In the fall, the task at hand is to quickly and thoroughly harvest all the available product of the planting season. A keen eye and careful hand are needed to fetch every piece of fruit, to know just when to take an apple from the tree and how to store it, distribute it and save its seeds. In the business world, much attention is paid to getting every last piece of fruit—improvements in efficiency and optimization, for example. But just as the skills to gather every piece of fruit have little to do with those needed to know which tree to plant, and must be understood in the larger context of a year of four seasons, so must optimization and process change be conceived of as part of a much larger cycle.