My Path to Success

In 1980, Douglas Carlston founded Broderbund Software, Inc., which quickly became the nation's leading developer of educational software. A pioneer in employing game technology, Carlston started the company as a sideline while practicing law. The company achieved major success with its geography learning game Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego and captivated adults as well as children with its graphically rich adventure game Myst and the historical fantasy Prince of Persia. Douglas Carlston addressed the Academy of Achievement at the 1996 Summit in Sun Valley, Idaho, where he recounted the winding path that led him to the software industry, including his experience teaching in Africa. In this podcast, recorded at the Summit, he urges the Academy's student delegates to follow their curiosity and pursue whatever fascinates them most. Carlston subsequently merged Broderbund with The Learning Company; the combined enterprise is now owned by Mattel. Douglas Carlston has participated in numerous nonprofits and educational institutions, as a board member of MoveOn, the Ploughshares Fund and the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins, among others, and is a former Chairman of Public Radio International. He founded a new software company, Tawala Systems, in 2005. He currently serves as CEO of Tawala and Chairman of the Carlston Family Foundation.

A pioneer among women entrepreneurs, Lillian Vernon was the founder and longtime chairman of one of the nation's largest mail order businesses. Born in Germany, she and her parents came to America fleeing Nazi rule, and young Lillian learned her English watching movies. At 24, she was a housewife and mother looking for a way to supplement her husband's $75 weekly salary. She thought a mail order business might bring in another $50 a week. With money she had received as a wedding gift, she spent $495 for a five-inch ad in the September 1951 issue of Seventeen magazine, advertising monogrammed belts and purses. Her friends and family, even her husband, regarded her venture as a hobby at best, but in the first three months, her ad drew $32,000 worth of orders. Vernon encountered resistance from male suppliers, vendors and investors who had no interest in doing business with a woman, but her business prospered. Within five years, she was mailing a catalogue of housewares, gifts, toys and fashion accessories to households across the country. For years, Vernon held the company privately. In 1987, she became one of the first female CEOs to take a company public. She sold her controlling interest in the company in 2003 and retired from active management. In this podcast, recorded during the Academy of Achievement's 1996 Summit in Sun Valley, Idaho, Lillian Vernon shares her tips for success in any field of endeavor.

In 1988, Amy Tan was earning an excellent living writing speeches for business executives. She worked around the clock to meet the demands from her many high-priced clients, but she took no joy in the work, and felt frustrated and unfulfilled. In her mid-thirties, she took up writing fiction. A year later her first book, a collection of interrelated stories called The Joy Luck Club was an international best-seller, and Amy Tan's life was changed forever.

Only 20 years ago, a list of well-known American authors would have included virtually no Asian-Americans. Today Amy Tan is one of America's most popular novelists. Her subsequent books, The Kitchen God's Wife and The Hundred Secret Senses have been best-sellers, and the film of The Joy Luck Club was an unprecedented success. Although they are primarily concerned with the lives and concerns of Asian-American women, her stories have found an enthusiastic audience among Americans of all backgrounds, and have already been translated into 23 languages.

In this podcast, recorded at the Academy of Achievement's 1996 Summit in Sun Valley, Idaho, she recounts how a visit to China with her mother influenced her career as a novelist.

From 1995 to 1999, General Charles Krulak served as the Commandant of the United States Marine Corps. Born in Quantico, Virginia, he graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and the U.S. Naval Academy. After his commissioning and graduation from The Basic School at Quantico, he commanded a platoon and two rifle companies in Vietnam. In 1987, he was assigned duty as Deputy Director of the White House Military Office. While serving in this capacity, he was selected for promotion to brigadier general. By 1994, he was a lieutenant general assigned as Commander of Marine Forces Pacific/Commanding General, Fleet Marine Forces Pacific. The following year he was promoted to four-star General and chosen to serve as the 31st Commandant of the Marines. After 35 years of distinguished service, General Krulak retired from the Marine Corps in 1999 and embarked on a new career in banking. In 1999 he joined MBNA Corporation; within two years he was named CEO of MBNA Europe. General Krulak left MBNA in 2005 when it was acquired by Bank of America. He has also served on the boards of ConocoPhillips, Freeport-McMoran (formerly known as Phelps Dodge Corporation) and Union Pacific. In 2011, he became the President of Birmingham-Southern College in Birmingham, Alabama. This podcast was recorded at the Academy of Achievement's 1996 Summit in Sun Valley, Idaho, while General Krulak was Commandant of the Marine Corps.

