After 39 years of business, I'm still learning. I go through this every year -identifying new strategies that are extremely important.

Every time I come across learning items of interest, I'll send distribution voice mail to the appropriate group in the organization.

In 1974, we began franchising. We didn't have any big thought process except that, 'OK, franchising will help us get to our goal of 32 stores and help us run stores farther away from home.'

Higher unemployment generally bodes well for franchising. People are looking for a new opportunity, and people who have jobs are a little less confident they'll always have a job.

I used to do a lot of interviews in the early '80s, when my career started, but it came to a point when I decided I didn't want to talk anymore, and people kind of understood that and left me alone.

I loved being in the theater. It was a place of enormous excitement and happiness and safety and respect and dignity. It was a place where, if you did your job, you weren't a kid - you were a full person worthy of respect from all the adults in the company.

I've found that when you roll up your sleeves and join people in their daily work, they tend to open up quite a bit and let you know what they really think about the issues facing our country and what kind of job they think the government is doing.

My career is like an artichoke. People might think that the leaves are tasty and buttered up and delicious, and they don't even know that there's something magical hidden at the base of it. There's a whole other side of me that people didn't know existed.