The Ten Commandments for Business Failure - Don Keough [52]
Revolutionary changes in this country have overturned many situations that were once considered the absolute, unchangeable, and hopelessly eternal way things are. There was a time when NO IRISH NEED APPLY signs were common at employment offices. Now the Irish are everywhere.
There was a time when every door but the back door was shut on African Americans. Gradually, these barriers are coming down. We move slowly, but gradually more and more doors have opened until today African Americans can and do legitimately aspire to the highest offices in the land.
Women once were excluded from many walks of life, including many professions and schools. Today, more than half of all college freshman classes, more than half the entrants into medical schools, law schools, and business schools are women. We move slowly, but progress is being made at even the most hidebound bastions of what some politely call “traditionalism.” Or as my friend Father Ted Hesburgh at Notre Dame called it, “Reactionary pigheadedness.”
In fact, my second child, Shayla, was part of the first class of women ever to go to Notre Dame. It was 1972 and Father Hesburgh made the then-revolutionary decision that Notre Dame, founded in 1842, would no longer be an all-male preserve. I remember the first day of Shayla’s freshman orientation very well because there was still quite a bit of internal opposition to the whole idea, and we, the parents of the pioneer female students, not to mention the women themselves, were all a trifle nervous about how things would go.
The day began with a mass. There were these 125 young women and their families all looking on with apprehension as to how the college would treat them. Father Hesburgh, with his dramatic mane of silver hair and his white robes, strode to the altar. He had a great sense of timing and knew how critical this first moment would be to the success of the whole program. He raised his arms and looked up at the figure of the Blessed Virgin, Mary, atop the famous golden dome and said, “Mary, I want to apologize that it has taken 130 years to bring your daughters to this place.”
It was an incredible moment in which we all, parents and children alike, were suffused with a glow of optimism and high hope for ourselves, for the school, and for the future of womankind in this country.
Pessimism: The Paralysis of Fear
The late Julian Simon, the economist who wrote The Ultimate Resource and spent much of his career challenging the dismal notion of a Malthusian catastrophe, sounded this word of caution:
Progress toward a more abundant material life does not come like manna from heaven. My message certainly is not one of complacency. The ultimate resource is people—especially skilled, spirited, and hopeful young people endowed with liberty—who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefit and inevitably benefit the rest of us as well.
Helen Keller, a woman I had the privilege of meeting many years ago, once said that “no pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars or sailed to an uncharted land or opened a new heaven to the human spirit.”
The most serious problem with great pessimism is that it is absolutely paralyzing. People are so afraid of dire consequences that they throw their hands up in despair and do nothing. Fear of the future guarantees that the future will be a failure.
Our U.S. economy has not been in a real depression since 1941, and yet in many polls large numbers of Americans are depressingly glum.
Have you noticed how often whole segments of our economy are just written off? The manufacturing sector has had its obituary written at least a dozen times by experts in the last quarter of a century. Yet as I write this, manufacturing continues to generate new and rather highly paid jobs across the country from robotics in Charleston to airplanes in Seattle. Smaller economies in the northern plains and southeast have spawned a host of new manufacturing jobs. Not to mention the entire new industries