I’m the product of fate and a long life, hammered into shape by experience. By working age, I gravitated to entrepreneurs and CEOs. Their struggle – the absolute risk, the aloneness, the challenge of bringing people together – is something I understand.
We’re all human beings: Finding a path through life is the essential challenge, for each of us, regardless of our role. Being ourselves, stuck with a particular personality, limited by our own impulses and ways of seeing the world, presents every thoughtful person with the opportunity of self-mastery, of making the most of who and what we are.
My father was a refugee from Nazi Germany. He reinvented himself as an American, making his living solo, as a financier of real estate development projects in the U.S. and Europe. I was introduced to business at age 23, when compelled to take operational responsibility for a collapsing family-owned company. We ended up broke, but I experienced the essence of business, in microcosm. An expensive education.
At Harvard, I had studied English. Now I needed to earn a living. In 1977, Fortune magazine hired me for an entry-level job as a researcher and fact-checker. I was promoted to writer, then to the magazine’s Board of Editors. I spent some twenty years reporting and writing case studies of the large, complex enterprises that populate the Fortune 500.
This was a valuable apprenticeship. I discovered that much of what I’d learned running a failing small business applied to these enormous corporations: Cash flow matters. Results are binary: You succeed, or you fail. And it’s never just about you: Achievement depends on other people.
During those decades before the journalism business crashed and burned, Fortune gave me extraordinary access to CEOs and C-level executives of the world’s biggest companies, across a wide variety of industries, during an era of convulsive change. My role was to listen, probe deeply, understand these executives and their organizations – then crisply explain what I’d learned, in deeply-reported articles delivered to 900,000 readers. Listening, learning, communicating – these skills have since proved useful in other contexts.
The Fortune years were rich in learning. I sat at the feet of some of the most influential CEOs of the day: Andy Grove, Bill Gates, Jack Welch. Over the years, I covered Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and Hollywood – risky businesses all. Before my eyes, the industrial stability created after WWII collapsed into a dangerous, competitive free-for-all. I watched companies die, experiments fail, millions of jobs destroyed. I also observed new technologies, businesses, and industries emerge. I met plenty of big-desk CEOs who struck me as hapless bureaucrats – and just a few with the insight and heart to meet the challenges of the day. Increasingly, my writing focused on the fundamental question of change: What enables individuals and organizations to adapt and thrive?
My interest in technology began with the typewriter: I learned to touch-type at 13. When word processing came along, during the era of CP/M and the Osborne 1, I jumped right in. Thanks to this early start, I have developed a long-term perspective on the evolution of technology in general and the commercial internet in particular. I’ve come to doubt that human beings, as a species, can control what they create. If you disagree, read Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb, perhaps the best technology book ever written.
In 1993, with Noel Tichy, I wrote Control Your Destiny or Someone Else Will. This first independent study of Jack Welch’s transformation of GE became a best seller and contributed to a larger wave of change in business leadership. The once-radical ideas it promoted – face reality and change whatever needs changing – seem commonplace now. The ultimate takeaway from my years with Jack is the transformative power of learning. (For the denouement of the GE story, read Geoff Colvin’s brilliant “What the Hell Happened to GE.”)
I toured the world for years, delivering keynotes and workshops about leadership and large-scale organizational change. It was fun, but of dubious value. Though thousands of people heard my pitch, I doubt many of them actually faced up to their own challenges. This was disillusioning, but instructive: I no longer wish to lecture anyone on anything. (My wife might disagree.) Determined to be useful, I left journalism and became a sort of consultant – a facilitator of learning – content to work on a small scale with a few powerful people who genuinely want to accomplish something.
Here’s what I learned: Adaptive organizations must master the ability to change. Organizational change is the sum of individual choices, made freely, one by one. The art of orchestrating voluntary commitment to shared goals requires a special sort of leadership. Discovering the nature of that leadership, and learning how to nourish it, became my life’s work.
One detour: During the late 1990s, I co-founded a dotcom to sell books in Spanish and Portuguese across South America’s fragmented markets. The venture imploded just before the dotcom bust. I went broke for the second time, then nearly died of pneumonia. A learning experience.
Along the way I served five years on the board of the non-profit Leader to Leader Institute, founded by Peter Drucker, and apprenticed as a leadership coach.
In 2004, I joined four like-minded people to launch Accompli, focused on executing large-scale organizational change. Today I’m Accompli’s last man standing, working alone as an advisor to CEOs and their teams. These days, most of my clients are founders of startups.
My work is the fruit of what I’ve become, drawing on everything I’ve learned: big-business journalism; launching two startups; intimate engagement with scores of companies; failure and near-death; 40 years of meditation and other yogic practice; love of nature; aikido; broad reading; decades of marriage and fatherhood; deep international travel; and the long, fearsome struggle of being me. Plenty of opportunities for pattern-matching there.
I’m glad to make my living through service, which is an end in itself. Over the years, I’ve also taught meditation in prisons, from Sing Sing to Leavenworth, and offered companionship to the dying as a hospice volunteer. These days, I do pro bono coaching for leaders of worthy non-profits.
As Georg Büchner wrote, “Every man is a chasm. You get dizzy when you look down in.” If my life has a theme, it is the integration of seemingly opposed ideas. I seem to be most useful to clients who are very different from me.