinduism and Buddhism. It helps me learn to listen to people and to empathize within their frame of reference. In other words, to free myself from my own agenda, and get into their agenda.

Be extremely open and get your security from a divine source rather than human approval. It frees you. It gives you great courage; it also gives you more wisdom.

Mark Cuban

Co-founder, HDNet; owner, Dallas Mavericks

Treat your customers like they own you, because they do.

Jim Goodnight

CEO, SAS

At any company, it's easy to get into a rut of spending your day reading e-mail and going to meetings. That's not a productive way of doing business.

I talk to people in the elevator and ask them what they're doing. I was talking to one of our heads of R&D and learned about a programming challenge they were facing with customer records. I said I'd write a procedure that does all the things we need to do and gave his team 20 lines of code.

My code ended up processing 100 million records. I wanted to challenge the programmers by showing them that, hey, if I can do this stuff, you can do this stuff. And I wanted to be able to converse with them at the basic, lowest level of programming on how this stuff works. I was so thrilled with what I'd done -- so proud, I guess -- that I gave seminars to all of our programmers on how to do it.

Michael Graves

Architect and designer

My parents told me that no matter how good you are in your work, you must make a contribution to society. Without that, you will only be selfish. My career has been an interesting mix of architecture, design, and education. I teach, which is a way to "give back" to the profession. I taught at Princeton University for 39 years and am gratified that many of my students have become teachers themselves.

But there's another way of giving back. Architecture and design are professions that inherently address the public good. Since I became partially paralyzed nearly three years ago, and spent considerable time in hospitals and rehabilitation centers, I have come to realize that some of those buildings are not functional at a basic human level and that durable medical equipment has rarely been regarded as anything but a necessary evil. My colleagues and I can make a difference if we turn our attention to improving the functionality and appearance of the aids to living that many people need, even those with slight disabilities. We're working on a collection of them now, a contribution that I never expected but hope will make many people's lives more enjoyable.

Andy Grove

Former chairman and CEO, Intel

By now most people in Silicon Valley know this is my mantra, but I'm not sure they know what it means. It isn't as crazy as it sounds; it's really a corollary to Murphy's Law, which states that everything that can go wrong will go wrong. If that's so, then the paranoid have an advantage. I was always amused at how the phrase caught on -- and who wanted to be considered even more paranoid than I am. Once, when I was receiving an honor at Harvard University, Bill Gates was saying some nice things about me on a video and said he had only one quibble: that he was the most paranoid.

I think the rule is more relevant than ever today. The U.S. economy is getting hollowed out, industry by industry. Health care is about to become one-sixth of the U.S. economy, and yet for the most part it's an industry that has never taken advantage of digital technology. Our country's infrastructure is fragile, even precarious. Just look at New Orleans. So I would say, Duh. We'd better be paranoid. I know I am. But not about Intel. One of the benefits of no longer being the company's chief "paranoid" officer is that someone else gets to do that now.

Mireille Guiliano

CEO and president, Clicquot; author, "French Women Don't Get Fat"

We have to take "beach time" -- a space for ourselves -- every day because we live in a world of burnout. Even if you take 20 to 30 minutes for yourself, you'll be a better worker, a better colleague, a better person. It benefits the people around you as much as it benefits you.

Don't feel guilty to do your own thing during that time. And I don't necessarily mean going to the gym. I never go to the gym. I have a view of one across the street from where I live in New York. It's 7:30 at night, when you should be thinking about dinner and relaxing, and the gym is full of people.

I take my beach time each morning. I have a glass of water, and I walk along Bank Street to the Hudson River. A walk is the cheapest and best exercise, and it's the best 20 minutes of my day. It's an element of what I call "French Zen."

Carlos M. Gutierrez

U.S. secretary of commerce; former chairman and CEO, Kellogg

My experience and observation have shown that if people see you looking out only for your own best interests, they won't follow you. You have to believe in doing good for those you serve, knowing that it will allow them to do extraordinary things. Another important lesson I learned from my father, who was the first great leader I observed. He taught me that you have to keep your perspective and have a sense of humility. As he used to say, "Tell me what you brag about, and I'll tell you what you lack."

Gary Hamel

Business consultant and author

Near the end of my Ph.D. program at the University of Michigan, a veteran professor took me aside and proffered these words of advice: "Gary, the surest way to get tenure is to build on someone else's well-established theory, churn out as many articles as you can for leading journals, and avoid the temptation to do consulting, as this will only divert you from your research." As I absorbed this bit of sagacity, I had to work to keep from frowning. "Hmmm," I thought, "that might be the way to get promoted, but it sounds like a recipe for creative suicide."