Karan began her career as an assistant designer with Anne Klein in the late 1960s, where she was eventually promoted to associate designer in 1971. When Anne Klein herself died in 1974, Takihyo Corporation of Japan became the new owner and Karan, together with her former classmate and friend Louis Dell'Ollio, became head designer of the house. In 1984, Karan left Anne Klein and, together with her then husband Stephan Weiss and Takihyo Corporation, started her own business "to design modern clothes for modern people". She showed her first women's clothing collection in 1985.

Karan became well-known for her 'Essentials' line, initially offering seven easy pieces which could all be mixed and matched, and created a fully integrated wardrobe. Karan always insisted that she would only design clothes, like jersey dresses and opaque Lycra tights, that she would also wear herself. She was once described in the early 1990s by the New York Times as "[Ed Koch] in a stretchy black dress".

In 1988, Karan, nicknamed The Queen Of Seventh Avenue by the time, extended her women's 'Donna Karan New York' line by a less expensive one for younger women, called DKNY. Two years later, she created DKNY Jeans, a denim-inspired collection. DKNY for men was launched in 1992, one year after the 'Signature' line for men had been presented. In its heyday in the 1990s, the Donna Karan portfolio, for men and women, consisted of the top-of-the-line DKNY collection (black label, couture collection, partly hand-made, limited distribution) and its variation, the 'Donna Karan Signature' collection (golden label, designer sportswear, wider distribution), the DKNY lifestyle diffusion line, and the lower-priced DKNY Jeans (and DKNY Active) lines.[4] The portfolio was later complemented by a children's collection, beauty products, accessories and furniture. Sales rose up to 510.1 million in 1995 from $96.6 in 1991. More than half of the sales were attributed to the DKNY lines, couture contributed 15% and about 30% of the sales were generated by men's clothing, accessories, cosmetics and other products. Almost a third of the sales were made in exports.

Rick Scott was born in Bloomington, Illinois, and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, where his father was a truck driver and his mother worked as a clerk at J.C. Penney, among other jobs. Scott graduated from high school in 1970, and then attended one year of community college after which he enlisted in the United States Navy. He was in the Navy for 29 months and served on the USS Glover as a radar technician. Scott later graduated from the University of Missouri-Kansas City with a bachelor's degree in business administration and earned a law degree from Southern Methodist University.

In 1987 he helped found the Columbia Hospital Corporation with two business partners; this merged with Hospital Corporation of America in 1989 to form Columbia/HCA and eventually became the largest private for-profit health care company in the U.S. He was forced to resign as Chief Executive of Columbia/HCA in 1997 amid a scandal over the company's business and Medicare billing practices; the company ultimately admitted to fourteen felonies and agreed to pay the federal government over $600 million. Scott later became a venture capitalist, and entered into politics in 2010, when he announced his intention to run for Governor of Florida. Having defeated Bill McCollum in the Republican primary election, Scott defeated Democrat Alex Sink in a close race in the 2010 Florida gubernatorial election.

