Juggling work and family has been as much a challenge to me as to anyone else, especially since I wanted both to be great, so I combined them whenever I could.

Make sure that people understand the difference between fairness and generosity.

We could do this because the systemization of our decision-making process allowed us to stress-test the performance of our decision making under a wide variety of conditions.

Every key person should have at least one person who can replace him or her.

During those terrible days after 9/11, when the whole country was being whipsawed by emotion, or the weeks between September 19 and October 10, 2008, when the Dow fell 3,600 points, there were times I felt like hugging our computers. They kept their cool no matter what.

People who achieve success and drive progress deeply understand the cause-effect relationships that govern reality and have principles for using them to get what they want. The converse is also true: Idealists who are not well grounded in reality create problems, not progress.

If I was the one telling them what to do, I wouldn’t be getting any leverage from them. Besides, I didn’t want to work with people who needed that.