Chapter 1: How I Became a Practical, Unlimited Optimist

Chapter 1

How I Became a

Practical, Unlimited Optimist

If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.

— Milton Berle

Lessons for a Nearsighted Optimist

To the small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify

we give the name of knowledge.

— Ambrose Bierce

I was born optimistic. But it wasn’t unfounded optimism: Rather it was optimism based on seeing better ways to proceed. From the earliest age, I could see easy ways to improve on what the adults around me were ignoring. Take choosing a driving route, for instance. Most people simply went the way they had gone before whenever the mood struck them. Plan your route with a map and pick a time when others are not driving, and the same trip can go faster and easier. Once you see the real conditions, be flexible. Don’t sit stalled on the freeway when the access road is wide open. More importantly, I noticed that when you do things effortlessly, your quality of life improves as well. But there was a problem with my optimism; it was limited to improvements that I could effortlessly see.

There was an irony about my ability to see better ways to accomplish things: I actually couldn’t see very well unless something was a few inches from my face. I was legally blind but no one knew it. Here’s a funny example: Whenever our family visited my great grandparents, I wouldn’t put their binoculars down. I wanted to use those wonderfully adjustable lenses nonstop because I could see at a distance so much better with them. I was, however, puzzled, by the way that others always had to readjust the binoculars so much after I used them. What could that be about? Here was an early lesson that something else is going on worth investigating if others take a different approach.

In fourth grade a teacher noticed me squinting close to the blackboard between assignments and taking notes like mad. She sent me down to the nurse’s office where I failed to be able to identify the big E at the top of the eye chart. A quick trip to the optometrist soon left me sporting glasses that seemed a mile thick and with distance vision that still wasn’t very good. I preferred binoculars. My mother promised me, based on her sunny optimism, that I wouldn’t have to wear those awful glasses all of my life. She was sure that something better would come along.

She taught me an important lesson about the value of optimism a year later when she determinedly arranged for me to become one of the first children to wear contact lenses. Each time I put on my contact lenses for the next 50 years, I reexperienced the miracle and joy of being able to see clearly at a distance all the time. That daily recognition that good solutions could transform lives in miraculous ways led me to seek out how to help others who couldn’t yet see the opportunities in front of them.

One day after about a year with contact lenses, my mom told me that someday I wouldn’t have to wear the lenses any more. I couldn’t figure out why she was telling me that. I loved my contact lenses! What could be better?

Learning the Value of Hard Work, Imagination, and Education at Home

Don’t condescend to unskilled labor.

Try it for a half a day first.

— Anonymous

My dad had very little formal education. He was the oldest boy in a large farm family that rented poor quality land, and his dad wanted him working in the fields and the barn rather than sitting in school. Since grandpa was on the school board, he was able to interfere with dad’s education. By the end of fourth grade, dad didn’t attend very often. By the end of eighth grade, he stopped going altogether. As a result, dad couldn’t qualify for very many jobs. Doing simple paperwork was beyond him. Small in size, many people were reluctant to hire him for laboring work as well because they didn’t realize he was exceptionally strong. But finally dad found places where he was accepted.

Dad worked hard to earn a living for us. Five nights a week he loaded and unloaded mail and freight from trucks and trains at the Santa Fe Railway. After eight hours of that work, he immediately went out to mow lawns and perform other gardening tasks during the day. Around sundown, he would take a bath, eat a light dinner, and snooze for a few hours before waking up to do it all over again beginning at midnight. Some nights he would have to take a load of grass clippings and brush to the dump and laboriously pitchfork and shovel the refuse off in total darkness before he could go home to eat dinner. On the weekends, he would have the “luxury” of eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. He lived in a perpetual daze brought about by sleep deprivation.

For a few years, he did even more. Realizing that he had some time available on Saturdays and Sundays when many people didn’t want him to mow their lawns or do other types of gardening, dad got a job delivering furniture for a local store. This upped the hours he worked each week to over 100. He was exhausted all the time.

I was very proud of my dad because no one could keep up with him: I wanted to be just like him. I begged dad to let me work for him in the lawn business … but I insisted on being paid. Otherwise I felt it wasn’t a real job. Dad went along with that because he had always resented the way his father had kept all of his earnings when he lived at home on the farm.

By the time I was three I could take a large basket of grass clippings from a mower and empty it into the back of the truck. At that age I could use hand clippers to clean around sprinklers and push a broom a little, too. I would work for him as much as I could after school and on Saturdays.

