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Smart companies fail because they do everything right. They cater to high-profit-margin customers and ignore the low end of the market, where disruptive innovations emerge from.

Most managers are just trying to survive. That's why a lot of smarter guys have been let go from Fortune 500 companies: because they came up with new ideas that no one would allow them to try.

The dumb-manager theory of business problems just didn't hold water for me. There had to be a deeper reason why smart people would make decisions that lead to failure.

In order to build a great technology company, you have to hire lots of incredibly smart people. It's a total waste to have lots of big brains but not let them work on your biggest problems.

Most businesses fail because they want the right things but measure the wrong things, and they get the wrong results.

Success in almost any field depends more on energy and drive than it does on intelligence. This explains why we have so many stupid leaders.

What basically happens is that when a company becomes great, and I'm being a bit rude here, people think they're some kind of genius. So now we can move into all sorts of other businesses because the net bottom line is, it's because we're just geniuses. They become overconfident and expand too far.

The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You're encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren't that smart, who aren't that creative.

I don't get it. If you're saying, Tommy Lee, you don't fit the image of the East Coast, social elitist wealthy people who comprise Harvard, the only thing I can say is you have no idea what comprises Harvard.

I'm always surprised when the corporate world does stupid things, because they're often not very stupid in hindsight.