The Spirit of Risk Taking ...

Some of our motivation and inspiration these past few days during our meetings and business negotiations comes from the intense sporting ambience in California. Here, there is risk taking, real exertion, focused power, and the self-actualization that anoints success. We watch, study and appreciate talented men playing to win with all they've got. As entrepreneurs, you and I experience that every day. Any leader worthy of the title gets that sense of power and feels the feeling that goes with striving.

BOLDNESS ... THE WILL TO STAND APART FROM THE FOG AND THE FEAR ...

In this room tonight, we have a varied, talented and driven group of intellectually sharp, business savvy, mission-focused and highly experienced competitors--that is, entrepreneurs willing to take risk at precisely the time in our society when corporate risk taking is getting lost in a fog of fear and trembling. It is a kind of virus that is growing, spread by academia and caught by weak leaders.

Tonight, I would like to invoke a word that will express the approach that our work together and our joint collaborations will profit by over the years ahead. That word is: boldness.

Boldness has many meanings and uses, but, overall, it fits an approach that overcomes the awful timidity of the career, corporate bureaucrat, the redundant, paycheck player, and the resignation of executives settling for mediocre results, endured endlessly ... and deadeningly.

The new, socially acceptable sense of comfort with shrinking ambition and mediocre results is not for us, any of us.

In the real world of entrepreneurship, boldness is a virtue. I think you know what I mean by it: it is not hubris, arrogance, or braggadocio.

No.

Boldness is the self-reliant, self-driven assertion of personal power and courage, unapologetically.

Power and courage, asserted, again, unapologetically, marks the place where a story begins to become an epic and unfolds as a kind of conquest leading to success. Boldness, as we take it, is pressing down hard on the accelerator to fire our entrepreneurial engines.

It works ... and it is energizing and life enhancing.

Boldness, not rash self-assertion or boorish, amateurish salesmanship, but stand-up trust and confidence in an enterprises vision ... and the courage to act--that is the formula.

Let this continue to be the guiding mantra for Applied and for our partners, as we hold fast to our paradigm for growth beyond every prediction.

Our timing is right and our field of...