As I grew older and larger, I eventually learned to do all of the gardening tasks. He would also take me with him for some furniture deliveries and would pay me to help him even though I was too young to be hired by the furniture store. Dad was often expected to single-handedly carry a refrigerator up six flights of narrow stairs. I would take a little of the weight and steer the top of the refrigerator in the right direction. I was also pressed into tree-cutting duty, even though I was deathly afraid of heights. With my tiny frame, I could go to the very top of the tree, saw off branches, and tie on the ropes we used to pull the tree over after cutting the roots.

While my sister, Anna, and I were growing up, mom stayed at home and drilled us in the need to accomplish as much as possible. We owed it to God and other people to make the most of our talents. I’m sure that one reason she felt that way was because of how hard my dad had to work. But my mom also realized that she had missed out on an education, having stopped going to high school when she was sixteen to work as a waitress at a lunch counter. She was determined that we were going to get an education and make good use of it.

Working with dad provided an education that my mom didn’t know about. He could spot problems a mile off and devise ingenious ways of accomplishing things with virtually no resources. While other tree trimmers employed boot spikes, special belts, extension ladders, cherry pickers, and chain saws, we did it all with hand saws, a rope, and a rickety 6-foot ladder. If that ladder didn’t reach the bottom branches, dad or I would shinny up the trunk until we got to the first branch that would hold our weight. Our safety gear was that the one in the tree would tie a rope around his waist, loop the rope over a strong limb, and drape the other end of the rope to the ground where the other one would hold on tight. We often broke each other’s falls that way, avoiding broken limbs and fingers.

My idolization of dad’s hard work got me into trouble sometimes. When I was about five, our minister came to Sunday supper after church services. Noticing that he seemed to only work from 11 a.m. to noon on Sundays, I helpfully asked him when he was going to get a real job for the rest of the week. My mother never recovered from her embarrassment over that childish query.

Dad and mom had a weakness beyond their limited educations: They couldn’t figure out how to think about spending money to gain some advantage that might be turned into more money. Fortunately, I was fascinated by numbers. While other kids day dreamed, doodled, or drew cartoons when they were bored, I loved to write out geometric progressions. The way that numbers soared as the progressions continued filled me with awe. Compounding was my thing.

Here’s an example of a problem that had my dad confused. It took him almost eight hours a week to take his loads to a dump, pitchfork and shovel the loads out, and go home. Most of the time was spent unloading the evil-smelling remains that had been rotting for days. While at the dump, he would stare with longing at the dump trucks as their drivers dropped off huge loads in only a few seconds. Forty minutes later dad would still be digging away. He often talked about how great it would be to own such a dump truck. But such trucks cost a fortune. Years later, he heard about a company that could install a lift on a half-ton pickup truck. The price for the lift and the installation was about a $1,000 … a fortune for a man who earned less than $10,000 a year. What dad was missing was that the lift would probably last more than 20 years and could be reinstalled into another pickup truck for about $150. The lifetime cost of the lift would probably be about $65 a year including maintenance. That expenditure would save my dad about 250 hours a year of work for which he made no money. I pointed out that if he could find additional paying work that would provide 25 cents an hour of income he would be financially even … and if he could earn $1.25 for one of those weekly hours now spent forking out loads, he could reduce his work week by four hours. He looked at me in amazement; my mother challenged my thinking. I don’t think they ever understood the point, but they could tell I thought it was right. About a week later, we owned a new lift on our pickup. Actually, that lift lasted over 50 years and produced tens of thousands of dollars of added income due to my dad being able to take on high-priced work that required hauling away heavy loads. It was one of the few business investments my parents ever made that had a high return. I still admire that old lift whenever I see it, working like a charm after more than 45 years.

I became a financial guide for our family, on the lookout for financial opportunities. Since the time when I was a child, I located opportunities that earned or saved them most of their net worth such as other labor-saving equipment and a revolutionary paint that eliminated the need to repaint our house every few years. I also encouraged them to buy more houses. Houses in California were sure to go up in value, and they did.

Creating My Own Paths to Success

Improvisation is too good to be left to chance.

— Paul Simon

My childhood experiences made me confident that I could find opportunities where others saw none. And that confidence has always been rewarded. It’s no wonder I’m an optimist!

