In high school Summers was a very smart kid at a very smart school. The school was well funded (“practically a country club,” Neff says), had high academic standards and small class sizes. And Summers breezed through it, leaving for MIT after his junior year.

Brilliance is a good thing for a Harvard president—playing the part of the eccentric genius comes with the territory. And by high school, Summers had mastered the part—disorganization being the key.

The only thing that kept Summers from straight A’s was disorganization. Neff was his lab partner in a high school physics class. “I’d get us to B,” Neff said. “Larry was supposed to get us to A, which he would do—as long as he didn’t lose the lab, which happened about 40 percent of the time.”

Despite having many interests and little organization, Summers was eventually able to channel his energy.

Summers tended toward the quantitative and was particularly interested in economics. He and his father did a statistical project predicting the results of a baseball season. “He was not one of those kids who was focused on being a scientist, or a mathematician, or social scientist,” John Summers said.

Summers excelled at the weekly system that determined time slot ownership of the Summers family’s lone TV. Each member was allotted chips and asked to bid on certain shows at certain hours, as a way to maximize everyone’s happiness (or utility). Eventually, Summers had organized the three children into a solid bidding bloc, able to outvote the parents, and the parents had to call the system off.