Learn to sell. In business you're always selling - to your prospects, investors and employees. To be the best salesperson put yourself in the shoes of the person to whom you're selling. Don't sell your product. Solve their problems.

The only way to get ahead is to find errors in conventional wisdom.

The best way to beat'em out is to say nothing and jump quick.

People have marveled at the fact that I didn't start McDonalds until I was fifty-two years old and then I became a success overnight. But I was just like a lot of show business personalities who work away quietly at their craft for years, and then, suddenly, they get the right break and make it big. I was an overnight success all right, but thirty years is a long, long night.

My father had a simple test that helps me measure my own leadership quotient: When you are out of the office, he once asked me, does your staff carry on remarkable well without you?

Companies have a habit of sending expendable bodies to run new ventures. Its nuts. For a new business to succeed, it has to have the best people in charge, not the most available.