Once upon a time, a farmer had 10,000 acres of apple orchards. One day, he went to the nearby town and hired 1,000 apple pickers. He told them:

“Harvest the ripe apples in my orchards. Build storage buildings for them so that they will not spoil. I need to be gone for a while, but I will provide what you need to complete the task.

“The Society for the Picking of Apples – to which you will all belong – will need to work hard. In addition to those of you doing the harvesting, some will carry supplies, others will assemble buildings, and others will be administrators.”

As the Society began, some people volunteered to be pickers or packers. Others put their skills to work as truck drivers, cooks, accountants, inspectors or administrators. Everyone had the option to be a picker; however, only 100 of the 1,000 employees chose to become full-time pickers.

These 100 pickers started harvesting immediately. Ninety-four of them began picking in the 800 acres immediately surrounding the homestead. Only six went to the orchards far away.

The storehouses in the area surrounding the homestead were immediately filled with beautiful, delicious apples. These orchards had thousands of apple trees, but since almost all the pickers concentrated on them, the trees were quickly picked nearly bare. Soon these pickers started having difficulty locating trees with any ripe apples.

Apple picking slowed down around the homestead. Society members began focusing on building larger storehouses and developing better equipment for picking and packing. Although there were more than enough trees on the 10,000 acres to keep every worker busy, those working nearest the homestead did not move into the areas where many apples remained to be picked. They just kept working those 800 acres nearest the homestead.

The harvest of the remaining 9,200 acres was left to just six pickers. Those six were far too few to gather all the available ripe fruit. As a result, apples fell to the ground by the hundreds of thousands and were never harvested.

One of the students at the apple-picking school showed a special talent for picking apples quickly and effectively. When he heard about the thousands of untouched apple trees, he started talking about going there, but his friends discouraged him, saying, “Don’t waste your time out there. Help us be more efficient here at home. We need assistance using our storehouses more effectively since we have much more space than needed for the present apple crop.”

With so many workers and so few trees, the Society members living around the homestead had time for more than just picking apples. They built nice houses and raised their standard of living. Some became more concerned with media, politics and technology than picking apples. The members of the Society filled the remaining time by developing bigger and better apple-picking tools and talking about the number of picked apples in storage.

Those on the homestead were always kind to those six who worked in the far-away orchards. Nonetheless, those six pickers were saddened that the Society for the Picking of Apples spent 99.3 percent of its budget on improved apple-picking methods, equipment and personnel for the 800 acres around the homestead while it spent less than one percent of its budget on the acres beyond.

The six pickers knew that an apple was an apple wherever it was picked and that the apples near and far were equally important. Still, they could not erase from their minds the thousands of trees a picker had never touched. They longed for more pickers, packers, supervisors and ladder builders to come and help them. Perhaps they could even be taught better apple-picking methods so that fewer apples would remain unharvested.

When the owner returns, the Society members will rejoice. They will proudly show off the better ladders, storage boxes and storehouses they have created.

But we wonder, however, how much more effective the picking would have been had the Society not ignored the acres of untouched trees, unpicked apples and unfinished work.

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