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We will continue to focus relentlessly on our customers. * We will continue to make investment decisions in light of long-term market leadership considerations rather than short-term profitability considerations or short-term Wall Street reactions. * We will continue to measure our programs and the effectiveness of our investments analytically, to jettison those that do not provide acceptable returns, and to step up our investment in those that work best. We will continue to learn from both our successes and our failures.* We will make bold rather than timid investment decisions where we see a sufficient probability of gaining market leadership advantages. Some of these investments will pay off, others will not, and we will have learned another valuable lesson in either case. * When forced to choose between optimizing the appearance of our GAAP accounting and maximizing the present value of future cash flows, we'll take the cash flows. * We will share our strategic thought processes with you when we make bold choices (to the extent competitive pressures allow), so that you may evaluate for yourselves whether we are making rational long-term leadership investments. * We will work hard to spend wisely and maintain our lean culture. We understand the importance of continually reinforcing a cost-conscious culture, particularly in a business incurring net losses. * We will balance our focus on growth with emphasis on long-term profitability and capital management. At this stage, we choose to prioritize growth because we believe that scale is central to achieving the potential of our business model. * We will continue to focus on hiring and retaining versatile and talented employees, and continue to weight their compensation to stock options rather than cash. We know our success will be largely affected by our ability to attract and retain a motivated employee base, each of whom must think like, and therefore must actually be, an owner

An important book for taking stock of one's aspirations. Personal strategy development tools. "The Personal Enterprise Plan" aims to help individuals make the best use of their freedom inside institutions.. Freedom allows us to identify ourselves, to express our potential ad aspirations and to use the resources of the institution to realize ourselves or to change institutions if the resources cannot be provided."

Most of us know the answers to our problems most of the time deep down. We just don't always articulate them even to ourselves. Even if the solution appears to be out of our direct control, sitting down and thinking about how you are going to convey the problem, or the solution, to say for instance your boss has to be the first step. Blogging is a great trigger to doing this. If your blog is visible to others you will probably have to abstract the problem to avoid compromising others involved in the situation but this abstraction is partly what helps. It helps to depersonalise things and get to the root of what is really happening.