Born Jean Marie Untinen in Chicago, she was the second of five children of a housepainter. Today, Jean Auel is a story-writing phenomenon whose series of novels set in prehistoric Europe have sold nearly 50 million copies worldwide. A grandmother of nine, she put in 12 years of night school at the University of Portland; Jean Auel did not even try to write a book until she was past the age of 40. She quit work as a credit manager, and in 1977, "got the idea for a saga about a young woman's battle to survive in the early Cro Magnon era of the Ice Age." Jean Auel immersed herself in the history of the Ice Age. She joined a survival class to learn how to construct an ice cave, and researched primitive methods of making fire, tanning leather, and knapping stone from the aboriginal skills expert Jim Riggs. The first in her Earth's Children series, "The Clan of the Cave Bear" was rejected by several publishers, but eventually was sold to Crown Publishers for $130,000 (Crown Publishers paid Auel $25 million for the rights to publish her second novel). Her first book was an overnight sensation and sold more than five million copies. After the success of her first novel, Jean Auel traveled to the sites of prehistoric ruins and relics and her research took her across Europe from France to the Ukraine. She went on to author the international best sellers, "The Valley of Horses" (1982), "The Mammoth Hunters" (1985), "The Plains of Passage" (1990), "The Shelters of Stone" (2002), and "The Land of Painted Caves" (2011). Jean Auel addressed the student delegates at the 1993 Achievement Summit in Glacier National Park about her path to success as a novelist.

Sir James David Wolfensohn was the ninth President of the World Bank and President of Wolfensohn & Company, an international investment-banking firm. Wolfensohn was born in Sydney, Australia, entered Sydney University at age 15, and became a lawyer with a local firm. His initial ignorance of finance "unleashed an extraordinary drive" that led him to the Harvard Business School. Wolfensohn went on to develop the corporate finance division at Solomon Brothers, and, in 1981, he launched his own firm, which provided strategic advice to U.S. corporations. He has a long and distinguished record as a patron of the arts and science, including service as Chairman of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and a 12-year term as Chairman of Carnegie Hall, where he helped save the structure for future generations. In July 1995, he became the President of the World Bank, after President Clinton nominated him. He visited 120 countries during his term and brought attention to the problem of corruption in the area of development financing. A decade later, he founded Wolfensohn & Company, a privately held firm that invests, and provides strategic advice to governments and large corporations doing business in emerging market economies. Jim Wolfensohn attended the 1993 Achievement Summit and spoke to the students about his personal journey from Australia to the center of the international finance world.

The oldest son of a Marine Corps fighter pilot, Pat Conroy recalled his father's strict discipline in his novel, The Great Santini. His education at the South Carolina military academy, the Citadel, inspired another novel, The Lords of Discipline. Both books were made into outstanding motion pictures. Conroy's struggles to teach poor black children on an isolated island community while fighting the indifference of an unsympathetic local school board is recalled in a memoir, The Water is Wide, which became the film Conrack. A recent novel, The Prince of Tides became both a best-selling book and a major motion picture. Again and again, Pat Conroy has transformed the rich experiences of his own life into stories that have captured the imagination of the American public.

The team of Betty Comden and Adolph Green was the longest running creative partnership in theatre history. Betty Comden (May 3, 1917 - November 23, 2006) was born Elizabeth Cohen in Brooklyn. In 1938, soon after graduation from NYU, where she studied drama, she started making the rounds of theatrical agents. While she didn't find an agent, she did get acquainted with Adolph Green, who was also searching for a theatrical agent. They began writing and performing their own satirical comic material in a group called "The Revuers," which included the late Judy Holliday. Comden and Green went onto collaborate with Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins on what was the first show for all of them, "On The Town." With Leonard Bernstein they also did the score for "Wonderful Town" and with Jule Styne they wrote the book and/or lyrics for "Bells Are Ringing," "Hallelujah Baby," "Do Re Mi," "Peter Pan," and wrote the book for "Applause," and book and lyrics for "On The Twentieth Century" and "A Doll's Life." "Applause," "Hallelujah, Baby," "Wonderful Town," and "On The Twentieth Century" won them five Tony Awards. Comden and Green's many film musicals include "Singin' In The Rain," "The Band Wagon," "On The Town," "Bells Are Ringing," "It's Always Fair Weather," and "Good News." "Singin' In The Rain" was voted as one of the ten best American films ever made. Comden and Green also created the classic songs "Just in Time," "The Party's Over," "Make Someone Happy," and "New York, New York." In 1991, Comden and Green reunited with Cy Coleman to write the lyrics for the Tony Award-winning Broadway hit, "The Will Rogers Follies." Two years later, Betty Comden spoke to the student delegates at the 1993 Achievement Summit in Glacier National Park in Montana about her legendary career as a lyricist and musical comedy author.