Here’s an example: Wanting to get married right after college, I felt like it wasn’t right to ask my parents to help pay for graduate school. I believe a married couple should be able to handle their own expenses. But Harvard Law School wouldn’t provide any financial aid unless my parents provided financial statements as though they would be contributing. As a matter of principle, I didn’t want to ask mom and dad to do even that. So I applied to law school with the prospect of a working wife and big bills ahead. Fortunately, the publisher of the university’s alumni magazine was looking for a part-time person to manage the magazine’s circulation and advertising activities. I had been working as the flunky in the circulation department while I was in college and was asked to fill the job. I figured out to the penny how much money I needed to get married and go to graduate school. I also knew how much time I could spare for work from my legal studies. I offered 10 hours of my time per week during the school year at what would be in today’s terms over $200 an hour, plus a large bonus tied to circulation increases. The editor later told me he almost fainted when I made that offer, assuming the publisher would never agree. The publisher quickly accepted. He knew it was a good deal. I would easily save the magazine what I cost through expanded circulation revenues. During that year, the magazine’s readership grew by more than it had in the prior 40 years combined, and our cash balance expanded to its highest level ever. I also helped the editor shift the magazine’s production to a new printer who provided much better quality and service at no increased cost. If I could do something like that for the well-educated leaders of Harvard University, imagine what else might be possible!

A better opportunity soon came along. I had learned a lot about printing and financial analysis from my magazine work. Having heard about my success with Harvard Magazine, the editor of Harvard’s law school alumni publication came to ask for my help. I told her I would be glad to do the same things for her on a part-time basis. I negotiated with the university magazine’s publisher to skip lunches over the summer (when I worked full time) so I could work from 4 to 6 p.m. on Monday through Friday at the law school. Soon, the law school was also making great progress in cutting costs and adding revenue. After that success, the law school’s dean asked to meet with me to see if I would look into the rest of the school’s publications and its messy arrangements for printing study materials and copying professors’ work. His face showed shock when I asked him if he knew that I was one of the school’s law student for he thought that I was a full-time publishing professional with many years of experience. I ended up being hired to work at a vast multiple of the rate paid to the top-ranked students in the school for legal research. But I had to promise to keep my income secret.

My dean became the first of four Harvard Law School deans I served in a professional capacity. On a mostly self-taught basis, I ended up helping design or redesigning almost all of the school’s computer systems and administrative processes, overhauling the fundraising efforts, and improving many areas of operations including the dining hall. Eventually, I began to provide strategic advice about how to gain advantages over other law schools. From this experience, I realized that those who are at the top often have no more idea than those at the bottom that they have great opportunities. The main difference is that those at the top are more likely to be looking for better ways. I could be of help.

I found one of my most influential mentors at that time, Ernie Frawley, the legendary publisher of the Harvard Business Review. He had done an amazing job of building a highly profitable nonprofit business based on subscriptions to non-alumni and sales of article reprints for what had once been a traditional academic publication of interest mostly to professors. Before I made any of my more controversial proposals at Harvard, I would check the ideas out with Ernie. He was always supportive. In fact, he encouraged me to think even bigger.

An Unusual Business Education

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice.

In practice there is.

— Yogi Berra

On his own initiative, Ernie persuaded me to start taking courses in the second year of the Harvard MBA program in marketing while I was a second-year law student. I asked Ernie why I should study second-year marketing. He responded that there was almost no discipline-specific content in the marketing courses, and no one could tell the difference between a first-year and a second-year marketing course. The courses just looked at different case studies. As a result, I would be at no disadvantage over other students in the second year curriculum. I would have preferred taking the first-year version; but in the first year, the marketing course was held on an unscheduled basis that created unavoidable conflicts with regularly scheduled classes elsewhere.

Curious, I complied with Ernie’s suggestion and immediately made a big mistake. Not understanding that the business school and law schools operated with different length classes, I signed up for two courses that met at the same time. And the two schools were a brisk 20 minute walk apart! Gradually, I figured out that I didn’t really have to go to my tax class at the law school. I could just read the materials on my own. The tax code and regulations are pretty straightforward if you can understand bureaucratic language. So I spent my class time on those days south of the Charles River listening to MBA students say the most illogical and foolish things imaginable in class: They always wanted to abandon what was working well in favor of dangerous new directions, such as the student who wanted to drop the brand name for Heinz Ketchup in favor of a new name that no one had heard of before. It was irresistible entertainment. I began to notice that discussing business was a lot of fun while combing over the law was always deadly dull.

