Pronto

"All businesses have problems. It’s the problems that create the opportunities. If a business is easy, every simple bastard would enter it. In a sense, that was my problem with Pronto: the only barrier to entry in the “bantam market” field was capital. Anyone with enough capital could and did enter the field until overdevelopment caused the entire opportunity to crash and burn in the 1980s, leaving it in the hands of those with the most capital, like the oil companies."

"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."