You have a happier buyer. From a sales and marketing standpoint, it's been a real winner.

Sales may lead to advertising as much as advertising leads to sales.

Last year was our best year since the 1990's in the overseas market and with aggressive marketing and sales efforts we can seize even more of these growing markets.

The greatest marketing tool there is is victories. I think [the team's merchandise sales] are going to finish strong.

The tone of the conference call was quite cautious. Coupled with a revised outlook on sales and marketing expenditures, it suggests that a re-acceleration of revenue growth will only come at the cost of earnings.

What he wasn't so good at was manipulating the internal states of other humans, getting them to see things his way, do things for him. His baseline attitude toward other humans wass that they could all just go fuck themselves and that he was not going to expend any effort whatsoever getting them to change the way they thought. This was probably rooted in a belief that hed been inculcated to him from the get-go: that there was an objective reality, which all people worth talking to could observe and understand, and that there was no point in arguing about anything that could be so observed and so understood.