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My supervisor liked me, but my sloppiness at keeping track of peo- ple's transactions-which in those days involved writing down num- bers with a pen and paper-made me unfit for the job. My supervisor warned me that unless I improved quickly, she would be forced to let me go. I knew I wasn't likely to get better at handling details. I was a failure at my first job. I figured I had two ways to leave my job. I could get fired or-and here's the optimist emerging-I could get promoted. I wrote a letter to the senior vice president for the branch system, who was probably seven or eight layers of management above me, and described all of my naive suggestions for improving the bank. My ideas had one thing in common: They were impractical for reasons a twenty-one-year-old wouldn't yet appreciate. I closed my letter by asking for a rare and coveted spot in the management training program, a fast track to up- per management. It was a long shot for a guy who had on his perma- nent work record some version of "too incompetent to write numbers