Adam's Blog

“Hope is not a strategy.” That phrase, attributed to General Gordon R. Sullivan, has been passed around boardrooms and business schools for decades. It’s usually said with a shrug, a knowing smile, and an implied lesson: that serious people make plans, not wishes. When I mention it in my classes at the Haas School of Business, I see my MBA students nod. They’ve heard it from venture capital mentors or read it in startup blogs. Hope, in their training, belongs to the realm of naïveté.I understand why the phrase endures. Hope, on its surface, looks like soft thinking. It can seem vague, emotional, even unmeasurable—the opposite of what a spreadsheet or a pitch deck demands. But the longer I’ve worked with entrepreneurs and creatives, the clearer it’s become to me that the people who build lasting ventures and meaningful work all rely on hope. They just don’t call it that. They call it vision, resilience, faith in the process. Whatever the name, hope is the fuel that keeps them iterating when the metrics lag behind the mission.