For the following semester, I signed up for a class that was the culmination of a marketing MBA: providing a consulting service in marketing for a real business. Wanting to be conservative due to my inexperience in business and limited business education, I picked a magazine-related project. My MBA student teammates were impressed with my experience, so I was asked to help organize our work. Since I knew few of the analytical techniques that MBAs learn, I relied on my teammates teaching me the various methods we could employ before we picked one. It was a great learning experience for all of us.

Three days before the final presentation, our advisor happened to mention that we were expected to deliver a 100-page written report at the presentation. We had planned to write the report later. In a panic, I hired one of my law school secretary friends to type and started writing the report on a legal pad. Another team member was writing the presentation, but he needed to see the written report to do that. I would write for 12 hours at a stretch and snooze for a while on the couch in our shared office while my secretary friend typed. She kept clicking away until she couldn’t see straight and would then return a few hours later. Twice a day the presentation team came to read what she had typed and to ask me questions. We finished with 6 hours remaining before the deadline. After that experience, I felt like I could do anything.

To me, the most amazing part of the course was that our advice turned out to be uncannily accurate, even if that point wasn’t clear until later to anyone but our team. The presentation seemed to go well. Our client was polite and attentive. But after we ended, he asked us over a few beers if we really meant that the magazine would stop growing its circulation in six months. Yes, we meant that. He told us we had missed the boat. He argued that the magazine was serving less than 5 percent of its eventual readership. We explained why we thought that he was wrong, but he was complacent enough not to be offended. Needless to say, the magazine stopped growing six months later.

That client and I bump into each other from time to time, and he’s still puzzled by how we figured out that circulation was about to stop growing. It was actually pretty simple to figure out, and we explained our method to him at the time. We surveyed the people we assumed knew the most about the magazine and looked at the rate whereby they purchased the magazine versus a key competitor’s magazine. We assumed that ratio between the two publications would be a limit on growth potential across the country as awareness expanded. Looking at the ratio, we simply took the current growth rate forward until that limit was reached. It would happen in six months. The publisher simply didn’t realize that others didn’t love his magazine as much as he did.

That kind of short-sightedness is a key reason why many businesses underperform. It was a good lesson to learn at a young age: Optimism pursued solely on faith, rather than good thinking and hard work, could be a disadvantage. But I remained optimistic. I could see what the magazine could have done differently to grow larger… but its leaders weren’t willing to consider those changes. Three owners later, all of the changes were in place. The first set of owners cost themselves a fortune by being stuck in the wrong mind-set. That observation was very interesting to me. Since then, I’ve seen the same pattern repeated hundreds of times. Many people would rather fail with their own approach than look around and shift to a better one. That inclination leaves a lot of opportunity for mentally and emotionally flexible people.

Based on my favorable reaction to these business studies, I decided to join a strategy consulting firm, The Boston Consulting Group, rather than a law firm after graduation. Within a few months, I found myself along with many other young colleagues at a gathering of more than 50 Fortune 500 CEOs at a Cape Cod retreat. All of the CEOs were eager to learn how to recruit top young MBAs to their companies, so we had plenty of chances to get acquainted. It quickly became obvious that these CEOs weren’t very well rounded. They knew at most one functional discipline well and struggled for how to think about trade-offs between doing more in one area versus another area. The CEOs were like drivers who were headed for a new destination with no road signs to help them and only an incomplete map for guidance. Someone who could provide helpful directions would be very valuable to such people. Over the next three years, I had plenty of opportunities to help define new directions for Fortune 400 CEOs and other senior executives. Their lack of perspective continued to surprise me. The big picture was mostly invisible to these executives. Why? My impression is that the CEOs were chosen primarily for their ability to scramble for successful solutions to unexpected problems rather than for their potential to select an improved direction for the organization. These CEOs mostly chose new directions by default, as an unintended consequence of the scrambling solutions they put in place.

In delving through client materials, I learned about another form of optimism that I hadn’t seen before: near-term pessimism combined with long-term, pot-of-gold fantasies. This estimation of the future could be found in requests for funding of acquisitions, capital investments, new programs, or new products. The same way of thinking about the future would also show up in three-year and five-year plans. Immediately, these people said, it was going to be expensive and painful. Later, irresistible progress would follow. Typically, those making these estimates were simply looking at how they might improve their learning and error rates in the future while ignoring that competitors and new entrants might also be making rapid progress. Typically, competitive conditions became even tougher when everyone became more capable. As a result, the actual long-term results often got worse rather than better. This was a recipe for taking expensive painful steps that lead you into a worse place than you already were.

