We’ll have a good quarterly conference call or something, and Wall Street will like our quarterly results. People will stop me and say, “Congratulations on your quarter,” and I say, “Thank you.” But what I’m really thinking is, “That quarter was baked three years ago.” Right now I’m working on a quarter that’s going to reveal itself sometime in

Surrounding yourself with great people. Learning to delegate early on—not trying to do everything yourself. Making sure you’ve got the kind of people who are praising the team around them, not criticizing them. And having people who are willing to really innovate, be bold, and create something that everybody who works for the company can be really

Being a really good listener is one of the most key things. When I sit around listening to the Elders talk in meetings, I realize they’ve become Elders because they spent their lifetimes listening and absorbing and then only speaking by choosing their words carefully. Another key thing is loving people—a genuine love of everybody, and looking for

John F. Kennedy, who showed leadership in the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 that kept the U.S. and the Soviet Union from a nuclear war—one that could have killed more than 100 million people (including me). My ninth-grade teacher was so convinced that a nuclear confrontation was likely that she assigned no homework for a few days. She said we would

If I look at our success over the last thirty years, it really comes down to having learned to trust people, to trust their judgment, and to delegate to skilled people.

“I don’t think it’s important for me to be remembered specifically. I do hope that infectious disease is largely eliminated as a problem, so that nobody’s having to talk about it and people can focus on other issues. That would be a huge, great thing.”

All of our senior executives operate the same way I do. They work in the future, they live in the future. None of the people who report to me should really be focused on the current quarter.

What they were doing was so interesting, and the quality of the people they had recruited was so compelling, I just had to be there.

The comment was that the free food really changed everything. Many of these things were marketed as great fun, but there was a serious business behind them. In the case of the food, this was Sergey’s idea. Families eat dinner together, and he wanted the company to be a family. If you made sure people had proper, good food—breakfast, lunch, and