Jim Whitt, Contributing Editor

Wagon Train to the Stars

“When I left school at the age of 15 I was halfway through the tenth grade,” wrote Louis L’Amour in Education of a Wandering Man . “I left for two reasons, economic necessity being the first of them. More important was that school was interfering with my education.” If you’ve read any of L’Amour’s work, you’re a beneficiary of that education.

There have been over 225 million copies of L’Amour’s books sold. They’ve been translated into 15 languages and have been made into many movies. Not bad for a high school dropout. L’Amour is best known for his westerns although I would argue that he really wrote about human motivation, leadership and change in a western setting. I’ve said if we want to help people who live under the thumb of third-world dictators we should air drop them Louis L’Amour novels because his tales of the Old West are really documentaries of the American experience — life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and all that comes with it — love, loss, success, failure, victory, defeat, blood, sweat and tears. Reading L’Amour could transform the Middle East into the Middle West.

The world was Louis L’Amour’s classroom. He hoboed around the country as an itinerant worker, sailed as a merchant seaman, climbed in the ring as a boxer and served as a tank crewman in World War II. Add in his lifelong love affair with reading and you have the perfect education for a best-selling author. To write about life with any believability you have to live it.

You might be surprised that the man who was best known as a writer of western novels had a lot in common with Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. “As I have said elsewhere,” wrote L’Amour, “I believe that all that has gone before has been but preliminary, that our real history began with that voyage to the moon.” L’Amour thought of himself more as “a writer of the frontier.” The frontier that he wrote about most just happened to be the western expansion of the United States.

L’Amour read more than 100 books a year on a wide range of subjects but was particularly fond of history. History is all about frontiers. Seeking, finding, co nquering and then starting the whole process over again. The storyline includes action, danger, power, struggle, riches and romance. It’s the stuff novels are made of, western or otherwise. So it’s easy to see how L’Amour would be intrigued by the final frontier: “Now, with the vast distances of space opening before us, and the length of the journeys into outer space, we must begin to think in terms of generations and centuries rather than in years.” Who would have believed Louis L’Amour was a closet futurist? And you might be shocked to learn that Gene Roddenberry was a closet cowboy.

Roddenberry grew up in California and, unlike L’Amour, had a more formal education. He graduated from Los Angeles City College and attended Columbia University , the University of Miami and the University of Southern California . But like L’Amour, his informal education included a wide range of experiences. He flew B-17 Flying Fortress combat missions in World War II and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal . He flew as a commercial pilot for Pan Am Airlines after the war but gave it up to serve on the Los Angeles Police Department and pursue a career writing for television. He wrote scripts for many TV series in the 1950s including Have Gun, Will Travel, the popular western starring Richard Boone as Paladin, the gentleman gunfighter with an unconventional approach to his trade.

Wagon Train was another popular western at the time so when Roddenberry pitched Star Trek to producers, he sold it as “Wagon Train to the Stars.” In retrospect I can see how Star Trek could be considered a futuristic interpretation of Wagon Train. Both shows were about the adventures, trials and tribulations of pioneers making their way through a new frontier.

One of the problems I find with modern society is that we seem to have lost that pioneering spirit. Oddly enough I find this to be especially true of a lot of farmers, ranchers and others engaged in agriculture. Rather than continuing in the pioneering ways that made their forefathers successful, too many are focused on trying to preserve the past. The only enterprises that succeed by preserving the past are museums. It’s worth noting that they are only able to survive as a result of charitable contributions.

It is a challenge to get people and organizations to think in long range terms. Most are concerned primarily with what hits them in the face every day. Too many corporations are led by myopic monomaniacs who can see only as far as the next quarter’s financial performance. Their lack of long range perspective dooms their companies to repeat never-ending cycles of boom and bust. U.S. automakers are a case in point. L’Amour noted that politicians are particularly guilty of short-sighted thinking, “Too few can see further than the next election and will agree to spend any amount of money as long as some of it is spent in the area they represent.” And since the vast majority of people have no more interest than what their current needs and fears are, they vote for those who promise the most and the quickest with no concern of the long term cost and consequence.

A generation is considered to be about 30 years. In the big scheme of things that’s nothing. If you want to determine the direction of a country, a company or any organization, that’s the perspective you must adopt. In fact it may be a bit nearsighted, as H.G. Wells observed, “Men who think in lifetimes are of no use to statesmanship.” Effective leaders have to possess pioneer mindsets. They have to see beyond temporal pain and pleasure. They must be willing to venture beyond the comfort of pastures where they now graze and grow fat and take on the arrows that would deter them from journeying into a new frontier where the greener pastures of tomorrow lie. History tells us that great people, great organizations and great nations are byproducts of the pioneering spirit.

What is most fun for us is when we can get clients to look a generation into the future and start building the organization it will take to get them there. As we map out the path the organization will embark on for their journey into the future, people get excited. The next quarter’s performance is seen as a milestone rather than a millstone when people see they’re on a wagon train headed for the next frontier. Louis L’Amour and Gene Roddenberry understood that the pioneering spirit is encoded into the DNA of the human spirit. It doesn’t matter if it’s the western frontier or the final frontier, the human spirit wants to boldly go where no man has gone before. And the organizations that tap into the pioneering spirit will be those we’ll read about in history books 30 years from now.

Please e-mail comments to Jim Whitt at jim@whittenterprises.com.

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