Reasonable Beats Optimal Always

“I concluded that I didn’t have to find an optimum solution to Pronto’s difficulties, just a reasonable one. Trying to find an optimum solution in business is a waste of time: the factors in the equation are changing all the time.”

“Twenty-eight years later, the Economist of November 10, 1990, put it this way: . . . non-convex problems . . . are puzzles in which there may be several good but not ideal answers which classical search techniques may wrongly identify as the best one. I concluded that I didn’t have to find an optimum solution to Pronto’s difficulties, just a reasonable one. Trying to find an optimum solution in business is a waste of time: the factors in the equation are changing all the time. But you’ve got to have something to hang your hat on. The one core value that I chose was our high compensation policies, which I had put in place from the very start in 1958.”