» Peter Drucker on planting trees

One of my favourite places in Southern California is Claremont. It’s a leafy green university town east of Los Angeles.

Peter Drucker spent much of his career teaching at the Claremont Colleges in Southern California. He tells this story of how they were built.

In the 1920s, the President of Pomona College, the mother college of the Claremont Colleges, realized that Southern California and it’s college population would grow fast and that he would need a great deal of money for the college.

He started by actually founding local new businesses and running them for a couple of years until they broke even. Then he called in a top-flight new graduate, literally gave him the business and $100,000 to boot (which was a great deal of money in those days), and said, “It’s yours. You build it. But if it’s successful, don’t repay us. Remember us.”

That’s why Pomona and the whole Claremont group are so well endowed today.

He built an enormous constituency—long term. The fruits didn’t come in for twenty years, but they came in a thousandfold.

Peter Drucker, Managing the Nonprofit Organization, 58.

Drucker had saying about this: “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.”

What are you going to do this week that will yield fruit a thousand times over in twenty years time?