Decision Points

late one night, running over the neighbor’s trash can, and then smarting off to Dad. When some people picture that scene, they envision two presidents locked in some epic psychological showdown. In reality, I was a boozy kid, and he was an understandably irritated father. We didn’t think much about it until it came up in the newspapers twenty years later.
    Moments like these are a reminder that I am not just my father’s son. I have a feisty and irreverent streak courtesy of Barbara Bush. Sometimes I went out of my way to demonstrate my independence. But I never stopped loving my family. I think they understood that, even when I got on their nerves.
    I finally saw things from my parents’ perspective when I had children of my own. My daughter Jenna could be sassy and sharp, just like me. When I was running for governor in 1994, I accidentally shot a killdeer, a protected songbird, on the first day of dove hunting season. The blunder produced headlines but quickly faded. A few weeks before the election, Laura and I campaigned with the girls at the Texas State Fair in Dallas. Twelve-year-old Jenna won a stuffed bird as a prize at a carnival game. With the TV cameras rolling, she held the plush animal in the air. “Look, Dad,” she said, giggling. “It’s a killdeer!”

    In the fall of 1972, I went to visit my grandmother in Florida. My college friend Mike Brooks was in the area, and we played golf. Mike had just graduated from Harvard Business School . He told me I should consider going there. To make sure I got the message, he mailed me an application. I was intrigued enough to fill it out. A few months later, I was accepted.
    I wasn’t sure I wanted to go back to school or to the East Coast. I shared my doubts with my brother Jeb. I didn’t know Jeb very well when he was growing up—he was only eight when I moved out for boarding school—but we grew closer as we got older.
    Jeb was always more serious-minded than I was. He was intelligent, focused, and driven in every way. He learned to speak fluent Spanish, majored in Latin American Affairs, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from theUniversity of Texas. During his senior year in high school, he lived in Mexico as part of a student exchange program. There he met a beautiful woman named Columba Garnica. They were both young, but it was obvious Jeb was in love. When we went to the Astrodome together, I’d watch the ball game and he’d write letters to Colu. They got married two weeks after his twenty-first birthday.
    One night, Jeb and I were having dinner with Dad at a restaurant in Houston. I was working at a mentoring program in Houston’s poverty-stricken Third Ward, and Dad and I were having a discussion about my future. Jeb blurted out, “George got into Harvard.”
    After some thought, Dad said, “Son, you ought to seriously consider going. It would be a good way to broaden your horizons.” That was all he said. But he got me thinking. Broadening horizons was exactly what I was trying to do during those years. It was another way of saying, “Push yourself to realize your God-given talents.”
    For the second time in my life, I made the move from Houston to Massachusetts. The cabdriver pulled up to the Harvard campus and welcomed me to “the West Point of capitalism.” I had gone to Andover by expectation and Yale by tradition; I was at Harvard by choice. There I learned the mechanics of finance, accounting, and economics. I came away with a better understanding of management, particularly the importance of setting clear goals for an organization, delegating tasks, and holding people to account. I also gained the confidence to pursue my entrepreneurial urge.
    The lessons of Harvard Business School were reinforced by an unlikely source: a trip to visit Mother and Dad in China after graduation. The contrast was vivid. I had gone from the West Point of capitalism to the eastern outpost of communism, from a republic of individual choice to a country where people all wore the same gray clothes. While riding my bike through the streets of Beijing, I occasionally saw a black limo with tinted windows that belonged to one of the party bigwigs. Otherwise there were few cars and no signs of a free market. I was amazed to see how a country with such a rich history could be so bleak.

    With my sister, Doro, in China, 1975.
    In 1975, China was emerging from the Cultural Revolution, its government’s effort to purify and revitalize society. Communist