With more experience, I also discovered that organizations (I also did consulting for nonprofits) were filled with problems that they hadn’t been able to solve for many years. Yet hope sprang eternal, and everyone was convinced that the next attempt was sure to succeed even if it were no different than the last attempt. This perspective was like thinking that sending more light brigades of cavalry to charge a well-entrenched enemy during the Crimean War would succeed where the last one had not (Tennyson’s poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” commemorates the fatal charge in 1854 during which 247 of 637 British cavalrymen were killed or wounded following a foolish order during the Battle of Balaclava in the Ukraine). In one case, I led the eighth or ninth consulting team in 10 years to look at the same problem. Imagine how much more could get done if problems were solved properly on the first attempt!

One reason for these unresolved problems was the lack of helpful information. The accounting results for problem areas didn’t look so great, but you could study the accounting numbers all you wanted and those numbers wouldn’t give you any clues about what needed to be done. Instead, you had to develop a whole new set of measures; simulate change in a dynamic environment in which customers, beneficiaries, suppliers, and competitors would make adjustments; and identify paths that left you better off regardless of what happened with factors outside of your control. That way of thinking was as incomprehensible to most leaders as an obscure foreign language they had never heard before. The consultant’s major task was to be able to translate those new possibilities into some expression that leaders could grasp and appreciate. Analogies, metaphors, stories, and vivid graphics were important to communicating complex information that others could not internalize from the detail. I was reminded of telling my dad he would have to earn $1.25 for an hour a week to pay for his lift while having four more hours available. Perhaps I should have taken more literature classes.

Practicing What I Had Learned

However much thou art read in theory,

if thou hast no practice thou art ignorant.

— Sa’di

After my consulting stint at The Boston Consulting Group, I was interested in learning more about what it takes to make change from the inside. I also was hoping that an insider would be able to pursue more difficult tasks than consultants usually addressed. The management at Heublein, the Fortune 500 food and beverage company (products included A.1. Sauce, Grey Poupon mustard, Ortega chiles, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Smirnoff vodka, and Inglenook wines), asked me to become their corporate planner back in the days when that was a popular thing for companies to do. Today, organizations prefer to have their leaders learn strategic thinking rather than to rely too much on staff people. I soon found that changing opinions was, if anything, more difficult to do from the inside than it had been as a consultant. But I thought I had an ace up my sleeve.

Everyone at Heublein thought that Professor Peter Drucker, the founder of the management discipline, knew what he was talking about. Having failed to convince our organization to shift its focus from after-tax profit to another financial ratio, I decided to find out what Professor Drucker would have to say.

I attended a public lecture he gave at New York University and had the good fortune to be called on at the end of the talk. I asked him which one measure of corporate performance was the best to use as a goal.

After a lengthy pause, he replied with irritation in his deep, gruff voice, “My dear sir, you obviously know nothing. There is no single measure of corporate performance that is any good. Use them all and try to develop new ones, and each will teach you something you need to know.”

I sat down, much chagrined, but with a profoundly helpful business principle in hand. I was encouraged, however, because I was very good at coming up with new measurements. This approach was right up my alley! Besides, with more measures it might be easier to convince management of the need to make changes. Surely some one of many measures would get each person excited.

Becoming a Student of My Clients

I want to be part of the best team in the world.

— Will Carling

After three years at Heublein, I was tired of the 100 mile commute each way. Contacting my old clients, I was pleased to find that they were all interested in having me work for them at night and on the weekends. With Heublein’s permission, I started offering consulting again. Soon, I had a big enough base of business to start consulting full time, as the head of Mitchell and Company. A month after I did that, Carol Bruckner Coles who had also been a colleague at The Boston Consulting Group, resigned from Heublein to join me. Carol did more of the missionary marketing than I did because there were more prospects near her home in Connecticut than near mine in Boston. Early on, she realized that selling to a lot of people at one time was a better idea than selling to people one-by-one. We launched a series of free seminars in New York, and companies were soon fascinated by our ideas about how corporate performance translated into stock-price improvement, something we had done a lot of work on at Heublein. That interest surprised us because much of our strategic work was of more economic value. This stock-price improvement practice became the backbone of our firm over time. From this enthusiasm for stock-price improvement, I learned that there was untapped potential in areas that I didn’t even consider to be very important because others did.

