Godfather essay

Attached are: (1) a previous essay and corrections my professor made and (2) The Pre-writing worksheet to follow. Thank you!

(1) Read the article by Ron Wilson below and prepare an outline for an essay in response to it. Follow the Pre-Writing Worksheet . Do you agree or disagree with his thesis? Support your position with examples from The Godfather and your own reasoning. (2) When typing your essay, follow MLA style (12 pt. type, Times New Roman font, double-spacing, headers, etc.). In addition, boldface your thesis and underline your topic sentences so I can easily identify them.

“How to Succeed in Business” by Ron Wilson
It has eluded many literary critics that The Godfather, the famous bestseller from 1969, is not just a story about gangsters. Mario Puzo’s novel is actually a study of business. The genius of Puzo’s novel is that criminals stand in for businessmen. The protagonists are Vito and Michael Corleone. They learn three important things about business. First, to be a successful, you must be tough—in all senses of the word. The second rule of success is that you must build alliances with others. The third rule is that you must be paranoid.
To be successful in business you must be tough. Vito, Hagen, Clemenza, and Michael show their mental and physical toughness in many ways and win victories because of it. Weak characters in the novel fail. The Godfather says several times that every man must move toward his destiny. That takes mental and physical toughness. If you are a person who is simply content to wait for your destiny, you are not cut out for business.
To be a successful businessman you must build relationships with others. The rich and powerful have always done this. (One of the failures of our educational system is that we don’t teach students this skill.) When Vito was a young man and living with the Abbandando family, he understood this. He formed relationships with Abbandando, Clemenza, Tessio to improve his lot in life. For us, living in the 21st century, our success in business will depend largely on the quantity and quality of our relationships.
The last truth in The Godfather is that to be successful in business, you must, for lack of a better word, be paranoid. Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel, wrote a book on business strategy called Only the Paranoid Survive. This truth runs all through The Godfather. You must always be aware of your weaknesses and blind spots. If you are not, your employer and your competitors will exploit them and may even drive you out of business. The history of American business is often the history of naive innovators and inventors who brought a product to market only to have it stolen from them by sharper, greedier, and more deceitful businessmen/crooks.
The Godfather is frequently remembered as a story about organized crime. Actually it is about more than that. The Godfather is about the nature of business which is essentially the nature of the world. To get anywhere you must be tough, know how to build relationships, and be paranoid.