Why do people perpetually create for themselves the condition for their own dissatisfaction? Listening to Clark talk about how much money he needed to make was like watching the racing dog who had the wit to grab hold of the remote device that controls the mechanical rabbit. Rather than slow it down, however, he speeds it up. Clark played these

One of the reasons the software business favored the young is that every so often the language changed. It was as if you announced to the population of France that everyone would be speaking Esperanto instead of French. Old people with their old language were shoved aside by new people who, with nothing invested in the old language, picked up the

“If you want to be a good engineer you have to be willing to be replaceable.

wealth came from the human imagination. Wealth wasn’t chiefly having more of old things; it was having entirely new things. “Growth is just another word for change,”

“There was a feeling that we were about to change the world. And we all now knew that was how you made money, by changing the world.”

The group of executives, led by Clark, entered the shed at the end of the yard. Before Clark arrived on the scene, there was no building in the Huisman Shipyard that could house a 197-foot mast. Clark had waved that objection to one side, and said he would pay for a new building.

A big company—even a big company as highly charged as SGI—needs to believe its own internal propaganda: that its products are the best, that its technology will win, and so on. It has trouble entertaining the thought that it is doomed.

Traditions are more easily preserved where the risks of changing things outweigh the rewards,

“there’s nothing that gets you interested in money like having some of