Wanting to push the boundaries of knowledge, Mitchell and Company did pioneering research in many areas of stock-price improvement. Typically, however, we found that client interest in important new ideas and practices was tepid, at best. Focusing on that lesson, we turned our research model around and began to only research questions that were of interest to clients. In the process we formed a learning organization for executives at major companies, Share Price Growth 100.

Over the course of a decade, we learned that every major existing approach to stock-price improvement other than the one we had been developing was fatally flawed. Why? It turned out that those who wrote the road maps for stock-price improvement hadn’t bothered to do much, if any, research to test the validity of the directions.

Following Peter Drucker’s advice, we began inventing lots of new measurements, employing those measurements in as many ways as we could, cross-checking our conclusions with independent sources of measurements, and adjusting our conclusions to reflect how well the past estimations had worked. One of our first new measurements was to express a company’s stock price in terms of the factors that the company’s shareholders paid the most attention to. We did this by looking at statistical correlations to a company’s historic stock price. Next we interviewed shareholders to find out which of those most highly correlated factors (or similar ones) the investors actually used to make buy and sell decisions. The result was a verified multivariate correlation (an equation describing past stock prices in terms of what investors considered) that reflected those shareholder perceptions and practices. Those verified correlations, in turn, were helpful for anticipating stock-price changes through locating what had happened to companies taking new actions whose shareholders had similar perceptions and practices. In addition, we used anonymously sponsored interviews to test market planned or potential actions to see which steps would elicit the most stock purchasing with the least selling.

We had a big surprise at first: We greatly underestimated how well our advice worked. We weren’t optimistic enough! One of our clients had asked us about taking a subsidiary partially public. After they succeeded with that stock offering, the parent company’s stock went to almost double the level we had predicted. From that observation, we eventually learned that the client had created a bandwagon effect that caused investors to rush forward to create stock-price growth faster than would otherwise have occurred for less well designed and communicated programs. To adjust for that bandwagon factor, we added a fourth set of measurements related to the improved ways of understanding the current and potential liquidity of the stock. Eventually, we developed a service to facilitate creating and sustaining the bandwagon effect and incorporated that learning into our estimations. With that service, we could help companies attract investors who would raise the value of the company while avoiding those who would harm the company’s stock price. Then, the great epiphany occurred for me: With the right direction, people could greatly exceed the highest levels of historical stock-price performance that anyone had achieved. Now that was interesting to think about! Many company leaders were intrigued, too, and identifying and executing strategies to exceed historical stock-price performance became a rewarding part of our company’s strategy consulting practice.

Peter Drucker Points Out a Task

The contribution I make to a client is basically to be very stupid and very dense;

ask simple, fundamental questions;

demand that he be thoughtful with the answers;

and demand that he make decisions on what is important.

— Peter F. Drucker

Share Price Growth 100 had another helpful impact on me. The members asked that we have the work checked by an independent academic to be sure we weren’t making mistakes that we didn’t realize. I was asked to pick the academic. Naturally, I chose Peter Drucker who kindly agreed to begin working with Carol and me in 1992 to improve the Share Price Growth 100 research. That’s when my business education really began because Peter was the only person who could help me see the full potential of what I was doing.

He had three messages for me that he repeatedly stressed over the years we worked together (through 1999, when he began to cut back on his consulting due to his failing health):

1. I had a general methodology that I used to solve all problems.

2. That approach could be used by anyone to solve 80 percent of all problems anyone ever has to face. Thus people could learn one way of solving problems rather than hundreds, creating the potential for lots of breakthrough progress as they became more talented in the new method.

3. If I didn’t share that process with the world, it might not be rediscovered for centuries and that would be a terrible loss. I should publish a book that explained the process so others could use it.

Even on my most optimistic days, it had never occurred to me that I could contribute anything uniquely valuable. Peter had replaced my mother in helping me see the unlimited future we can all create when we follow the right steps (ones you’ll read about beginning in Chapter 4). Since then, I’ve been a new kind of optimist — a practical, but unlimited, one.

What’s the difference between a practical, but limited, optimist and a practical, unlimited one? The practical, unlimited optimist in me creates and uses disciplined ways of asking questions and thinking that extend my vision of what can be done well past the best of what can be observed today.

By learning those questions and ways of thinking, your ability to see opportunity and grasp its benefits will be unlimited as well. That’s my message for you, thanks to Peter Drucker.

Copyright © 2007. 2012 by Donald Mitchell.