11 ly more relaxed than the people who lived on wealthy estates. My love affair with cities grew more serious when I was 14. I was attending a private Quaker school in center-city Philadelphia. One sunny spring day, one of my classmates and I cut class and took a bus to New York City. I walked down Fifth Avenue past Tiffany and into Central Park. I had never seen such vitality and such diversity of people and architecture in my life. I turned to my classmate and said, “I will live here one day.” Although I was suspended for truancy shortly thereafter, I was confident that my introduction to the world’s first megacity was well worth it. My education and travels in college and graduate school took me to many cities around the world—Boston, New York, Baltimore, Washington, San Francisco, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Calcutta, New Delhi, Kathmandu, Kabul, Istanbul, Athens, Madrid, Paris, London, Vienna, Geneva, Charleston, Atlanta, Chatta- nooga, New Orleans, and Albuquerque, to name just some. Travel encouraged my notion that cities offered the greatest vitality and diversity to be found. Large cities enjoyed the spirit described by poet Richard Eberhart: “If I could only live at the pitch that is near madness When everything is as it was in my childhood Violent, vivid and of infinite possibility.” My travels led me to the conclusion that big cities were first and foremost places de- fined by “open minds.” Most of these large cities were places that attracted a wide range of curious, intelligent, talented people who creat- ed open-minded cultures. This big-city culture encouraged leadership and entrepreneurship characterized by the openness and values that support innovative thinking. With open-mindedness came a greater learning metabolism. When there were disagree- ments, people explored them for entertainment and to generate new ideas and greater insight. Typically, they also valued intellectual diversity. Trust and disagreement coexisted in celebration of a never-ending search for greater intelligence and clarity. Traveling the entire Northern Hemisphere, I did not find a place that I loved more than New York on that spring day. After I graduated from The Wharton School with my MBA in 1978, I moved to New York, where I lived for the next 11 years. I lived and worked in all areas of Man- hattan—downtown, midtown, uptown, East Side, and West Side. I explored and experienced the city with a vengeance—the financial mar- kets, the parks, the street life, the theaters, the opera, the restaurants, the museums, the gyms, the sports events, and, most of all, the people and their multiple cultures and societies. I even explored and learned the guts of the urban infrastructure as part of recapitalizing the New York City Subway and Bus Systems, the Long Island and Metro-North Railroads, the Tribor- ough Bridge and Tunnels, the City University of New York, and the New York Water and Sewer System. (For more, see Business Week article.) If you love great documentaries and are interested in the history of New York, I highly recommend Ric Burns’ eight-episode series— now available online for free—New York: A Documentary Film. https://www.youtube.com/embed/yum- VGUA1FcI Burns’ documentary does an excellent job of describing the growth of the first megaci- ty as well as showing the pros and cons and struggles of urban living. Burns also includes a description of two of my heroes, whose lives and