So in an act of rebellion, I signed up for a consulting project at General Electric while still a doctoral student (jeez, did I learn a lot), hooked up with a similarly contrarian-minded professor, C.K. Prahalad, and started working on the first of what would become 15 articles for the Harvard Business Review and two books. And as I looked around for role models and mentors, it quickly became obvious that the people who had really made a difference in the world of management -- from Frederick Winslow Taylor to Mary Parker Follett, W. Edwards Deming to Taiichi Ohno -- were all rebels. Constructive rebels, but rebels nonetheless.

As the pace of change accelerates, the value of precedent will continue to wane. Today the most important thing is to regard everything you believe as nothing more than a set of hypotheses, forever open to being disproved. A healthy disrespect for precedent is the ultimate advantage in a world where the future is less and less an extrapolation of the past. By the way, being a contrarian is usually not as risky as the custodians of convention typically make out. Somewhere along the way, I got tenure.

Phil Hellmuth

Poker world champion

What we do as poker players is read people. People lie to us; they try to bluff us constantly. So we get used to trying to sort out all the bullsh**. When I get pitched by people who are really good, like con men, they are not as good as the poker players.

You can't cheat an honest man. I don't know exactly why that is, but it's true for me. My honor is unquestioned in poker, and if you have perfect honor in poker, it's better than having it anywhere else in life because everyone remembers everything from 15 or 20 years ago. If you cheated then, they'll remember.

Carl Icahn

Billionaire investor

Don't confuse luck with skill when judging others, and especially when judging yourself.

Paul Jacobs

CEO, Qualcomm

The downside of this rule is that no one will believe you, so you'll need to work much harder to sell your idea. The upside is that everyone else will be running in the wrong direction, so you'll have a more open field in which to innovate. Find the incorrect underlying assumptions and you'll create opportunities.

Penn Jillette

Magician, author, and producer

This was the hardest thing to learn when I was 19. When we first started doing Penn & Teller shows, I thought that if you had a contract, it was enforced. I thought there were the contract police -- so you'd sign a contract that says you're going to give me a million dollars, and if you don't have a million dollars, someone will step in and give me my million anyway. Right.

That's one of the hardest lessons for a guy like me who has no interest in business but now runs a multimillion-dollar enterprise. A contract is not much of a legal document. It's just an agreement that two people who trust each other have made. You can't enter into a contract with anyone that you wouldn't make a handshake deal with, because everything comes down to a handshake deal.

The more experience I got in showbiz, the less I read the contracts. Now I don't bother. If I can't make the deal in a phone call, and have them understand it, then it's not a worthwhile deal. You're making a deal with the people, not with the contract. That's a mistake that people make a lot: "We've got it in writing now." The contract is clarification, but it's not enforcement.

Ray Kurzweil

Inventor and entrepreneur

I had the idea that I would be an inventor when I was 5 years old. Now, 52 years later, I still fashion myself an inventor. After some youthful experiments, I realized that the key to a successful invention is timing. Many inventors succeed in getting their contraptions to work, yet most inventions still fail in the marketplace because the enabling factors needed for success are not in place when they're needed.

With this in mind, I became an ardent student of technology trends over 30 years ago. Now I have a team of researchers who assist me in gathering key measures of information technology in a variety of fields. In addition to timing my inventions, the technology trend models derived from this data enable me to create long-term forecasts of what will be feasible with the information tools of 10 or 20 or 30 years from now and beyond. I say this not just looking backward now but with a track record of accurate predictions in a series of books going back about two decades.

Geraldine Laybourne

Chairman and CEO, Oxygen Media

When I was at Nickelodeon, we had 10 commandments whenever we started a new business. To me, the most important one was "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, thy neighbor's donkey, or thy competitor's success."

This is especially true in television, where so many people just keep their eye on what the other networks are doing. They'll try to find the next Desperate Housewives, but the look-alikes never amount to a whole lot. I've done that a couple of times and fallen flat on my face. So I try not to get distracted by what worked for others.

I always have an eye on the competition, but it's not to do what they're doing. It's to see where the holes are. I've built businesses by looking at conventional wisdom and going exactly the opposite way.

Shelly Lazarus

Chairman and CEO, Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide

I am constantly asked by women how to balance careers with family. I know from experience that there is no silver-bullet answer; if there were, we would be seeing more women in the corner office. The truth is that balance is achieved through a host of individual dance steps, from being willing to suffer a little domestic chaos to insisting that performance be measured by results, not just time spent in the office. Unless you love your work, you won't find the balance. How can you, if you resent the time away from family spent at a tedious job? I fell into a job and a company I loved. I never wanted to leave and never worried that my family suffered for it. Finding fulfilling work should be an early and deeply pursued part of everyone's career path. This may sound soft and mushy, but happy people are better for business. They are more creative and productive, they build environments where success is more likely, and you have a much better chance of keeping your best players.

Steven D. Levitt

Coauthor, "Freakonomics"

So much of what we hear and what we're taught turns out to be false on closer scrutiny. Whether it is expert advice, what you read in the paper, or what your mother told you, if it is important, take the time to figure out for yourself whether it is really true.